Category: Books

Dante Quiz

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

Reading So Many books blog, I found Dante’™s Inferno Test. This reminded me that I’d started to read Dante’s The Divine Comedy, but hadn’t got very far with it. Take the test and find out what circle of Dante’™s hell you can look forward to spending eternity in.

I took the test and found that I’™m going to the first level of Hell’“Limbo. The illustration below shows the different levels of hell, copied from the Oxford World Classics edition of The Divine Comedy. I’ve indicated the position of Limbo.

First Level of Hell – Limbo

 

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Charon ushers you across the river Acheron, and you find yourself upon the brink of grief’s abysmal valley. You are in Limbo, a place of sorrow without torment. You encounter a seven-walled castle, and within those walls you find rolling fresh meadows illuminated by the light of reason, whereabout many shades dwell. These are the virtuous pagans, the great philosophers and authors, unbaptised children, and others unfit to enter the kingdom of heaven. You share company with Caesar, Homer, Virgil, Socrates, and Aristotle. There is no punishment here, and the atmosphere is peaceful, yet sad.

I had hoped for better, but it could have been much worse!

Exploring Britain – In Books. A Thursday Thirteen

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For a while now I’ve been reading Thursday Thirteen posts on a number of blogs and wondering about writing one myself. Until last week there was no theme to Thursday Thirteen, it could be whatever you wanted it to be. They have now introduced a theme, but I’ve been writing this list on books on Britain, so I’m not following the theme and here is my first Thursday Thirteen.


These are books that explore different aspects of Britain – things that interest me, landscape, places, history, architecture, writers, cookery, walking and so on. They’re books I own and enjoy looking at; some I’ve read and others I’ve only dipped into. They have all provided me with hours of delight. There are a number of books reflecting my fascination with history in its physical form – standing stones, castle, churches, stately homes – others my interest in Britain’s geography and topography. The book that triggered this list is A Reader’s Guide to Writers Britain by Sally Varlow, which I bought this week in the library book sale.

From bottom to top they are:

1. English Landscapes photography by Rob Talbot, text by Robin Whiteman (1995). The English countryside in full colour, explored region by region from Penzance to Penrith, landmarks, local architecture, social and historical surveys, literary and artistic connections, geography and local customs. An amazing collection exploring the byways of England. A book to sit and pore over planning where to go.

2. Yesterday’s Britain published by the Readers’ Digest. Full of photographs this book covers the period 1900 -1979 and is ‘the story of how we lived, worked an played’ throughout the 20th century. It contains personal anecdotes, eyewitness accounts and intimate stories: a ‘family scrapbook of the nation’.

3. British Isles: a Natural History by Alan Titchmarsh, accompanying the BBC1 series. Beginning in the mists of time, 3 billion years ago this book traces the evolution of Britain exploring everything from geology and geography to flora and fauna. It includes a section on Places to Visit, from Stone Age villages at Skara Brae, Orkney to the Centre for Alternative Technology, Powys, Wales. A beautifully illustrated and informative book.

4. Land of the Poets: Lake District, Photographs by David Lyons (1996). The English Lake District, that much visited area of Britain, is one of my favourite places. I’d love to live there, even though it rains and is often full of tourists. This book illustrates the drama and beauty of the countryside, the grandeur of the crags and hills, complimented with poetry inspired by the mountain streams and lakes. The anthology is mainly drawn from William Wordsworth and his near contemporaries, with photographs relating directly to the poems – The Langdale Pikes, Home at Grasmere, (Wordsworth), Helvellyn (Walter Scott) to name but a few.

5. Mountain: exploring Britain’s High Places by Griff Rhys Jones to accompany the BBC series. I was so impressed with Griff’s fitness as well as his great sense of humour as he climbed Snowdon and the other High Peaks in England, Scotland and Wales. These are such spectacular places, also rough and arduous climbs. Amazingly he had never done any climbing before! One third of Britain is covered in mountains – I didn’t know that before. There’s a bit of history in this book too.

6. Great British Menu, the book that accompanied the first series on BBC2, when 14 chefs competed to decide who should cook for the Queen at the celebration lunch marking Her Majesty’s 80th birthday. It contains recipes from the chefs representing the South East, the North, Wales, the South West, Northern Ireland, the Midlands and East Anglia, and Scotland – including Lancashire Hot Pot made with wild boar, Finnebroague Venison with Colcannon Pie and Wild Mushrooms (Northern Ireland) and Pan-Fried Cornish Lobster (South West). Delicious, mouth-watering recipes.

7. How We Built Britain by David Dimbleby, describing a journey through Britain and a thousand years of history seen through Britain’s buildings and the people who built them. This is more than the book of the TV series, immensely detailed, reflecting Dimbleby’s enthusiasm and delight in a huge span of British history from 1066 to the modern day.

8. Sacred Britain: a guide to the sacred sites and pilgrim routes of England, Scotland and Wales by Martin Palmer and Nigel Palmer. This gives information about ancient stone circles and tombs, Christian and pre-Christian shrines, medieval synagogues, churches, cathedrals, holy wells and rivers, ancient yew trees and symbolic plants. It also describes 13 traditional pilgrimage routes eg the Canterbury Pilgrimage from Winchester to Canterbury (129 miles). Illustrated with colour photographs and coloured sketch plans of the routes.

9. A Reader’s Guide to Writers’ Britain by Sally Varlow (2000). This is a beautiful book containing maps and photographs, and giving a guide to places to visit linked with writers and books, from all parts of the British Isles. There’s an index of authors and places with anecdotes and fascinating facts. Hours of endless pleasure reading about where to visit.

10. In Search of Stones:a pilgrimage of faith, reason and discovery by M Scott Peck. Scott Peck’s account of the trip he and his wife took through the countryside of Wales, England and Scotland looking for ancient megalithic stones. It covers travel, history, archaeology, as well as Scott Peck’s meditations on spirituality and mysticism. Illustrated with drawings by Christopher Peck. I’ve read this book twice so far and have visited some of the sites he describes.

11. Mysterious Wales by Chris Barber looks at beautiful and magical places in Wales. It’s a guide to prehistoric megaliths, holy wells, magic trees, secret caves, lonely lakes, bottomless pools and sites associated with legends concerning King Arthur, Merlin and the Devil. Illustrated with photographs and drawings. Absolutely fascinating.

12. The Hidden Places of England edited by Joanna Billing is a travel guide to some of the less well known places of interest to visit (together with other less ‘hidden’ places eg Stratford-upon-Avon, Bath and Oxford), with short descriptions accompanied by line drawings and coloured maps. It also has information about places to stay and eat, many in out-of-the way places. My edition was published in 1997 but it is still a useful book to find out about the history of villages and towns, churches, pubs, restaurants, cafes, tearooms, and numerous other attractions.

13. A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells: The Central Fells by A Wainwright. This is one in a series of the Wainwright walking guides to the Lakeland Fells, reproduced from the original handwritten pages and intricate pen and ink sketches of the routes and the landscape. Alfred Wainwright was born in 1907, fell in love with the Lake District and moved to Kendal in 1941. The guides describe the fell walks as they were in the 1950s and 1960s; the footpaths, cairns and other waymarks may not all be the same now and you do need to take an up-to-date map with you but, as the BBC series ‘Wainwright Walks’ have shown, the routes are very much as Wainwright knew them.

Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel

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In the first chapter of Hilary Mantel’s memoir she writes, ”I hardly know how to write about myself. Any style you pick seems to unpick itself before a paragraph is done.”  She then advises herself to trust the reader, to stop spoon-feeding and patronising and write in ‘the most direct and vigorous way that you can.’ She worries that her writing isn’t clear, or that it is ‘deceptively clear’. It comes across to me as being clear, honest and very moving. She’s not looking for sympathy but has written this memoir to take charge of her memories, her childhood and childlessness, feeling that it is necessary to write herself into being.

When I read Beyond Black a couple of years ago I was struck by the biographical information at the end of the book – that as a child she believed their house was haunted and that she was often very frightened. She expands on this in her memoir. From the age of 4 she believed that she had done something wrong and she was ‘beyond remedy and beyond redemption’. She thought it was because of her that her parents were not happy and that without her they would have had a chance in life. It didn’t get any better as her father left home and she was left to live with two younger brothers and their mother and her mother’s lover. Home was a place where secrets were kept and opinions were not voiced. Her experience of ghosts at the age of 7 was horrifying she felt as though something came inside her, ‘some formless, borderless evil’.

She wasn’t happy at school; and by the age of twelve she no longer believed in God and as she was at a convent this must have been difficult. She went to university to study law, and was married at 20, struggling to combat the prejudice against women prevailing in the early 1970s:

‘It was assumed that marriage was the beginning of a woman’s affective life, and the end of the mental one. It was assumed that she neither could nor would exercise choice over whether to breed; poor silly creature, no sooner would her degree certificate be in her hand before she’d cast all that book-learning to the winds, and start swelling and simpering and knitting bootees. When you went for an interview, you would be asked, if you were not wearing a wedding ring, whether you were engaged; if you were engaged or married, you would be asked when you intended to’start your family’.

Oh yes, I remember that too!

Life got worse for Hilary as her health deteriorated and the doctors thinking depression was the cause prescribed anti-depressants, which in turn damaged her further. From being underweight she went from a size 10 up to size 20 and developed akathisia as a side effect of the drugs she was given. This condition looks and feels like madness and was the worst thing she had ever experienced, apart that is from the horror she had felt as a child of 7. As a result of the misdiagnosis of her condition (eventually it was diagnosed as endometriosis) she was unable to have children. She sees the children she never had as ghosts within her life; ghost children who never age, who never leave home. Ghosts in her definition are also

the tags and rags of everyday life, information you acquire that you don’t know what to do with, knowledge that you can’t process; they’re cards thrown out of your card index, blots on the page.  It’s just the little dead, I say to myself, kicking up a fuss, demanding attention by the infantile methods that are the only ones available to them.

I found it a remarkable memoir.

Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

Review copy courtesy of the publishers Hodder and Stoughton. Paperback, 2008.

Garden Spells has a touch of magic to it and it’s not just the sparkly glitter frosting on the book’s cover. It’s a modern fairy tale/myth that captured my imagination right from the start. Maybe it’s because there is an enchanted garden, in flower all year round, with a magic apple tree at its centre. Maybe it’s because it has a warm, cosy ‘once upon a time’ feel and I needed something completely different from other books I’ve read recently. Whatever it was this book, together with Hilary Mantel’s Giving Up the Ghost (post on this book to follow), helped pull me out of the reading rut I’d experienced after the high point of reading C J Sansom’s Revelation.

The Waverleys, considered by their neighbours as just a little bit weird, have lived in Bascom, North Carolina for generations. Ever since Sydney Waverley left home ten years previously Claire, her older sister has continued to live in the house, tend the garden and run a catering business using plants she has grown. She is kept busy, as

all the locals knew that dishes made from the flowers that grew around the apple tree in the Waverley garden could affect the eater in curious ways. The biscuits with lilac jelly, the lavender tree cookies, and the tea cakes made with nasturtium mayonnaise the Ladies Aid ordered for their meetings once a month gave them the ability to keep secrets. The fried dandelion buds over marigold-petal rice, stuffed pumpkin blossoms and rose-hip soup ensured that your company would only notice the beauty of your home and never the flaws. Anise hyssop honey butter on toast, angelica candy, and cupcakes with crystallized pansies made children thoughtful. Honeysuckle wine served on the fourth of July gave you the ability to see in the dark. The nutty flavour of the dip made from hyacinth bulbs made you feel moody and think of the past, and the salads made with chicory and mint had you believing something good was about to happen, whether it was true or not.

Claire is not the only Waverley with magic powers; her cousin, Evanelle gives people strange gifts, such as a rhinestone brooch, a ball of yarn, little packets of ketchup and tweezers, which they later find are just what they need. These magic powers have made Claire independent and her only contact with people is through her catering business. In addition, she is wary of becoming attached to anyone fearing that if she lets herself become emotionally involved she will get hurt and that they will leave her (her mother abandoned her and Sydney, leaving their grandmother to bring them up).

Even though it is essentially a comforting read there are serious issues within the story. Sydney returns to Bascom, with her five-year old daughter, Bay, leaving her partner, David in the dead of night, after suffering years of physical abuse. She has tried to leave him before, but he has always found her and forced her back. This time she is determined that he won’t find her. Their arrival throws Claire off balance, even though she welcomes them into the house. Sydney’s reappearance in Bascom sets ripples running through the neighbourhood, causing changes not just for Claire. Old friends are both pleased and horrified at her return.

There is also a newcomer to Bascom, Tyler Hughes, who has moved in to the house next door to Claire. He has seen her around and is immediately attracted to her, much to her discomfort and Claire’s comfortable life is thrown into disarray. The apple tree in the Waverley garden is a very temperamental tree and has a habit of throwing its apples at people from its branches. Eating one of these apples affects people in strange ways. So when Tyler eats an apple that the tree has tossed over into his yard he has the most amazing dream.

Garden Spells is a book to enjoy and read quickly, its romantic elements verging on chick-lit, reminding me of Sophie Kinsella’s books (which I also enjoy). I was also struck by the comparison (but not a strict parallel) with the Garden of Eden and the tree of knowledge of good and evil at its centre, with the serpent persuading Eve to tempt Adam to eat the apple.

The author’s website has more information plus recipes of dishes using edible flowers mentioned in the book. This book qualifies as my first read in the Once Upon a Time II Challenge.

A Good Hanging by Ian Rankin

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Happy Birthday to Ian Rankin. My choice for the Celebrate the Author Challenge in April is A Good Hanging by Ian Rankin whose birthday is today 28 April.

A Good Hanging is a collection of twelve short stories featuring Inspector John Rebus, set in Edinburgh. All the stories are concise and I think convey the character of Rebus; he is cynical and analytical, a lone worker, who drinks and smokes too much. None of the stories pose complex mysteries and are seemingly easily solved by Rebus. I did enjoy the book but it is less satisfying for me than a full length novel. I have several other Rebus books in line including Black and Blue, which promises to be ‘a first-rate and gripping novel’, according to the Sunday Times.

First published in 1992 it’s one of the earlier Rebus books. The first story in this book is called ‘Playback‘. Rebus is impressed by being able to phone your home phone ‘from the car-phone’ to get ‘the answering machine to play back any messages.’ You can tell from this that it’s rather different from current crime detection fiction. As the title indicates, solving the crime in this story hinges on phone messages. The police receive a phone call from the murderer confessing his crime. He panics and tries to flee, only to be caught as the police arrive on the scene of the crime. He then insists on his innocence. Rebus disentangles the puzzle even though this seems to be ‘the perfect murder’.

In ‘The Dean Curse‘ Rebus is reading Hammett’s novel ‘The Dain Curse‘, which he tosses up into the air disgusted by how far-fetched and melodramatic that book was, piling on coincidence after coincidence ‘corpse following corpse like something off an assembly line’, when he receives a phone call with news of a car bomb that had just gone off in Edinburgh. He cannot believe it has happened. It seems as though this is the work of terrorists, the bomb having all the hallmarks of an IRA bomb and it had gone off seconds after the car had been stolen. It seems to Rebus as if the coincidences in the Hammett story have nothing on his case. But there is more to this case than at first meets the eye.

My favourite in the book is the title story ‘Good Hanging‘ in which Rebus solves the crime through his knowledge of ‘Twelfth Night‘. It’s set during the Edinburgh Festival period, when the city is full of young people, theatrical people. A Fringe group, comprising a number of students are staging a play called ‘Scenes from a Hanging’ promising a live hanging on stage. The story starts with the discovery of a young man found hanging from the stage scaffold in Parliament Square. It appears to be suicide according to the note in his pocket ‘Pity it wasn’t Twelfth Night’. Rebus investigates and finds that all is not as it seems.

The other stories involve the discovery of a skeleton buried beneath a concrete floor, a Peeping Tom, and blackmailers. One story I particularly like is ‘Being Frank‘ about a tramp who overhears two men talking about a war that’s coming. He is well known for making up stories and informing the police of numerous conspiracies so they just laugh at him. But fearing the end of the world Frank confides in Rebus who eventually begins to suspect that this time Frank is not lying.

I see on Ian Rankin’s website that he has written the final Rebus book Exit Music. Another book to add to the book mountain.

The Sunday Salon – Travels in the Scriptorium

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It’s been a good reading week here. I started and finished Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel and Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen. It was with some relief that I finally finished Eat, Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. Three very different books and I’m going to write separate posts on each of them. I’m behind with writing about these books – I just can’t keep up with my own reading. After doing the Page 123 meme on Friday I decided that I would read Travels in the Scriptorium next and I stuck to that even though Remember Me by Melvyn Bragg arrived on Saturday morning.

Yesterday was a beautiful day here and I sat for a while in the garden reading Paul Auster’s Travels In the Scriptorium. It’s a very short novel (130 pages) and I read it in one sitting. I found it to be an odd little tale about Mr Blank, an old man who wakes to find that he is alone in a room. He doesn’t know where he is, who he is or why he is in the almost empty room. At first it seems as this is the story about old age and memory, but as I read on I realised it is more than this. It’s metafiction, with a story, or rather stories within the story, posing a puzzle. Mr Blank spends his day looking at photos on the desk, reading an unfinished manuscript, thinking about his past and talking to the various people who visit him as the day progresses.

Travels in the Scriptorium is a slender book, written in beautiful but simple prose. I wasn’t sure what to expect, after all a scriptorium is a writing room in a monastery but having read it I think the clue to its contents is in the title.

If you’ve never read any of Auster’s books I suppose you could still enjoy this book, but you wouldn’t realise what it was all about and I wouldn’t recommend that you start with this book. If you like a novel to have everything explained and a complete ending with all the strands of the story neatly tied up then don’t read it either. I’ve only read two of Auster’s books – Oracle Night and The Book of Illusions and when I read that Anna, one of the characters in Travels had been married to David Zimmer light began to dawn – Zimmer is the main character in The Book of Illusions, but he wasn’t married to Anna. The title Travels in the Scriptorium is also the title of a film in The Book of Illusions, so obviously, I thought, these are not accidents  – Auster is doing this on purpose. It turns out that all the characters in Travels are characters from his other books.

The manuscript story is unfinished and Mr Blank is disgusted. He is told that a man named Trause is the author. Here is a hint I thought to the puzzle, as Trause is an anagram of Auster as well as being a character in Oracle Night, a character who is also an author. So, this book is about writing, about words and characters and the nature of authorship. As the narrator says of the characters

‘the paradox is that we, the figments of another mind, will outlive the mind that made us, for once we are thrown into the world, we continue to exist for ever, and our stories go on being told, even after we are dead.’

I think that it is not just the characters that continue to exist but also the authors – we can still read their words and explore what was in their minds through their books. Our interpretation may not be what the author intended (I read somewhere that the reader writes the text), but still I am fascinated by reading what (for example) Jane Austen wrote two centuries ago and what Paul Auster wrote two years ago.

I’m still thinking about Travels. If you’re a fan of Auster then you’ll read it. But is it a great book, a good book or just a book? Just for the fact that it entertained me and made me think I’m going to say it is a good book – but not a great book. I may re-read it sometime when I’ve read a few more of his novels.

This morning I’ve read some more of Les Miserables and have now finished Part One. It’s difficult to know what to write about this novel – it’s long, (nearly ten time longer than Travels), long-winded but compelling me to read on. I remember seeing a TV version some years ago and vaguely know the story. I remember in particular watching with horror after Fantine, desperate for money had sold her two front teeth. My reaction was just the same on reading about it.There’s a whole host of characters and the novel covers a broad sweep of French history in the 19th century. It’s the story of Jean Valjean the ex-prisoner who transformed himself into the respected Mayor Monsieur Madeleine and then is revealed as Valjean by the end of Part One. Part Two opens at Waterloo. I’m tempted to see the musical at the Queen’s Theatre this summer if I can get tickets.

That’s all for now as later we’re meeting some of the family and going on a bluebell walk. Heavy rain is forecast for today but so far there’s no sign of it – I hope it keeps fine for this afternoon.