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Sunday Salon – Currently Reading

Published on August 23, 2009 by Margaret14 Comments

I love starting to read new books and planning which books to read next, so the Currently Reading section on the sidebar over on the right is often not up to date. These are on the sidebar:

I am still reading After the Victorians by A N Wilson. It seems as though I’ve been reading it for ever, not because it’s boring or hard going, far from it, but because I only read small snippets when I have my breakfast – I don’t have a lot for breakfast! So far I’m up to 1941/2 and I have to say that Churchill doesn’t come over very well to me. It’s made me want to read his biography to get a fuller picture of the man.
I started Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel and have actually put it to one side – again not because I wasn’t enjoying it, but because I was reading it in bed at night and it’s too big and heavy to hold lying down. My eyes kept closing and the book kept falling out of my hands. I need to read it in the mornings, sitting up!
The Case for God by Karen Armstrong is fascinating – but it’s slow going because it too is a large, heavy book and also because it’s non-fiction I need to be fully awake to read it. So that has to wait for a morning time read as well.
Yesterday I started The Bradshaw Variations by Rachel Cusk. This is a paperback and much easier to handle in bed and so far I am enjoying it. I thought when I started it that maybe I wouldn’t as it’s written in the first person singular – not my favourite style – but the content is so absorbing that I don’t actually notice it anymore.

The folowing books are not listed on the sidebar but are books I’ve started and would love to continue reading, but there is a limit to how many I can keep in my mind at one time:

1599: a Year in the Life of William Shakespeare by James Shapiro
The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton
Death of a Chief by Douglas Watt

I really, really want to find time to read these books as well (all borrowed from the library):

All the Colours of Darkness by Peter Robinson – after reading Strange Affair I found this one in the library – this the latest one to be published (I did intend to start with the first).
Pardonable Lies by Jacqueline Winspear
Among the Mad by Jacqueline Winspear
The Brading Collection by Patricia Wentworth

Oh, for more reading time!

Tuesday Teaser – The Hound of Death by Agatha Christie

Published on August 18, 2009 by Margaret14 Comments

Teaser Tuesday is hosted by MizB at Should Be Reading.

Grab your current read.
Let the book fall open to a random page.
Share with us two (2) ‘teaser’ sentences from that page.

The Hound of Death is a book of short stories. Today’s teaser is from the second story, The Red Signal on page 46:

And I will tell you this, if the man suffering from a delusion happened to hold his tongue about it, in all probability we should never be able to distinguish him from a normal individual. The extraordinary sanity of the insane is a most interesting subject.

The Sunday Salon – newbooks magazine

Published on August 16, 2009 by Margaret8 Comments

My copy of ‘newbooks’ magazine arrived the other day. This is perhaps the one magazine that I always read from cover to cover. The editorial highlights the changes in publishing in the last decades with

… the conglomeration first of publishing houses and then bookselling, and the negative contribution made by literary agents pedalling a ‘stifling excess of lucrative junk’, hand-in-hand with Google and Amazon’s rapid growth in influence. … ‘No one can predict how books and readers will survive.

The trend seems to be away from books in print, with not only independent bookshops dwindling but also the high street bookshops in decline, towards the on-line digital era. Whilst this is something that has been debated extensively online before, it did strike me that this could mean that in future magazines like ‘newbooks’ would not be issued physically but only available on line and how would I like that?

Well, I wouldn’t – I like it dropping through the letterbox onto the doormat and then flicking through its pages before settling down to read it. Maybe there won’t be any letterboxes in future – everything will be done online? I have no problem with reading somethings online – after all I write this blog and read lots of other blogs quite happily. But I’m not up to reading whole books on screen, nor do I want to print them off and read them that way and the same goes for magazines – I want the physical object – books in print please. Although I do buy some books from online boksellers I prefer to go to a bookshop and browse the books. So I hope the complete change doesn’t come soon.

In the meantime I’m happy reading and choosing which book to pick as my free book from ‘newbooks’. Will it be An Equal Stillness by Francesca Kay, The Girl on the Landing by Paul Torday, Antigona and Me by Kate Clanchy, The Book of Unholy Mischief by Elle Newmark, or The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery?

Mog commented on my previous post that she has chosen The Book of Unholy Mischief and I’m very tempted by that one too. It’s set in Venice in 1498, where an ancient book, rumoured to contain heresies and secrets of immeasurable power, is hidden. Luciano, a chef’s apprentice in the doge’s palace is drawn into the search leading him into a perilous maze to the centre of an intrigue concerning some of the most powerful and dangerous men in Venice.

I’m also drawn to The Girl on the Landing, which is about Michael and his wife Elizabeth. Michael spots a painting whilst staying at a friend’s country house in Ireland. In the background of the painting he see a woman clad in a dark green dress, except his hosts say there is no woman in the picture and indeed when he looks again she is not there.

There is also an interview with Paul Torday in the magazine in which Zoe Fairbairns reveals that its the nature of Britishness and Englishness that is debated furiously in this book as Michael, on medication which he then refuses to take, plummets towards breakdown. She writes:

If identity and personality are so fragile, how can anyone said to be ‘truly’ British, ‘truly’ anything? It’s disturbing stuff, but compulsively readable, which is what Torday wants: ‘My perfect reader is someone who picks the book up and goes on reading it until it’s late at night.’

That could be me!

Griff Rhys Jones – “Rivers”

Published on August 14, 2009April 10, 2022 by Margaret9 Comments

I’ve been watching Griff’s TV series Rivers, so I was thrilled to read on the Mostly Books blog that he was giving a talk in Abingdon. Of course, by the time I read about it all the tickets were sold out, but I had a phone call yesterday morning – some tickets had been returned and did I still want to go!

My thanks go to the person who returned the tickets – it was a great evening. Griff was up and running as soon as he was on stage – entertaining, funny and oh, so knowledgeable. So many facts spilled out of him with boundless enthusiasm and all without any notes. Griff explained how he came to do the TV series and how the producers like him to be “in jeopardy” – if you’ve seen any of his TV programmes, you’ll know what he means, from dangling on a cradle whilst cleaning windows of a New York skyscraper (his hairiest moment) to swimming the River Mersey, in danger of getting Weil’s disease when he fell straight in the sewage going underground with the team maintaining Manchester’s waterways, and kayaking in a canoe slalom on the River Derwent.

Griff is passionate about rivers and opening them up for people to use. He wanted to make a series about the landscape and how it is used – the waterways of Britain are the ancient transport routes only superceded by road and rail relatively recently. The rivers are there to be used, navigation rights that have been extinguished should be reinstated so that we can all use them. He also wanted it to be about the history of rivers – telling how the monks were the first people to use the rivers, creating the water meadows to irrigate the land, how people settled near rivers, how the towns grew up, how they were above all working rivers, and how we have lost our ancient connection with rivers.

I bought his book – Rivers: a Voyage into the Heart of Britain, which he explained is not just about the TV series but is full of stories. I joined the long queue waiting for him to sign it. I was almost the last person in the queue, but he was still cheerfully smiling and signing! I asked him how long it had taken him to write the book. He paused and screwed his eyes up whilst he thought back, “Well I started it in November … and had to have it finished by … February”, he said. “And then it was edited down, it was much longer than it is now.”

Well, that wasn’t very long to write such a detailed, hefty book, which looks fascinating, complete with line drawings, maps and colour illustrations. I’ve only dipped into it so far, but here is an extract conveying the beauty of our rivers:

Down beyond Sudbury the River Stour closes in. It slinks through a perfect English landscape: Essex to the south, the much more mythically rural Suffolk to the north. “Suffolk” sounds eggy, buccolic, lost and lazy. Essex is equally as good, just not so equally named. I glimpsed wool merchants’ ochre or pink half-timbered hall houses. I slid into great mill ponds. There were plenty of startling grand churches, some paid for out of the profits of the local weaving industry, some like Stoke-by-Nayland, by rich medieval aristocrats. But mostly, despite the hard-won navigation rights, I was alone, hemmed in by tall banks of reeds, picking my way through over-hanging willows, negotiating passage rights with arrogant swans.

Frequently a stretch would open out with bullrushes standing up on either side, below whispering aspens. The way was clogged with waterlilies in full bloom: buttercup-coloured buds the size of small fists, and open petals like dishes, lying on flat floating leaves. The water itself was clear and waving with green cabbage-like undergrowth that ceaselessly, yearningly, writhed in the current. I could see right down to a river bottom reflecting sunlight off mother-of-pearl freshwater mussel shells. (page 277-8)

As well as meeting Griff I also met Annabel from Gaskella, who was on the stall selling books – she has the good fortune of having Mostly Books as her local bookshop. She’s also written about the event – see here.

Sunday Salon – Birthday Books

Published on August 9, 2009August 11, 2023 by Margaret24 Comments

We’ve been away from home again for a few days. This time it was to Stratford to celebrate my birthday by going to see the RSC’s Julius Caesar at The Courtyard Theatre. I finished re-reading the play just before we went to Stratford. I enjoyed it, but not as much as other performances I’ve seen. More about the play in a future post.

Stratford was packed – with bikers as well as the usual tourists – a constant whine and roar of their engines as they seemed to spend the days and evenings circling the town. We have visited Stratford many times but this time we did the tourist thing and visited Shakespeare’s Birth Place and other houses connected to him and his family – more about that in a future post.

I always love books as birthday presents and was lucky enough to be given this pile this year. I just wish I could read them all at once:

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. I’ve been reading about this one and it was high on my wish list.
Jane Austen’s Letters collected and edited by Deirdre Le Feye – another book I’ve been coveting for a while.
The Rebecca Notebook & Other Memories by Daphne Du Maurier. Rebecca is one of my favourite books and this book begins with Du Maurier’s thoughts on writing it with an alternative Epilogue.
The Children’s Book by A S Byatt. How could I not want this book – other bloggers have been giving it such praise!
The Cleansing by Bill Rogers. I’d actually forgotten this was on my wishlist, but I’m so glad D bought it for me. I’ve started to read it and so far I think it’s very good. Set in Manchester, it’s a murder mystery well grounded in police procedure. DCI Tom Caton leads the Specialist Detection Group investigating a very messy case involving a killer dressed as a clown.
Mary Queen of Scots by Antonia Fraser. I’m particularly drawn to historical biography and especially Mary Queen of Scots, so I’m looking forward to this one.
Death of a Chief by Douglas Watt. This looks excellent – a surprise present from my son. From the back cover: “The year is 1686. Sir Lachlan MacLean, chief of a proud but poverty-stricken Highland clan, has met with a macabre death in his Edinburgh lodgings. … Death of a Chief is set in pre-Englightenment Scotland – a long time before police detectives existed.”

Recent Serious – Booking Through Thursday

Published on August 6, 2009 by Margaret15 Comments

Today’s question is

What’s the most serious book you’ve read recently?
(I figure it’s easier than asking your most serious boook ever, because, well, it’s recent!)

I thought at first this would be an easy question to answer, but as I looked back over the books I’ve read recently I began to define “serious”. Does a serious book have to be non-fiction? If so then I didn’t have to think too hard and the book is one I’m currently reading – After the Victorians: the World Our Parents Knew by A N Wilson. I’m up to 1938-9, the build-up to the Second World War. What could be more serious than that?

However, “serious” isn’t limited to non-fiction. Fiction can be very grave, austere, earnest, thought -provoking and heavy (as opposed to light and fluffy). Thinking of books in this way it’s more difficult to choose “the most serious” book I’ve read recently.

But I think the most serious and powerful novel I’ve read this year is Remember Me … by Melvyn Bragg. This is the tragic, emotional and heart-rending story of Joe Richardson as he tells it to his daughter. It’s a long book, very intense and very moving.