Literary Blog Hop: Once Upon a Time

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Literary Blog Hop

The question posted by The Blue Bookcase at the literary blog hop is:

How did you find your way to reading literary fiction and nonfiction?

Reading is like talking – I don’t remember a time when I couldn’t talk or read. My parents loved books, bought me books and took me to the library way before I went to school. So I have always had books and have always borrowed books from the library.

My early reading was all given to me by my parents and relatives – books such as the Heidi books, What Katy Did,  Peter Pan, books by Beatrix Potter, Mabel Lucy Atwell and Enid Blyton and so on. I loved books of fairy tales, myths and legends, the tales of Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm and of Brer Rabbit. Later I read books by Malcolm Salville, Louisa May Alcott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rosemary Sutcliffe and Lewis Carroll,  books that I owned or borrowed from the library.

I remember seeing a TV dramatisation of Jane Eyre and being terrified of the mad woman in the attic and the scene showing her death in the fire has remained in my mind ever since (I must have been about 12 years old as we didn’t have a TV before then). I don’t think that led me to the Charlotte Bronte’s book but a TV serialisation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice certainly did – I loved it and was thrilled when my mother gave me her copy to read. It has been a favourite ever since and I still have her copy. I always loved getting books for birthday and Christmas presents and my aunties all knew that was what I liked best. They bought me books such as Wuthering Heights and Great Expectations.

School also introduced me to more books, such as Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham, the Mayor of Casterbridge and other books by by Thomas Hardy, more books by Charles Dickens, more Jane Austen novels, Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell, the plays of Shakespeare and Christopher Fry, Moliere, Hugo and books by Antoine De Saint-Exupery and Alexandre Dumas (in French lessons).

As for non-fiction, apart from a set of 4 books called The World of the Children, which is full of fascinating facts about nature, science, art, books, music and many more things such as making things out of paper, card tricks, the night sky, and cities and countries around the world. I don’t remember reading much non- fiction at all until I was older and read books on nature, history, biographies and so on. Much later doing Open University courses introduced me to books on philosophy, religion, and art history.

So the sources that have influenced my reading include my parents, family, libraries, school, college and university, television and radio, and friends – including bloggers.

Resolutions – Booking Through Thursday

Published on by Margaret15 Comments

Today’s Booking Through Thursday’s question is:

Any New Year’s reading resolutions?

  • Read what I like when I like.
  • Enjoy browsing in bookshops and online book sites.
  • Take part in the Reading Challenges I’ve joined, but not to worry if I don’t read many books for them, or if I don’t finish them.
  • Read books from my TBR shelves.
  • Restrict how many books I borrow from the library, because I often take books back unread.
  • Re-read some old favourites.

That looks like enough! :)

Louisa May Alcott: Little Women

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I had forgotten that Little Women is such a moral tale. In fact, I doubt that when I first read it years ago I ever thought of it as a moral tale at all, but the emphasis on the characters of the four sisters  with their individual flaws and efforts to overcome them was the dominant theme that struck me whilst I was reading the book this time.

I loved Little Women when I first read it and re-read it several times. It remains in my memory as one of my favourite childhood books. But reading again now it seems dated (although I did like reading what the girls wore – gloves were essential wear for a party!) and rather pious. I’m also reading Eden’s Outcasts: the story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father, so I flipped forward in that book to see what John Matteson had to say about Little Women and Louisa May’s thoughts on writing her book. She wrote Little Women after Thomas Niles, a partner in the publishing firm of Roberts Brothers had asked her to write a book for girls. She wasn’t too keen but agreed to do so even though she said that:

I don’t enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters. (Quoted in Eden’s Outcasts page 332.)

She consulted her mother and sisters and with their consent wrote the book based around the Alcott girls’ lives.

Little Women is about the four March sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, and their mother – ‘Marmee’. Their father is absent for most of the book, working as a chaplain in the army,during the American Civil War.  The first part of the book is a series of scenes of the March family life illustrating each sister’s burden of character flaws, and their attempts to overcome them. Meg is vain and materialistic, Jo has a temper and flies into great rages, Beth is painfully timid and shy and Amy is selfish. This section of the book is loosely based on Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, as some of the chapter headings indicate – for example, Playing Pilgrims, Amy’s Valley of Humiliation, Jo Meets Apollyon and Meg Goes to Vanity Fair.

The second part of the book centres on Jo (based on Louisa herself), her writing and her reluctance to grow up. Again this hadn’t struck me when I read as a child (I can’t remember how old I was); I’d thought of her as a tomboy character. She says to Meg, who at 17 is a year older and falling in love:

Don’t try to make me grow up before my time, Meg: it’s hard enough to have you change all of a sudden; let me be a little girl as long as I can. (page 162 of my copy of Little Women)

Laurie, who lives next door with his grandfather becomes a friend to all the girls, but especially to Jo. The family go through a number of dramas, both small and large, culminating in Beth catching scarlet fever after visiting the poor Hummel family, whilst Marmee is in Washington staying with Mr March who was very ill in hospital. Mr March is mostly absent from the book, and even when he does come home there is very little mention of him; he is a man of few words. He discovers that his ‘little women’ have changed for the better whilst he has been away, despite it being a rough road for his little pilgrims to travel:

“But you have got on very bravely; and I think the burdens are in a fair way to tumble off very soon,” said Mr March, looking with fatherly satisfaction at the four young faces gathered him. (page 232)

Little Women ends with Meg’s engagement to John Brooks, Laurie’s tutor. The story continues in Good Wives,which I have as a separate book, but it was originally published as volume 2 of Little Women. These two books were followed by Little Men, the story of Jo and her husband Professor Bhaer at Plumfield school, and Jo’s Boys, continuing the lives of the family and the boys ten years later.

Even though it is a sentimental tale, which it wasn’t in my memory, I did enjoy the experience of re-reading Little Women – some of the magic was still there. And I think I’ll re-read the other books soon as well.

Welcome to My Life

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I love the start of the New Year – new beginnings and new books to read.  So I like this set of questions thinking about the year  to come in books from Margot at Confessions of a Mystery Novelist.  You can put as many restrictions (e.g. only books you read in 2010, or only books on your 2011 TBR list, etc.) or as few restrictions on your answers as you want. Following Margot’s example, I’ve used crime fiction titles to complete the answers to the questions and except for the first book (which I’ve read) these are all books on my TBR list:

I spent my New Year’s Eve: Among the Mad ‘“ (Jacqueline Winspear)

I’ve made a resolution to: give up Playing with Fire (Peter Robinson)

I plan to quit my habit of: Road Rage (Ruth Rendell)

I hope I’ll get to visit: The Black Tower (P D James)

One project I didn’t finish last year but want to finish this year is: The Death Maze (Ariana Franklin)

I want to learn: The Interpretation of Murder (Jedd Rubenfeld)

I’m not looking forward to: Evil Under the Sun (Agatha Christie)

My biggest dream for the year is: A Cure for All Diseases (Reginald Hill)

I hope I don’t end up: The Dumb Witness (Agatha Christie)

I’ll probably spend a lot of time: Telling Tales (Ann Cleeves)

The Books of 2010

Published on by Margaret16 Comments

I read 100 books last year – most are fiction (52 were crime fiction), plus 12 non-fiction (mostly biography/autobiography). I read books by 45 new-to-me authors and 25 books off  my tbr lists.

Each month I decided which was the best book of the month. Some months I couldn’t pick just one book!:

  • January – Black and Blue by Ian Rankin – I read this in January, very quickly, eager to know what happened next and intended to re-read it slowly – must do that sometime!
  • February – The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey. It was first published in 1948 and it’s set in a post Second World War England reflecting the social attitudes of its time. It’s based on a real case from the 18th century of a girl who went missing and later claimed she had been kidnapped.
  • March – A Fatal Inversion by Barbara Vine. I thought it a clever book, with clues dropped casually, so that I had to read it carefully. The plot covers a number of issues ‘“ family relationships, friendship, loyalty, race and class discrimination, the consequences of our actions and above all the nature of evil and guilt.
  • also in March – Raven Black by Ann Cleeves. Another murder mystery, this one is set in Shetland. Family ties, heredity and personal relationships are important themes running through the narrative.  There is also a strong sense of location and terrific atmosphere – the landscape, the sea, the weather, and the circling ravens.
  • April – Take My Breath Away by Martin Edwards. This is a legal mystery, featuring Nic Gabriel, a lawyer turned writer, who is investigating the death of his friend Dylan Rees. Like all good murder mysteries this is a complex book about good and evil, about power and manipulation, about secrets, lies and deception.
  • May Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel – the story of Thomas Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith, and his political rise, set against the background of Henry VIII’s England and his struggle with the Pope over his desire to marry Anne Boleyn.
  • June – Resurrection Men by Ian Rankin. Not about body-snatchers (as I wondered it might be), but about the cops who need re-training, including D I Rebus. To help them become team players they’ve been given on old, unsolved case to work on. But Rebus was involved in the case at the time and begins to get paranoid about why he is on the course. It’s a tough, gritty story and as with other Rebus books, there’s more than one investigation on the go.
  • July – The Comfort of Saturdays by Alexander McCall Smith. What I find so fascinating about the Isabel Dalhousie series is that whilst not a lot actually happens, a lot goes on in Isabel’s head. Isabel is an ‘˜intermeddler’. She can’t resist appeals for help and tries to do the right thing. A variety of themes run through this book – justice, jealousy, guilt, and the nature of freedom.
  • August – The Serpent Pool by Martin Edwards – a  terrific book. It has everything, a great sense of location, believable, complex characters, a crime to solve, full of tension and well paced to keep you wanting to know more, and so atmospheric.
  • also in August – Thirteen Hours by Deon Meyer. It’s tense, taut and utterly enthralling. Moving at a fast pace the book follows the events during the thirteen hours from 05:36 when Rachel, a young American girl is running for her life up the steep slope of Lion’s Head in Capetown.
  • September – The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie – a series of murders advertised in advance by letters to Poirot, and signed by an anonymous ‘˜ABC’. One of the best of her books!
  • October – Quite Ugly One Morning by Christopher Brookmyre. Another murder mystery. Investigative journalist, Jack Parlabane gets involved. It soon becomes apparent to the reader who did the murder and it is the motive behind it that needs to be ferreted out.
  • November – Two Moons by Jennifer Johnston – a warm and intimate novel, portraying the problems of falling in love at all ages and the difficulties of  growing old and coming to terms with the disappointments of the past with great sensitivity.
  • December –An Autobiography by Agatha Christie. I’ve written several posts about this excellent book and have yet to write a summing up post. It’s not just an account of her life but is full of her thoughts and questions about the nature of life and of memory.

Most of these ‘best books’ are crime fiction, but I think that of all them Wolf Hall has to be my ‘Book of the Year’. It is an exceptional book. What I found most enjoyable was the way it transported me back to that time, with Mantel’s descriptions of the pageantry, the people, the places and the beliefs and attitudes of the protagonists.