My husband took this photo of the book he was reading this morning when he was trying out my camera. See if you can identify the book and the name of the “Old Man”.
Hint: It’s not the sort of book I usually read – you should know, Paul.
Category: Books
An Armful of Books
These books have little, if anything in common, other than the fact that they are all recent acquisitions. Every now and then I decide not to buy any more books and then along come some that I just can’t resist. They all look so enticing I want to read them all at once. As that’s not possible I thought I do quick summaries of each one (from information on the book covers) to help me decide which one to read next.
Remember Me by Melvyn Bragg. This is the latest book from Melvyn Bragg based on his own life. I enjoyed the others – The Soldier’s Return, A Son of War and Crossing the Lines – so much that I couldn’t wait for this book to come out in paperback.
A passionate but ultimately tragic love affair starts when two students – one French, one English – meet at university at the beginning of the sixties. From its tentative, unpromising early stages, the relationship develops into a life-changing one, whose profound impact continues to reverberate forty years later.’
The Last Enchantment by Mary Stewart – bought in the Library Sale for 10p. I read and loved Mary Stewart’s trilogy of Arthur/Merlin books many years ago. The first two are The Crystal Cave and The Hollow Hills.
The Last Enchantment is a richly woven story peopled by princes and soldiers, grave-robbers and goldsmiths, innkeepers and peasants and witches.
As it’s so long since I first read this book I expect it will be like reading a new book.
Never On These Shores by Stephen R Pastore. Lisa Roe at the Online Publicist sent me this to review. Have a look at her site; she has a number of books available fo review. This is a ‘what if’ book’.
what if in 1942 the Nazis had landed in Mexico and invaded the United States through Texas. The Japanese have conquered Canada and have captured and occupied most of the west coast from Seattle to the outskirts of Los Angeles.
In a way this fits in with my current reading of books about the Second World War.
Admit One: a Journey Into Film by Emmett James, a review book also from Lisa. This book follows British born actor Emmett James on his numerous adventures
… as he jumps from forgery to pornography to crashing the Academy Awards under the alias of a nominated writer. All the while, the films that inspired each tale contextualize this humorous collection of stories. The narrator provides a unique insight into the fascinating industry of film, eventually himself stumbling into the biggest box-office grossing movie of all time.
Discussion about films attracted me to this book.
Down To a Sunless Sea by Mathias B Freese, a review book from the author. This collection of short stories
plunges the reader into uncomfortable situations and into the minds of troubled characters. Each selection is a different reading experience – poetic, journalistic, nostalgic, wryly humorous, and even macabre.
This sounds so different and quite challenging.
The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett, a bookshop buy.
Set in the turbulent times of twelfth-century England when civil war, famine, religious strife and battles over royal succession tore lives and families apart, The Pillars of the Earth tells the story of the building of a magnificent cathedral.
Historical fiction and family drama combined makes this very attractive to me.
Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman. I saw this in the bookshop at the same time. I bought it as Joanna had suggested it when I wrote about Garden Spells, another magical book. I was also influenced by the name of one of the main characters, ‘Sally Owens’, as that was the name of my Great Aunt, who I thought was magical. It says on the back cover that this book
blends together the mundane and the mysterious, the familiar and fantastic.
It promises to be good.
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. From the same bookshop buying spree. I remember reading good things about this book on several blogs and it was the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005. There is very little information about this book on its cover so I looked on Wikipedia which summarises it :
Gilead is the fictional autobiography of the Reverend John Ames, an elderly congregationalist pastor in the small, secluded town of Gilead, Iowa who knows that he is dying of a heart condition.
From the back cover:
A visionary work of dazzling originality.
I’m prepared to be dazzled.
Engleby by Sebastian Faulks, the final bookshop buy.
This is the story of Mike Engleby, a working-class boy who wins a place at an esteemed English university. But with the disappearance of Jennifer, the undergraduate Engleby admires from afar, the story turns into a mystery of gripping power.
This sounds promising – a murder mystery set in a university and a creepy central character.
Can Any Mother Help Me? By Jenna Bailey. This is a bargain buy from newbooks. It’s about a group of women and their magazine – the Cooperative Correspondence Club (CCC) which lasted 55 years.
They wrote articles about the things that mattered most to them – children, work, love, politics – and commented on each other’s work.
The magazines are part of the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex, which also is the source for Our Longest Days – diary entries from ordinary people during the Second World War. The CCC began in 1935, so the war years are also covered in this book. I’ve already read a little of it and I may start it properly when I’ve finished reading Our Longest Days.
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss, bought in the Library Sale for 40p. I’ve been wondering about this book for some time whenever I saw it in the bookshops, but the title put me off for some inexplicable reason. But at 40p I thought why not? There are many quotes both on the back cover and inside singing its praises:
The history of Love has perfect pitch and does its dance of time between contemporary New York and the wanderings of the Jews with unsentimental but heartbreaking grace [Krauss] also happens to write like an angel. Simon Schama, Guardian.
He does make it sound very good.
The Sunday Salon – Looking Back at Wartime Britain
This week I’ve been reading more of Our Longest Days: a People’s History of the Second World War by the Writers of Mass Observation. It’s composed of diary entries from a number of people of their personal observations, thoughts, and hopes. The one criticism I have of it is that I’m finding it difficult to remember the details of each person. Their first entry is annotated in the margin with their name, age, occupation and location. After that there is just the name, so I have to flick to the end of the book where there are brief biographies for each person. But I am gradually getting used to each person. This morning I was reading about April 1941 with the declaration of war on Yugoslavia and Greece. In Eastern Europe, Hungary, Rumania and Bulgaria were effectively Nazi puppet states. Maggie Blunt, a writer living alone with her beloved cats in a cottage in Slough, wrote on 21 April 1941,
‘Are we really going to lose this war? The Nazis sweep from triumph to triumph making no mistakes while we make all the mistakes. ‘ God alone knows what we shall be called upon to endure these next few years but as others wiser than I have said, it is not what one endures but how one endures it that counts. There were bad raids again on London last week. Planes overhead again tonight. The horror of the sound has become dulled by familiarity and resignation.’
It seems strange to say I’m enjoying reading this, but I am. It is an amazing insight into how ordinary people felt about the war. I remember hearing the stories my mother told about her wartime experiences and thinking how terrible it must have been, yet at the same time how much fun they managed to have despite the circumstances.
I also picked up at the library a week or so ago London War Notes 1939 – 1945 by Mollie Panter-Downes (I read about this first on Danielle’s blog). I’ve just started to read this in conjunction with Our Longest Days. Together these books throw so much light on those years. Mollie Panter-Downes covered the war from England for the New Yorker. The letters are witty, humorous and full of poignancy. I can’t decide whether to read until I’ve caught up with Our Longest Days, or to just stick to one book and then read the other one.
I’ve also got Wartime Britain 1939 – 1945 by Juliet Gardiner (recommended by Litlove). I’ve only dipped into this so far and looked at the photographs. It’s a long, detailed book with many endnotes and an extensive bibliography. In the foreword it states that is about the pervasiveness of the war and how it affected people’s lives. So that’s up next too.
One last book for today is The Ration Book Diet by Mike Brown, Carol Harris and C J Jackson. This uses the wartime diet as a model and includes sixty recipes, some taken straight from cookery books of the time, with only minor adjustments, but most are new dishes created using the ingredients that were available during the war. From the introduction:
When VE-Day finally came in May 1945, Britain was a very different place from the country it had been in 1939. Six years of war had taken their toll on the fabric of the nation. In many cases the effects were far-reaching in terms of Britain’s social, economic and demographic characteristics. But if there was one good thing to have come out of the war then it was food rationing: the war left us healthier as a nation than we had ever been before or have been since.
This is a lovely book and I’ll be writing more about it at a later date.
It’s a glorious day here, hot and sunny, with no breeze. I’m not sure I really like this weather; it makes me feel drained and languid. I shan’t be reading much more today as the family are coming over this afternoon and the garden calls. We’ll be getting the paddling pool out for the children, although my son and husband will be firmly indoors from 3.00pm onwards watching their team Manchester United play the last game of the Premier League against Wigan. The championship hangs on this match. See my son’s post here for a more informed view.
Booking Through Thursday – Manual Labour (Labor)
This week’s Booking Through Thursday’s question is:
Writing guides, grammar books, punctuation how-tos . . . do you read them? Not read them? How many writing books, grammar books, dictionaries’“if any’“do you have in your library?
My English teacher at school, Miss Orr, would be pleased and amazed if she could read this now – I like books on grammar and punctuation! I love dictionaries and writing guides.
I regularly use The Chambers Dictionary, which boldy says on its cover “the largest, bestselling and most comprehensive single-volume English dictionary” and also “the richest range of English language from Shakespeare to the present day”. It’s more than a dictionary as it also has lists in the back – first names, phrases and quotations in Latin and Greek and modern foreigh languages, books of the Bible, plays of Shakespeare, chemical elements and so on and so forth. It’s the meaning that I’m looking for because you have to have some idea of how a word is spelled to look it up. I do use on-line dictionaries but really prefer my “real” dictionary, somehow it’s more satisfying. I just opened it now to check the word “labour” (that’s how I would spell it not “labor” – I’m not too bothered about spelling) to see if my idea of using writing guides etc is covered by that word. “Labour” means, among other definitions “physical or mental toil; work, especially when done for money, or other gain, pain, a task requiring hard work”. So no, using these books is not all laborious for me.
I also have The Oxford Library of English Usage which I really ought to read more than I do. It’s a box set of 3 volumes – Grammar, Spelling and A Dictionary of Modern Usage. I bought the set some years ago when I realised that my memory of English Grammar from school was fading fast (sorry Miss Orr).
More recently I bought Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss, which I think makes grammar so much more interesting. I love her examples and the wrong use of the apostraphe in “its/it’s” infuriates me, although not quite as as much as it does her:
“No matter if you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, “Good food at it’s best”, you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.”
My typing is not always up to much and I cringe when I see I’ve typed “it’s” instead of its”.
I’m really good at reading writing guides in hope of improving my writing or to give me inspiration to actually write something creative, but I never do what they say. I have a few books on Creative Writing – my favourite is Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer. I’m encouraged by her analysis of the difficulties of writing, her practical approach to the business of writing and this sentence in particular strikes a chord:
“Writing calls on unused muscles and invloves solitude and immobility.”
Although not a writing guide in the usual sense I also love Margaret Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. She writes about what is a writer and how she became one; the drawbacks of being a female writer; and asks question such as, “For whom does the writer write?” and “Is there a self-identity for the writer that combines responsibility with artistic integrity? If there is, where might it be?” She quotes many other author, enticing me to read yet more and more books.
Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
I seem to have been reading Eat, Pray, Love a very long time. That is because I only read short sections each morning. I’d read quite a lot about the book on a number of blogs and some people loved it and others didn’t and for a while I resisted reading it. Then a few months ago I found it sitting on the shelf in my local library and thought I’d have a look at it. At first I found Elizabeth Gilbert’s style irritating, so chatty and verbose, but after I’d got beyond the sorry details of her marriage, divorce and disastrous relationship with the next man, and she took herself off to Italy I began to relax and enjoy the book. I’m glad I finally did read this book as in the end I found it very entertaining.
She travelled to Italy (Eat), India (Pray) and Indonesia (Love) spending four months in each place, searching for pleasure in Italy, mainly through food, God in India at an ashram, and balance in Indonesia.
I’ve written a bit about her time in Italy here and this was my favourite section of the book. Whatever Elizabeth Gilbert does it seems as though she throws herself into it 100% – so in Italy she put on weight, eating pizza and gelato. Well not just those two Italian basics, but loads of delicious sounding food. It made me feel happy just reading about her happiness in eating soft-boiled eggs, asparagus, olives, goat’s cheese and salmon, followed by a fresh peach. By the end of her stay in Italy I wasn’t surprised that none of the clothes she brought with her fitted – I found the same after two weeks! Needless to say I enjoyed reading Eat and it made me want to visit Italy again.
On to India, where it was back to intense, emotional experiences; much soul-searching and naval- gazing too. (I also wrote a bit about this section here.) I have practised Yoga so I was looking forward to reading of her time in an ashram, but soon decided that I’m glad I was never tempted to spend time in one myself. Elizabeth Gilbert was hoping for a dazzling encounter with God, maybe some blue lightning or a prophetic vision’, but for a while this eluded her. I was amused when I read that she wrote that she’d been talking too much, not just at the ashram but all her life, so she decided she didn’t want to waste the greatest spiritual opportunity of her life by being all social and chatty the whole time. She was going to become known as That Quiet Girl! Her hopes were dashed when she was asked to be Key Hostess, looking after people coming to the ashram on retreat.
But it was during these retreats that she had her dazzling encounter with God. Elizabeth writes about God as though she’s writing to a penfriend or is talking to a friend at the end of a telephone. She also writes about it in abstract terms – she stepped through time and entered the void; she
was the void ; the void was God, which means that I was inside God. But not in a gross, physical way – not like I was Liz Gilbert stuck inside a chunk of God’s thigh muscle. I was just part of God. In addition to being God. I was both a tiny piece of the universe and exactly the same size as the universe.’ (p209)
My interpretation of this is that Elizabeth was experiencing a state of ‘œoneness’, where she was not aware of the limits of her own being. She says that it wasn’t hallucinogenic or exiting or euphoric, even though she states it was heaven; maybe she is saying that she slowed down and experienced calm and tranquillity, a sort of blend of Christianity and Buddhism perhaps. At the beginning of the book Elizabeth writes that she is culturally, though not theologically a Christian, which goes some way to explaining her experience of “being God”. She explains her position thus:
while I do love that great teacher of peace who was called Jesus, and while I do reserve the right to ask myself in certain trying situations what indeed He would do, I can’t swallow that one fixed rule of Christianity insisting that Christ is the only path to God. Strictly speaking then, I cannot call myself a Christian. Most of the Christians I know accept my feelings on this with grace and open-mindedness.’(p14)
In the final section of the book she travelled on to Bali in Indonesia where she had first met Ketut, the medicine man, who resembles Yoda from Star Wars. I have to admire Elizabeth Gilbert’s confidence in travelling alone without even any idea of where she is going to live, and what she is going to do. She arrived in Bali not knowing Ketut’s address or even the name of his village and when she did find it at first he did not recognise her. Life in Bali is very different from her time in India, much more relaxed and Ketut’s methods of meditation were much less intense than those at the ashram.
Along the way she also made friends with Wayan, a poverty stricken woman healer and spent the mornings with her laughing and eating’ the afternoons with Ketut talking and drinking coffee and the evenings relaxing in her garden, either by herself or with another friend, Yudhi who came over and played his guitar. She decided to raise money from friends in America to buy Wayan a house and this nearly ended in disaster when Wayan kept finding more and more difficulties with purchasing land and said she needed more money. Fortunately Elizabeth had met a charming Brazilian man, with whom she fell in love and he explained that that is the way of life for people there to try to get the most money they can out of visitors.
So, it all ended happily as Elizabeth sailed
to this pretty little tropical island with my Brazilian lover. Which is – I admit it!- an almost ludicrously fairy-tale ending to this story, like the page out of a housewife’s dream. ‘¦ Yet what keeps me from dissolving right now into a complete fairy-tale shimmer is this solid truth, a truth which has veritably built my bones over the last few years – I was not rescued by a prince: I was the administrator of my own rescue.’ (p 344)
Sunday Salon – This Week’s Reading
I’m late coming to the Sunday Salon today, because just as I was finishing writing this post we had a power cut, which lasted nearly four hours and when it came back on I found that I hadn’t saved all of it! Last Sunday the heavy rain that had been forecast held off for our walk among the bluebells, in fact it was a warm sunny afternoon and there were still lots of bluebells in the woods. 
It’s been a mixed week weather wise – we’ve had sunshine and torrential rain, coming down like stair rods as my father used to say. But it has meant that everything in the garden is growing like mad. I love this time of year when the leaves are still small enough to see the branches. We have two small apple trees and a cherry tree which have now blossomed – promise of fruit later in the year.
On the reading front for some of the week I’ve been in the company of Dalziel and Pascoe, but mostly Pascoe as the book is The Death of Dalziel by Reginald Hill. Because I watched the BBC series before I read any Dalziel books in my mind I see Warren Clarke as Dalziel and Colin Buchanan as Pascoe. It’s a complicated plot with all the sub-plots intricately interwoven. The characters are so believable and the mystery so absorbing that I just had to read it through to the end. It was a while ago that I watched this on TV so, even though I knew what the outcome was I couldn’t remember the details. What I don’t remember from the TV are the episodes describing what is going on inside Dalziel as he lies in hospital unconscious (he was caught in the blast of a hugh Semtex explosion).
This is a nice example. Dalziel is
floating uneasily above Mid-Yorkshire. His unease derives not from his ability to defy gravity, which seems quite natural, but his fear that someone below might mistake him for a zeppelin and shoot him down.
Because he is Dalziel he breaks wind and his
… relief is huge and more than physical.
‘Dead men don’t fart!’ he cries triumphantly.Dalziel breaks wind again, this time with such force he gets lift-off and accelerates into the bright blue yonder like a Cape Canaveral rocket. Soon the startled starling is nothing more than a distant mote, high above which an overweight, middle-aged detective superintendent at last realises the Peter Pan fantasy of his early childhood and laughs with sheer delight as he tumbles and soars between the scudding clouds of a Mid-Yorkshire sky.
In complete contrast I’m in the middle of The Maytrees by Annie Dillard. Some years ago I read and thoroughly enjoyed Pilgrim at Tinker Creek which won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 1975. In that book I was fascinated by the detail and description of the natural world that Dillard saw at the Creek and I expected her novel would much in the same vein. But for me it is too sparsely written, too economical. The Maytrees is about a couple, Toby and Lou who marry and have a son Petie, living out their seemingly non-eventful lives at Provincetown on the tip of Cape Cod. After 14 years of marriage Maytree just ups and leaves with Deary Hightoe, which is as far as I have read. Part of me loves this book for the descriptions of the setting and characters, but part of me struggles with prose that seems so detached from emotion.
I always like to have more than one book on the go, so although I’m only progressing slowly with Les Miserables I’ve also started to read Our Longest Days, diary entries of people living during the Second World War. It’s fascinating reading about the war as it was experienced by the people left at home, enduring the bombing of Britain and the threat of invasion. I’m up to December 1940 – Herbert Brush, then aged 71 was living in London, described what he had done to make staying in the dugout more comfortable, with a paraffin stove, a curtain across the entrance and shields to keep the draught off the bunks on each side of the dugout:
It is quite a comfortable place now, when one gets used to the cramped space and the inability to turn over without falling off the bunk, for folk of my size.
It’s a touching account of the war years full of personal hopes and fears.
Finally I started to read John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids yesterday. So far I’m finding this an immensely satisfying book, easy to read, and full of suspense about a world where genetic variations are seen as Offences and Abominations that have to be rooted out and destroyed. Chillingly, when a baby is born it has to be inspected and if there is any deviation from what has been decided is normal, ie made in the image of God, even if there is the slightest blemish then it is taken away and never heard of again. My copy is an old second-hand Penguin book published in 1959 and I’m intrigued by the references on the cover to ‘what is unhappily known as – science fiction’, and again as writing that is ‘so unscientifically called Science Fiction‘. I must look up the history of sci-fi writing.
BooksPlease 