Category: Books

Book Beginnings on Friday

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

I’ve just finished reading Standing Water by Terri Armstrong, which I greatly enjoyed and will write more about it in another post. But for now here are the opening lines:

On the way to the funeral Hester started to cry. Neal, driving the ute, glanced at her. He reached over and squeezed her hand, too tightly. The tears wouldn’t stop. She pulled in jagged breaths and held a tissue to her face. Without warning, Neal swerved the ute into a gravel siding, throwing her against the door. He kept the engine idling.

‘For Christ’s sake, Hester. We’ll be there in five minutes.’

‘I know. Sorry.’ She had to pull herself together. She turned her head to look at the roadside scrub, focused on the pale, thin limbs of a top-heavy mallee tree.

‘Wasn’t even your bloody mother,’ Neal muttered.

These lines caught my imagination – I assumed that Neal and Hester were an apparently unemotional son and a very upset daughter-in-law. They drew me into the story and also very definitely set the scene for me, in Western Australia – what I wondered is a ‘mallee tree’. (I thought maybe a eucalyptus, and was pleased to discover that it is.)

Standing Water is Terri Armstrong’s first novel and is the winner of the 2010 Yeovil Literary Prize (pre-publication). It is to be published by Pewter Rose Press on 28 February. (My copy was sent to me by the publishers.)

Book Beginnings is hosted by Katy at A Few More Pages every Friday.

Choosing a Classic

Published on by Margaret11 Comments

It’s time I began reading another classic for the Classics Challenge. I thought I’d look at the openings of some to see which takes my fancy.

Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell:

To begin with the old rigmarole of childhood. In a country there was a shire, and in that shire there was a town, and in that town there was a house, and in that house there was a room, and in that room there was a bed, and in that bed there lay a little girl; wide awake and longing to get up, but not daring to do so for fear of the unseen power in the next room – a certain Betty, whose slumbers must not be disturbed until six o’clock struck, when she awakened herself ‘as sure as clockwork’, and left the household very little peace afterwards.

It reminds me of the children’s song Old MacDonald had a Farm with its repetitions. The little girl is Molly Gibson and Betty with the unseen powers is the family’s servant. It promises a story of a family and Molly’s place within it and this opening interests me. I don’t know anything about the book and have not seen any of the TV adaptations, so I’m coming to it with a completely open mind – no other interpretations to influence my reading of Elizabeth Gaskell’s words.

Silas Marner by George Eliot:

In the days when the spinning-wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses – and even great ladies, clothed in silk and thread-lace, had their toy spinning-wheels of polished oak – there might be seen, in districts far away from the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills, certain pallid undersized men, who, by the side of brawny country-folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race.

This one looks good too about village/rural life at the beginning of the 19th century. The only book by George Eliot that I’ve read is Middlemarch, which I loved. You have to have time and patience to read her books. Silas Marner, however, is a much shorter book with less characters than Middlemarch.

Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome:

There were four of us – George and William Samuel Harris, and myself, and Montmorency. We were sitting in my room, smoking, and talking about how bad we were – bad from a medical point of view I mean, of course.

We were all feeling seedy, and we were getting quite nervous about it.

Yet another author I know nothing about and as for the book I only know it’s reckoned to be a comedy. Again I have very few preconceptions about this book and have no ideas about the characters or what happens. I think Montmorency may be a dog as the book’s full title is Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog).

Now I just have to decide which one to read.

Wondrous Words Wednesday

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

Wondrous Words Wednesday is a weekly meme where we share new (to us) words that we’ve encountered in our reading. It is hosted by Kathy, over at BermudaOnion’s Weblog.

My words this week come from After the Armistice Ball by Catriona McPherson, set in 1922.

  • jounced – ‘Alec increased the speed again as we passed the sign for Reivers Rest and we jounced over the close-cropped turf faster and faster until the car rounded the last of the gorse into the open and skidded to a slithering halt.

I could tell from the context what ‘jounced’ means, but it’s a word I’ve not come across before. Looking it up I found it does mean just what it sounds like – ‘to jounce is to move or cause to move with bumps and jolts’ (from The Free Dictionary).

I like the Wikipedia definition of jounce – ‘in physics, jounce or snap is the fourth derivative of the position vector with respect to time, with the first, second, and third derivatives being velocity, acceleration, and jerk, respectively; in other words, the jounce is the rate of change of the jerk with respect to time.’ As I said, just what I thought it was!

  • Thawpit – ‘I should begin calmly but ready to dissolve into tears if the occasion arose and a corner of my handkerchief was soaked in Thawpit to help with the dissolving.’

I had no idea what Thawpit was – and amazingly discovered that it was a a stain remover, a solvent that containing carbon tetrachloride. It’s no longer available, presumably because of the danger of sniffing it etc. No wonder Dandy Gilver (the amateur sleuth in the book) ‘succumbed to a fit of weeping’ when she ‘dabbed her eyes’ with the Thawpit soaked hankie.

  • chafing-dish – ‘I trigger no obvious trip-wire en route from my bedroom to the ground floor, but every morning Pallister appears with a chafing-dish just as I’m sitting.’ He then cooked Dandy’s eggs.
An old woman poaching eggs in a glazed earthenware chafing dish over charcoal

A chafing-dish is a new term to me. Wikipedia explains that it is ‘a kind of portable grate raised on a tripod, originally heated with charcoal in a brazier, and used for foods that require gentle cooking, away from the fierce heat of direct flames.’

 

The Jigsaw Maker by Adrienne Dines

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

It was back in July 2007 that I bought The Jigsaw Maker and it’s been sitting on the to-be-read bookshelves ever since. It was worth waiting for as I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Lizzie Flynn has a shop in a village near Kilkenny, a sort of knick-knack shop selling a variety of goods, cards, flower arrangements, home-made sweets, that needs brightening up and bringing up to date. Much like Lizzie herself, a single lady nearing 50. Her settled life is turned upside down with the arrival of the Jigsaw Maker – Jim Nealon, a stranger who walks into her shop one morning and asks her to sell his beautiful jigsaws.

But these are no ordinary jigsaws. Jim makes wooden jigsaws, tiny intricately shaped pieces ‘finely cut so that they were more like buttons than jigsaw pieces’  And each one is individual showing a photograph of a real place accompanied by a personalised history of the scene:

It’s not just history,’ Jim said. ‘It’s real life. You don’t just know what it looks like now; you get a feel for what it was like in its heyday. It’s a personal memory. (page 8.)

He proposes to take photos of places, not the tourist attractions, but the places their ancestors might have lived and worked. He asks Lizzie to help him by writing about the scenes. To begin with he shows her a photo of the local school and asks her to picture herself back there in 1969 and write what she remembers – what it was like to be a pupil there.

It just so happens that 1969 had been quite an eventful year. This opens up the floodgates of memory for Lizzie as painful and puzzling events from that year almost over power her. Looking back at the child she was she realises that not everything was as it had appeared to her then.

It is just like a jigsaw – all the pieces are there and both the reader and Lizzie have to put them together correctly to get the correct picture. This is a beautifully written book, one with pace and tension in just the right places. I could visualise the scenes and the characters and I became anxious for Lizzie as she realised the truth not only about the events she had seen, but also about her place in those events. There are plenty of repressed secrets that come to the surface and an added mystery too – who is Jim? Why has he come to the village and why did he ask Lizzie in particular to help him?

I hope I’m not going to wait another 5 years to read more books by Adrienne Dines. There are two more: Toppling Miss April and Soft Voices Whispering.

  • My rating: 4.5/5
  • Paperback: 307 pages
  • Publisher: Transita (10 Feb 2006)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 190517523X
  • ISBN-13: 978-1905175239
  • Source: I bought it
  • Author’s website and blog

A Classics Challenge – February Prompt: Character

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

This month’s focus from Katherine of November’s Autumn for the Classics Challenge is on character. Write about a character you find interesting, it doesn’t have to be your favorite. Perhaps your least favorite or a minor one: choose any.

I’m answering a combination of her Level 1 and 2 questions. What phrases has the author used to introduce this character? Find a portrait or photograph that closely embodies how you imagine them.  Has your opinion of them altered? Do you find them believable? Would you want to meet them?

I read The Woman in White in January and wrote some thoughts about previously. The book has some very interesting characters and I’ve chosen to describe the villain – Count Fosco, a friend of Sir Percy Glyde.

We see him first through Marian Halcombe’s eyes (see my earlier post for her description). She is Laura’s half- sister and I think she is the real heroine of this book. She describes Fosco:

He looks like a man who could tame anything. If he had married a tigress, instead of a woman, he would have tamed the tigress.

…

The man has interested me, has attracted me, has forced me to like him.

…

he is immensely fat. Before this time I have always disliked corpulent humanity.

…

here, nevertheless, is Count Fosco, as fat as Henry the Eighth himself, established in my favour, at one day’s notice, without let or hindrance from his own odious corpulence. Marvellous indeed!

She is impressed most by his unfathomable grey eyes, which have a cold, beautiful, irresistible glitter and hold an extraordinary power, one which forces her to look at him and causes her sensations she would rather not feel. Although an Italian, he speaks excellent English. He is old (sixty!), but his movements are light and easy. He is very sensitive to noise and winced when Sir Percy Beat one of the spaniels – he cares for animals more than he cares for humans.

And his most curious peculiarity is his fondness for pet animals – a cockatoo, two canaries and a whole family of white mice, all of which are familiar with him. The birds sit on his fat fingers and the mice crawl all over him, popping in and out of his waistcoat. He kisses them and twitters to his birds.

Below is an illustration from the 1865 edition of the book, which doesn’t really portray him as I see him.

But this is more like it – Michael Crawford’s portrayal in the West End musical in 2004.

As for his character, Marian may be attracted to him, but he is is a true villain, completely domineering, sinister, clever and untrustworthy. He is powerful, a sensualist whose wife is completely besotted by him. Whilst it might seem from my description that Fosco is a caricature, he does come across as a believable character and certainly one I would not wish to meet.

Teaser Tuesday – Testament of Youth

Published on by Margaret11 Comments

I’m currently reading Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain. She was born in 1896 and this book is an Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900 – 1925. 

I’ve read up to the beginning of 1915, just after the outbreak of the First World War. It’s fascinating and there are so many passages I could highlight, but for now I’m quoting these that I read this morning. Vera Brittain wrote this book in 1933 and she pointed out the change from 1915 to 1933. Just think  of the vast difference between life now and then, nearly 100 years ago.

Sophisticated present-day girls, free immediately after leaving school to come and go as they wish, or living, as independent professional women, in their own rooms or flats, have no conception of the difficulties under which courtships were contracted by provincial young ladies in 1915. There was no privacy for a boy and girl whose mutual feelings had reached their most delicate and bewildering stage; the whole series of complicated relationships leading from acquaintance to engagement had to be conducted in public or not at all. (page 120)

Everything in a young woman’s life was supervised and discussed in the family circle, letters were observed and commented upon. Vera had never been anywhere by herself until she left home to go to Oxford University, on train journeys her ticket was bought for her and she had to send a telegram home immediately she arrived.

In 1915 (aged 19) she was deeply in love with a young man, Roland Leighton, her brother’s friend, but had never been alone with him or without constant observation and the possibility of interruption. She wrote:

Consequently, by the middle of that January, our desire to see one another alone had passed beyond the bounds of toleration. (page 121)

For more Teaser Tuesdays go to Should Be Reading.