Around the House and Garden

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For this round of ABC Wednesday I’m focussing on various objects in our house and garden, beginning with

A for Asiatic Pheasants and also B for Blue and White Porcelain.

This is an oval meal dish in the Asiatic Pheasants design, which was popular during Queen Victoria’s reign. It’s an English design based on an oriental original and is a much lighter blue than the Willow pattern.

It’s large and very heavy, and I’m rather fond of it. It has a cartouche on the back, which identifies the manufacturer as James Beech 1877 – 1889 in Tunstall Staffordshire.

Reading Notes

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I seem to have a few books on the go at the moment, all at different stages.

I’ve recently finished The Help by Kathryn Stockett, which I think is absolutely fantastic and I need to write a separate post about it soon.

Before that I read Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, which I think is basically a book of two halves – more on that in another post, because I’ve borrowed The Sensation Novel from The Woman in White to the Moonstone by Lyn Pickett and I want to read that before finalising my thoughts on book itself. I found this book whilst looking for a biography of Collins and wanting to know more about him and his work. I hadn’t known about the sub-genre ‘sensation novel’ before, but apparently the 1860s was a decade of sensational events and sensational writing. So I’ve now started to read the Pykett book.

The next book I read is The Burry Man’s Day by Catriona McPherson, the second in the Dandy Gilver series. It’s crime fiction set in the 1920s in South Queensferry, full of local scenery. More about that too in another post to follow.

I then came to a halt, finding it difficult to find the next ‘right’ book to read. I’m part way into The Safe House by Nicci French, a psychological thriller about Samantha Laschen, a doctor specializing in post-traumatic stress disorder, asked to look after Fiona Mackenzie, a girl whose parents have been savagely murdered. I’m liking it, but I can’t read it in bed as the font is so small it hurts my eyes. I need to read it in daylight, so I had to find something else to read at night.

I’d started The Last Enchantment by Mary Stewart, the third book in the Merlin series. I read the first two books years ago. They stand well on their own and I know the story of Arthur and Merlin quite well, so I was keen to read this book. Again it’s small font, so I’m limited to reading it during the day, or at least, not in bed. And somehow, it has not captured my imagination enough to keep reading it. I’m not abandoning it, just leaving it to one side for a while.

I’ve also dipped into to several others as well. It’s really annoying that when I’ve finished reading books that have had me spellbound, that I have to go through a time of indecision and am unable to settle properly with another book or that the font size defeats me. The answer I realised today is to read on my Kindle! I can increase the font if I need to and have a discreet light to read without disturbing my husband.

Earlier today I started The Bones of Avalon by Phil Rickman on Kindle and I’m happily engrossed in the world of Dr John Dee in 1560 and the missing bones of King Arthur. He’s on his way to Glastonbury accompanied by Robert Dudley (possibly the Queen’s secret lover – does he push his wife Amy to her death, but that’s another story). Just for the next 13 hours or so you can download it from Amazon for 99p – a bargain.

Learning to Draw

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I sketched these trees a couple of weeks ago – not copied from life, but from a painting magazine. I’ll try sketching some of the trees in our garden soon. They are similar to these but without leaves right now – harder to draw!

Saturday Snapshot

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Here are a couple of photos taken in December 2010 when we were snowbound. I came into the kitchen early one morning and there on the decking outside was this little mouse, eating the bread we had put out for the birds:

There were actually three mice climbing all over and round the back of the loaf nibbling it. I wasn’t the only one interested. Lucy came to the patio door and wanted to go out for a closer look.

See more Saturday Snapshots on Alyce’s blog, At Home With Books.

 

Tony and Susan by Austin Wright

Published on by Margaret

I read Tony and Susan by Austin Wright last November and parts of it are still vivid in my mind, but a lot of it has faded away. I’d put a few markers in the book, which act as pointers to sections I found notable, and which have helped to refresh my memory.

It’s a novel within a novel. Susan receives a manuscript novel, Nocturnal Animals, from her ex-husband. This is the outer story, which is nowhere nearly as interesting or absorbing as the inner story, her husband’s fictional tale of a crime, an ambush on the highway that leads to murder. Each time Susan stopped reading I just wanted to get back to the story of Tony Hastings and his family. It made me nervous as I was reading it and even more nervous went we drove anywhere, because Tony, his wife Laura and their daughter Helen were travelling on an Interstate going to their summer cottage in Maine when two cars in front of them blocked the lanes and forced them off the road. This does happen in real life, and the description is tense and vivid enough to make me believe it. It is terrifying.

The rest of the inner story is about Tony trying to get justice/revenge for what subsequently happened. There are questions on the back cover about why Susan’s husband sent her the manuscript, but the book doesn’t resolve any of these questions, which was disappointing. But I found it compelling reading and strangely enjoyable, if a little drawn out.  It was strange because that is Susan’s reaction as she reads about Tony:

This book has her in its grip, she can say that truly. The long, slow plunge into the evil night and Tony trying to brace himself by being civilised. The notion that being civilised conceals a great weakness.

…

She puts the manuscript back in the box, and even that seems like violence, like putting coffins into the ground: images from the book moving out into the house. Fear and regret. (page 110)

This is what this book is about – fear and regret – and also revenge. And it’s also about writing:

Once she asked him why he wanted to write. Not why he wanted to be a writer but why he wanted to write. His answers differed from day to day. It’s food and drink, he said. You write because everything dies, to save what dies. You write because the world is an inarticulate mess, which you can’t see until you map it in words. Your eyes are dim and you write to put your glasses on. No, you write because you read, to remake for your own use the stories in your life. You write because your mind is a babble, you dig a track in the babble to find your way around it. No, you write because you are shelled up inside your skull. You send out probes to other people in their skulls and you wait for a reply. (page 134)

There are more passages I could quote, but I think this one says a lot – and is long enough, anyway!

Tony and Susan was originally published in 1993. The author, Austin Wright was a novelist and Professor of English at the University of Cinncinnati. He died in 2003 at the age of 80.

  • Paperback: 352 pages
  • Publisher: Atlantic Books (1 July 2011)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1848870221
  • ISBN-13: 978-1848870222
  • Source: I bought it
  • My rating 3.5/5

‘New to Me’ Books

Published on by Margaret13 Comments

I had a good time at Barter Books in Alnwick yesterday. Bartering books is a good way to recycle the books I’m not going to read again. I took in a box of books and came home with these. As I had built up a nice little sum over my last few visits, I was able to indulge myself!

Crime fiction

As you can see I was looking out for crime fiction and found three Agatha Christie’s I haven’t read:

  1. The Labours of Hercules – Poirot undertakes twelve cases before he retires to grow superior vegetable marrows.
  2. N or M? – a Tommy and Tuppence wartime mission.
  3. One, Two, Buckle My Shoe – Poirot investigates the death of his dentist.

I also got another Wycliffe book by W J Burley – Wycliffe and the Cycle of Death, in which he investigates the murder of a bookseller.

And another Perry Mason book by Erle Stanley Gardner- The Case of the Howling Dog – according to superstition a howling dog means a death in the neighbourhood, then both the dog and his owner are killed.

I’ve read one of H R F Keating’s books before but none of his Inspector Ghote’s books – this one caught my eye, Inspector Ghote’s Good Crusade, in which a millionaire philanthropist, the founder of a Bombay home for vagrants is murdered.

I’ve never read any of Sue Grafton’s books but have read reviews of a few, so I was pleased to find the first of her A-Z series – A is for Alibi. Kinsey Malone, Private Investigator has a cold case, hired by Nikki Fife, convicted of the murder of her husband eight years earlier, to find the real killer. If I like these there are plenty more in the series to look out for – and yesterday Barter Books had a shelf-full.

As I still had credit left I splashed out and bought two rather more expensive hardback books on crime fiction, which are at the bottom of the pile in my photo:

  1. The Great Detectives by Julian Symons, fictional ‘biographies’ of seven detectives, including Sherlock Holmes in retirement! I’ve been watching the fantastic TV series Sherlock, so my interest is very high right now.
  2. Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection by Chris Steinbrunner and Otto Penzler. I’m really excited by this book, even though it’s over 30 years since it was published. It’s a big, heavy volume which I’m sure is an excellent reference book, containing biographies and bibliographies of crime writers and articles on films, plays radio and TV series and so on. I’ll be dipping into it regularly.

And because I do like to read other books than crime fiction I also got these two books:

How to draw anything

I’ve been attempting to draw and paint and this book, How to Draw Anything by Angela Gair makes it look easy, which of course it isn’t. But I’m hoping it will help me improve.

A Still Life Byatt

I looked briefly at the many bookcases of general fiction and was drawn (pun not intended!) to Still Life by A S Byatt. Maybe my mind was still on art but this book certainly caught my eye. It’s a novel set in the 1950s. The cover is Still Life with Coffeepot by Vincent Van Gogh.