Category: Books

ABC Wednesday – D is for …

Published on by Margaret22 Comments

… Charles Dickens

What follows are merely my thoughts on the few Charles Dickens’s books that I have read.

The first book of his that I read as a child was A Christmas Carol. It was a small book with the original illustrations and I read it many times. It has a great opening paragraph:

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. the register of his death was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to, Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

It’s clear and to the point and it has to be because this is a ghost story and unless you are certain that Marley was dead, as Dickens goes on to say: ‘nothing wonderful can come of the story’. The story is well structured with Scrooge visited by the three Ghosts of Christmas, Past, Present and Yet to Come. The pathos of the story of Tiny Tim has stayed with me over the years and the transformation of the miserly Scrooge into a jovial, kind and happy man seemed to me a perfect Christmas story.

Following on from that I didn’t read any more of Dickens’s books until I read A Tale of Two Cities for ‘O’ level GCE, but I knew of so many of his books from watching them serialised on TV. In my mind Sunday afternoon tea time was the classic storytime, but I could be wrong. In any case Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Great Expectations and David Copperfield come to mind from that period.

A Tale of Two Cities has one of the most memorable opening sentences:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

and a unforgettable ending when Sydney Carton goes to his death on the guillotine:

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

I remember very little more about the story except that it was a wonderful love story set against the backdrop of the French Revolution. I’m thinking of re-reading it soon – I’ve downloaded it onto my Kindle – to see how much of it I remember and if I still think it as good as I did when I was 15!

Skip forward a few years and I read Hard Times whilst taking an Open University course. By that time in studying Hard Times I was more aware of Dickens’s social criticism than I had been before. There are some powerful scenes and characters portrayed, although to some extent I think of them as caricatures – Gadgrind and Bounderby – whose personalities are described by their names.

More recently my reading of Dickens has been after watching TV adaptations. I read Bleak House a few years ago, after being captivated by Charles Dance as Mr Tulkinghorn, Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock and Dennis Lawson as John Jarndyce.  It was a most impressive performance and cast, so many well known actors, not forgetting Johnny Vegas as Krook who was almost unbelievably good in the part.

This post is getting very long, so I’ll just add I’ve recently read The Mystery of Edwin Drood and The Holly-Tree Inn (the links go to my posts on those books).

Weekly Geeks: Blurry Book Disorder

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

This week’s Weekly Geeks questions are:

  • how do we avoid BBD (Blurry Book Disorder): When one can no longer keep characters and storylines straight? Often brought on by reading multiple books from the same genre in a short period of time.
  • and secondly how we avoid reading ruts.

If I’m not careful I do suffer from BBD – if I read one book after another too quickly without pausing between them. This is one reason I write at least a few words about the books I’ve read, as it does fix them in my mind a bit longer, and I can check back what I thought about it. But unless it’s an outstanding book the details of plots and characters don’t stay with me for very long.

I also find sometimes that I’m not sure whether I’ve read a book or not. This can be because I know the story from seeing a TV adaptation or a film as in the case of some of Dickens’s novels, like Oliver Twist. As for Crime and Punishment, I think I read it years ago, but then again maybe not, maybe I just started it and never finished it. This is another reason for keeping a list of the books I’ve read. The difficulty is that I only started to do this about ten years ago and then only spasmodically.

Books can become blurry when I’m looking at them in the library or in bookshops. It’s not so bad borrowing books I’ve already read but buying duplicates is bad. I have duplicate copies of a few books because I think I’d like to read them, buy them and then discover they’re already in the to-be-read piles.

As I read from a wide range of genres I rarely find myself in a reading rut and if I do I try to read something completely different. That usually works.

Crime Fiction Alphabet – Letter E

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

I’ve chosen Edgar Wallace’s The Clue of the Twisted Candle to illustrate the letter E in Kerrie’s Crime Fiction Alphabet. This is the first book by Edgar Wallace (1875 – 1932) that I have read. I downloaded it from Gutenberg. I’m not sure when it was first published – from different sources it appears to between 1916 and 1918. Edgar Wallace was a prolific writer and produced 175 novels, including The Four Just Men, screenplays, including the original draft of King Kong and many short stories.

The Clue of the Twisted Candle is not the one of the most puzzling murder mysteries I’ve read. It’s a bit rambling and disjointed. Basically it’s about John Lexman a writer of crime novels, his wife Grace, and Remington Kara a wealthy Greek/Albanian, a rich and handsome man who is also a notorious criminal. Grace fears Kara, whose marriage proposal she had rejected. T X Meredith, an Assistant Police Commissioner and friend of Lexman’s is investigating Kara, who in apparent fear of his life has made his bedroom into a virtual safe:

… its walls are burglar proof, floor and roof are reinforced concrete, there is one door which in addition to its ordinary lock is closed by a sort of steel latch which he lets fall when he retires for the night and which he opens himself personally in the morning. The window is unreachable, there are no communicating doors, and altogether the room is planned to stand a siege.

Lexman is found guilty of killing a moneylender, Vassalaro and imprisoned. He escapes from prison just after, unknown to him, he has been pardoned and T X is convinced that he and Grace have been abducted by Kara. In due course, Kara is found murdered inside this locked room and a small twisted Christmas candle is found inside in the middle of the room, along with the stub of an ordinary candle under the bed. The mystery is who murdered Kara and how did the murderer escape from the locked room? Why does Belinda Mary, Kara’s secretary disappear, and what is the explorer, George Gathercole’s  role? It’s not too difficult to work out who killed Kara. Everything is explained before a gathering of international police officials at the end of the book and the ingenious method of escaping from the locked room is revealed. All in all an entertaining book, but not one to tax the ‘little grey cells’ very much.

Sunday Salon

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

I was looking through the Radio Times yesterday to see if there are any programmes of interest this week and discovered that the BBC have launched a year-long season celebrating books. Starting last night with Sebastian Faulks’s 4 programme series Faulks on Fiction on BBC2. I haven’t watched it yet – it’s still available on BBC iPlayer and on BT Vision. This first programme is about the Hero and Heroism; how ideas  have developed over the last three centuries from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to Martin Amis’s John Self in Money.

Tomorrow night on BBC4 at 8.30 pm there is The Beauty of Books, a new series of 4 programmes looking at the importance of books from early texts to the present day paperbacks. The first programme focuses on the oldest surviving Bible – the Codex Sianaticus.

That programme is followed at 9.00 pm by the Birth of the British Novel, examining the social and political history of 18th century Britain – another look at Robinson Crusoe and the literary innovations from Tristram Shandy to Evelina.

Robinson Crusoe was based on the real life adventures of Alexander Selkirk – see my other blog for a photo of his statue in Lower Largo, Fife where he was born.

Also starting this month is a BBC2 chat show with Anne Robinson talking to guests including P D James, Robert Harris, Clare Balding and Sister Wendy Beckett. On World Book Night on 5 March The Culture Show has a literary evening with Sue Perkins on Books We Really Read.

Later in the year Arena looks at Dickens on film, there’s a BBC4 adaptation of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and a new version of Great Expectations on BBC1.

And that’s without looking at the radio programmes – today it’s Bookclub on Radio 4 at 4.00 pm with James Naughtie talking to Tim Butcher about his bestselling travel book Blood River, followed by Poetry Please at 4.30 pm.

There won’t be much time for actual reading!

Perfume:the Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

Perfume by Patrick  Süskind, translated from the German by John E üWoods was first  published in 1985. It is an extraordinary novel, a Gothic work in the vein of Edgar Allen Poe, or Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Grey. It depicts the strange life of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille and is a book of smells. Grenouille, himself has no body smell, but an acute sense of smell. He can recognise and locate the source of smells from miles away. His absence of smell alienates him from other people and he in turn is disgusted by their odour. He is an outsider.

On the trail of an elusive but exquisite smell he tracks it down to a young girl and kills her to possess  her scent for himself.  This puts him in a state of ecstatic happiness and

… he felt he knew who he really was: nothing less than a genius. And that the meaning and goal and purpose of  his life had a higher destiny: nothing less than to revolutionise the odoriferous world. (page 46)

He knew he had to become a creator of scents, the greatest perfumer of all time.

From then on his life became even stranger, if that was possible. He learnt the various processes of making perfume, then withdrew from the world, living for seven years in total isolation in a cave. There he existed in a world with no human smells, whilst he lived in his mind recreating the exquisite scent of the young girl he had killed.

He had withdrawn solely for his own personal pleasure, only to be nearer to himself. No longer distracted by anything external, he basked in his own existence and found it splendid. He lay in his stony crypt like his own corpse, hardly breathing, his heart hardly beating – and yet he lived as intensively and dissolutely as ever a rake had lived in the world outside. (page 128)

I was fascinated by the descriptive language, by so many different smells, scents, perfumes, stenches and obnoxious odours. The descriptions of how perfume is made, when you know what he had in mind was chilling. He wants the delicious scent of the girl he killed, to peel it off her and make it his own. Quite simply this is a horror story, one that made me not want to read it and yet also want to read it to the bitter end. It’s a tale of obsession, the atmosphere Süskind evokes is tremendous, and the detail it contains adds to the realism. Maybe Grenouille is a modern Dracula.

To say that I ‘enjoyed’ it is not true, but it is a tremendous story and well written.

Publisher: Penguin (re-issue edition April 2010)
Paperback: 272 pages
ISBN-10: 0141041153
ISBN-13: 978-0141041155
Source: My own copy (an earlier edition)

ABC Wednesday – C is for …

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

Thumbnail for version as of 06:51, 12 November 2010… Susan Coolidge, the American author of some of my favourite books when I was a child.

Susan Coolidge was her pen name – her real name was Sarah Chauncey Woolsey (1835 – 1905). She is best known for her classic children’s book – What Katy Did, featuring Katy Carr and her family. Along with Little Women this must be the book that I’ve the most number of times, together with What Katy Did at School and What Katy Did Next.

Looking at her entry in Wikipedia I realise now that she wrote many other books, short stories and poems, some of which are available from Project Gutenberg, including two more ‘Katy’ books, which I haven’t read – Clover and In the High Valley. There is a brief biography at the 19th-Century Girls’ Series.

I loved Katy. She was a tomboy, always getting into scrapes, playing rough games and getting into trouble. But there is another side to the story of Katy and her little brothers and sisters (based roughly on her own family) because Katy has an accident, falling off a swing and becomes bedridden, eventually with the help of Cousin Helen learning patience and cheerfulness. I haven’t read the book for years and I suspect I could find it a little too moralising now. I hope not I enjoyed it so much.

Katy’s hair was always untidy; her frocks were always catching on nails and ‘tearing themselves’; and in spite of her age and size, she was as heedless and innocent as a child of six. Katy was the longest girl that was ever seen. What she did to make herself grow so, nobody could tell; but there she was – up above papa’s ear and half a head taller than poor Aunt Izzie. …

She had fits of responsibility about the other children, and longed to set them a good example, but when the chance came, she generally forgot to do so. Katy’s days flew like the wind; for when she wasn’t studying lessons or sewing or darning with Aunt Izzie, which she hated extremely, there were always so many delightful schemes rioting in her brains, that all she wished for was ten pairs of hands to carry them out. These same active brains got her into perpetual scrapes.

These are my well-worn ‘Katy’ books:

Katy books

So far my entries for ABC Wednesday have had a literary connection and I hope to continue with them as long as possible. I also post non-literary entries on my other blog Margaret’s Miscellany – this week it’s C for Corfe Castle.