Category: Books

Once Upon a Time Challenge II

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

This Challenge has now ended.  My aim was to complete ‘œQuest the First” – to read at least 5 books of fantasy, or folklore, or fairy tales, or mythology’¦.

I decided to choose books were already on my to-be-read list and sadly they’re still there, with the one exception of The Chrysalids by John Wyndham, which I read and wrote about – see here. This is a book that I have owned for years, so I’m really pleased I’ve read it. The other books are still waiting and I will read them – sooner or later.

 

  • Dante’™s Descent into Hell, translated by Dorothy L Sayers. I’ve started this.
  • The Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake. I have actually read these books, but it was so long ago that I’ve nearly forgotten the story.
  • Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. This is one that I’ve started twice and put back on the shelf.
  • Star Wars by George Lucas. Will this be like the TV series/films?
  • Helen of Troy by Margaret George. I must read this soon!

The Sunday Salon – Reader Satisfaction

Published on by Margaret14 Comments

I’m in the middle of two very different books – Going Into a Dark House, a book of short stories by Jane Gardam and Messenger of Truth, a Maisie Dobbs mystery by Jacqueline Winspear. Both are giving me a lot of reader satisfaction; they take me out of myself and into their worlds, peopled by believable characters, set in realistic locations, and with plots that are detailed and complicated enough to keep me wondering how everything will turn out and hoping for a sequel.

I’ve only recently begun to appreciate short stories and still prefer the longer short stories in preference to those of just a few pages. The plus factor is reading short stories is that you can read one in just one session, making it a complete experience. Going Into a Dark House is a collection of eight short stories, all long enough to satisfy my requirements. The title story, which I haven’t read yet is the longest and is in three parts. Death figures quite a lot in these stories, in different guises and also reflections on age, youth and nostalgia. The first story is Blue Poppies which begins: “My mother died with her hand in the hand of the Duchess.” You know at the start that there is a death; the rest of the story leads up to this death and its effect on the daughter.  I like the way Jane Gardam writes, conjuring such vivid images that it seems as those I’m actually witnessing the scene. For example the blue poppies are

… just like Cadbury’s chocolate papers crumpled up under the tall black trees in a sweep, the exact colour, lying about among their pale hairy leaves in the muddy earth, raindrops scattering them with a papery noise. 

Zoo-Zoo is a strange little tale about a dying nun who is taken by two of her fellow nuns to a nursing home to end her days. She is not as senile as they suppose. My favourite story so far in this collection is Dead Children, which I think is absolutely brilliant. How Jane Gardam can write twelve pages about such a deceptively simple meeting of a mother and her two children and infuse them with such depth of meaning and emotion is just beyond me.  The twist at the end makes an ordinary everyday event amazingly extraordinary.

Messenger of Truth is a much longer book and my reading has been spread out over a few sessions already. It is a detective story set in 1930/1 in England. The artist Nick Bassington-Hope has fallen to his death from the scaffolding whilst installing his work at an art gallery. The police believe it is an accident, but his twin sister Georgina isn’t convinced and hires Maisie Dobbs to investigate his death. Along with Nick’s death there is also the mystery of the missing piece of art work that was to be the centre of the exhibition.

I’m just over half-way through this novel and I think I’m going to have to abandon other books I have on the go in order to finish it. Maisie’s methods of investigation take her to the art gallery, to Dungeness where Nick lived in a converted railway carriage and to visit his family at their home near Tenterden. After questioning his friends and seeing Nick’s paintings she becomes convinced the mystery of his death is related to the missing painting and that this is connected to Nick’s experiences as a war artist during the First World War.

I like the way the mystery is set in the cultural and social setting of this period, between the two World Wars. England is a place where there is a great divide between the wealthy and the poor. Maisie’s assistant Billy Beale is struggling to accept that people have money to spend on artwork when others can’t afford food and medicine. The realities of life are highlighted when Billy’s family catch diphtheria and his two year old baby, Lizzie is taken into hospital. The lingering effects of the war are starkly and shockingly described in Georgina’s reminiscences about the treatment during the war of men suffering from shell-shock.

 Maisie is a an independent woman living on her own, working out her relationship with Andrew Dene, who hoped to marry her. Their relationship is floundering as she is absorbed in her work and doesn’t want to give it up and conform to the accepted role of being a doctor’s wife. She is discontent and is seeking a quality out of life that she cannot quite define. She finds the thrill of investigation outweighs her desire to help others. It is the search for truth that motivates and thrills her.

Both books are immensely satisfying.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Published on by Margaret9 Comments
The Book Thief

I was not that keen on reading The Book Thief when I first heard about it. One reason, and this is quite contrary of me, I know, is that people were raving about it and that always makes me wonder whether a book can really live up to its reputation. The other reason was that I had the impression it was about the Holocaust, concentration camps and the Nazi persecution of the Jews and I would find it too heart-rending. Then I gave in and thought I’d better read it to see what all the fuss was about. It had been sitting on the book shelves unopened ever since I bought it until it was chosen as the next book to read in Cornflower‘s on-line book group.

Death is the narrator of the book. Oddly enough, I became fond of this character, Death, as the story progressed. Death is compassionate, commenting on man’s inhumanity to man and he is very overworked. The action takes place in Nazi Germany and there are some very moving, tense and emotional scenes. Overall though, the book is about ordinary German people and their experiences during the war, their reaction to the Fuhrer and their efforts to help their Jewish friends and acquaintances. As I was reading about how they survived during the air raids I was comparing it to how the British also coped as described in Our Longest Days. As you would expect, it was much the same. People in both countries suffered.

The “book thief” is Liesel Meminger who is nine at the start of the book in 1939. On her way to live with foster parents, Rosa and Hans Hubermann, she witnesses the death and burial of her brother and finds “The GraveDiggers Handbook”. This is the first book that became very important to Liesel. Her love of words leads to her acquiring more books with the help of her friend, Rudy. She steals a book from the Nazi book-burning fires and from the local mayor’s library, with the assistance of the mayor’s wife. The danger increases for Liesel and the Hubermanns when they shelter a young Jew, Max Vanderburg, in their basement. Liesel’s relationships with Rudy, Hans and Max are central to the story, as Death almost seems to stalk them. Terrible things happen in this book; the Nazis and the Hitler Youth Movement cast their sinister shadow, the people are starving, Jews are persecuted, people are whipped for helping them, and towns and cities are bombed and devastated.

Although this is a long book I read it very quickly; it is an easy book to read. The language is simple and straight forward. Some of the sentences are very short, almost staccato and fragmentary: “Door open, door shut. Alone again.” “The food.” “The carrots.” “I know. You know.” This jarred on me a bit but I suppose that writing like this does make the book easier to read and I was able to read it in just a few sessions. Still, I thought it was a disturbing, unsettling book and I found myself reading it completely absorbed in the story.

It also made me think of The Diary of Anne Frank, which she wrote whilst in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Her family was apprehended in 1944 and Anne Frank ultimately died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. This is a heartbreaking account. If you haven’t read it you really must!

Stalled Books

Published on by Margaret12 Comments

On the sidebar I’ve listed some books that I’m currently reading. This isn’t quite accurate as I have more books that I’ve started but stopped – not abandoned, as I do want to carry on reading them. I just haven’t got round to it yet. I thought that if I list them here it might give me that little push to start them again or at least put them in line to be read next. These are:

 Dead Language, by Peter Rushforth.

I started this ages ago (it was a Christmas present in 2006!). I’d read and enjoyed Pinkerton’s Sister and this was Peter Rushforth’s next novel – he died in 2005 before it was published. I stopped reading it because of its size – it’s too heavy to read in bed and it’s very long.

 Author, Author by David Lodge

I bought this at the library sale because I’ve read and enjoyed other books by David Lodge. I was waiting to read this after I’d read The Year of Henry James, David Lodge’s account of writing Author, Author.

 W. Somerset Maugham Collection

This is a library book I borrowed after reading The Moon and Sixpence. I’ve started Cakes and Ale. Again the reason I stopped reading is the size and weight of the book. I’ve been able to renew it a few times.

 Miss Ranskill Comes Home by Barbara Euphan Todd

I’ve borrowed this from the library after Tara wrote that she’d enjoyed it. I’d just read Todd’s Mr Blossom’s Shop, but I think this will be a bit different. I’ve only read the first few pages. I keep renewing this; fortunately no one else has reserved it. Then again if they had I’d probably have made more of an effort to carry on reading it

The Innocent Man by John Grisham

This is the true story of Ron Williamson who was sentenced to death for a murder he did not commit. Again I’ve only started it but I don’t feel quite in the right frame of mind just now to carry on reading it.

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

I feel really bad about this one, as I’ve read a big chunk of it. I was reading it in bed but the font is so small I was finding it hard to read. So I took it downstairs and then got involved in reading other books. I must put this to the top of the pile to read next.

There are more books I’ve started but I can’t list them now as it’s nearly time for Heroes, which is another reason I’m not reading these books.

The Shipping News by Annie Proulx

Published on by Margaret11 Comments

I struggled with The Shipping News for a while, and then found I just had to read it, despite disliking the writing style. So disjointed in parts it irritated me and yet I enjoyed the visual images it invoked. There are no spoilers in this post as the back cover gives as much detail of the plot of the book as I’ve written here.

Quoyle, the main character is no oil painting:

A great damp loaf of a body. At six he weighed eighty pounds. At sixteen he was buried under a casement of flesh. Head shaped like a Crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair ruched back. Features as bunched as kissed finger tips. Eyes the color of plastic. The monstrous chin, a freakish shelf jutting from the lower face.

He’s a loner, socially awkward and self-conscious, easily manipulated by others, his work as a journalist resulted in him seeing the everyday events in his life as newspaper headlines. His marriage to Petal brought him a month of happiness, two daughters and then six years of suffering. Suffering seems to be his lot in life; both parents commit suicide and then his wife is killed in a car accident. These events propel him into a life change as he, his aunt and daughters move to Newfoundland, the home of his forbears.

To some extent I think this is a book of set pieces, loosely linked together. Really not much happens, although there are tantalising hints that dramas lie around the corner just enough to keep me turning the pages to find out what happens next. The writing style, although annoying has left vivid pictures in my mind and I can still see the landscape of Newfoundland in its frozen, storm-ridden isolation, surrounded by icebergs “like white prisons” and the old, dilapidated Quoyle family house on Quoyle’s Point that had stood empty for forty-four years, a “gaunt building … lashed with cable to iron rings set in the rock”.  I also know a lot more now than I did before about knots, boats and boat building.

Quoyle’s job on the local Newfoundland weekly paper the Gammy Bird is to report on the shipping news, the boats coming in and out of the port and to cover the local car wrecks. The names of the characters are so distinctive that there’s no danger of forgetting who they are, from Quoyle (a flat coil of rope that you walk over) to his daughters, Bunny and Sunshine, the newspapermen, Jack Buggit, Billy Pretty, Tert Card and the eccentric Englishman B Beaufield Nutbeem, Quoyle’s aunt Agnis Hamm (reminiscent of Hamm in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame who won’t accept the end?), the harbormaster Diddy Shovel and the tall and quiet woman Wavey Prowse.

The main themes of the book that stood out for me are the relationship between the individual and the family, the importance of being part of a community, death, and love. 

The title, “the shipping news” brought to my mind memories of hearing the shipping forecast as a child. Even though we lived nowhere near the coast we always listened to it and I can still hear it like a poem:

Viking North Utsire, South Utsire, Forties Cromarty Forth, Tyne Dogger, Fisher German Bight,
 Humber Thames Dover Wight, Portland Plymouth Biscay, South Fitzroy, North Fitzroy Sole, Lundy Fastnet Irish Sea, Shannon, Rockall, Malin, Hebrides Bailey Fair Isle, Faeroes Southeast Iceland, with all the variables, moderates or good thrown in, in between.

Nothing like the shipping news in this book, of course. It’s still there running through my mind.

The front cover of my copy of the book shows the actors from the film of the book. I haven’t seen the film. I had to keep averting my eyes from the cover, but inevitably I couldn’t help but see the faces of Judi Dench and Kevin Spacey. I’ve written endlessly it seems before about my views on books versus movies, but I can’t resist adding this. Kevin Spacey could never be anything like my vision of Quoyle, unless he’s the best actor that has ever lived. So, I will not watch the film. Despite not liking how much of it is written this book has captivated me. I think if I can find a copy that doesn’t show scenes from the film (like the one shown to the left) I may buy it and read it again.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1994

The Sunday Salon – Book Notes

Published on by Margaret17 Comments

Another Sunday Salon post. I finished reading three books this week. That’s not as much reading as it sounds as I’d been reading two of them for what seems like ages. I’ve already written about Nigel Slater’s autobiographical Toast,  which I gobbled down. 

The other two books are Inspiration by Wayne W Dyer and The Shipping News by Annie Proulx. Inspiration is subtitled “Your Ultimate Calling“. I borrowed it from the library, partly because I’ve read other books by him and partly because of the front cover with a photograph of a butterfly. I’m glad I didn’t buy this book as I won’t want to read it again. I took a long time over it because I read short sections most mornings. It’s due back at the library next week so I read the last few chapters in one sitting, which I found quite repetitive. In fact the whole book is repetitive – inspiration is living “in-spirit”. Each chapter ends with “Some Suggestions for Putting the Ideas in This Chapter to Work for You”. I think I could probably have just read these and got a good idea of what the book is about. I don’t go along with everything Wayne Dyer advocates but there are some good things in the book, a lot of which I already know but don’t always do, such as unclutter your life, slow down, relax, meditate, turn off the television, be less judgmental of yourself as well as of others, and so on.

I’ve been reading The Shipping News on and off for weeks. Twice I thought I wouldn’t bother reading any more but in the end I did finish it. My problem with it is its style – I don’t like it. Too many fragments. Sentences without nouns, pronouns. And all those lists. But counter-balancing this are the scenes of Newfoundland; the people, the landscape, the ice, wind, snow, storms; at times I felt seasick. I’m going to write more about this in a post on its own.

I’ve started to read The Book Thief by Markus Zusak and although I’ve only read a few chapters I think it’s going to be compulsive reading.

I’ve also started Admit One: a Journey into Film by Emmett James. This promises to be good with the story of his life interwined with films and its correlation to our pasts. With my current obssession with films versus books I’m looking forward to reading more. In the introduction James writes:

I am struck by one, pertinent truth (thanks to the 20/20 hindsight of adulthood). that fact is is this: that a film itself, although unalterable once the physical reel is printed and unleashed, changes continually in the reel of our memory.

I returned one book to the library this week and came home with four more. These are:

  1. Making It Up by Penelope Lively. Taking moments from her life  and asking ‘what if?’ she constructs fictions about possibilities and alternative destinies.
  2. A Splash of Red by Antonia Fraser. A Jemima Shore novel in which Jemima flat-sits for a friend , close to the British Library and receives threatening anonymous phone calls …
  3. Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes. A multiple mystery of obssession and betrayal concerning two stuffed parrots both claimed as the one Flaubert borrowed from the Museum of Rouen to sit on his desk as inspiration. I read about this in someone’s blog – I’m sorry but I can’t remember who. It sounded so funny that when I saw it on the libray display shelf I just had to borrow it.
  4. Messenger of Truth by Jacqueline Winspear. This is the fourth Maisie Dobbs Mystery. I read the first one of her books, Maisie Dobbs last November and have wanted to read more. Another lucky find that almost jumped off the shelf into my hand.

Now all I need is time to get reading.