Song for a Sunday

I feel I should do an April's Fool... but I can't think of anything.  So let's have a Song for a Sunday as normal, eh?

Sometimes you can't do better than a bit of Barbra and Judy, can you?

Stuck-in-a-Book's Weekend Miscellany

Happy weekend, one and all!  I think mine will be spent justifying my thesis in a thousand words (fun) and - rather better - hopefully the first trip of 2012 to Jane's Teas.  But I shall not leave you neglected, oh no - here is a miscellany to enjoy.

1.) The book - the first I heard of Marilynne Robinson's new collection of essays was through a post at Mary's Library.  Mary found When I Was a Child I Read Books a little uneven, and I've got to admit, the excitement I felt at the title (a book about books, yay!) was dampened rather when I discovered what it was actually about (philosophy and theology and stuff... oh.)  I have no problem with those topics, but they don't compare to my love of books-about-books.  Still, I'm intrigued to read it, since Robinson is such a brilliant writer - and this afternoon got a ticket to see Robinson talk about the book at Blackwell's on 15th May.  (Anyone around in Oxford then?)

2.) The link - is a week-long course my supervisor Sally Bayley is helping to run in Oxford: Sylvia Plath Interdisciplinary Masterclass.  All the info is here, for those with the interest, finances, and proximity to Oxford!  I would just add, Sally is lovely, passionate about literature, and able to engage people in discussions about it in a dynamic and friendly way.  That sounds like a testimonial, doesn't it?!  But it's true :)

3.) The other link - is the Explore Learning National Young Writers' Award, a competition for budding writers aged 5-14.  A story on 'Old and New', max. 500 words, can be submitted after April 11th by email, post, or at your local Explore Learning Centre.  Andrew Cope will be the judge - apparently he writes the Spy Dog series.  Being out of the loop on children's books, I don't know it - but I bet lots of you have read it aloud to your kids!  All the info you need is here - I'd love to know if your children/grandchildren/nephews/nieces etc. are entering.

4.) The blog post - is Daniel's at Hibernian Homme, mostly for the beautiful picture, and the question at the end - but also because if you haven't discovered Daniel's quirky, joyous, bohemian corner of the blogosphere yet, then you need to do some exploring...

P.D. James

This morning I went to the Oxford Literary Festival - only the third event I've attended in eight years in Oxford - and saw P.D. James talking with Peter Kemp (of the Sunday Times) about Death Comes to Pemberley.  As I've grown to expect from James's appearances, she was a witty and wise speaker - even without having read Death Comes to Pemberley (or, indeed, any of her books) I loved it.

My highlight from the event was the childhood story which revealed James's early propensity for crime literature: when her mother read her Humpty Dumpty, young Phyllis's question was "Did he fall, or was he pushed?"

I didn't join my friends in buying a copy and getting it signed, because of my Lenten fast, but I was tempted... has anyone read it?  I've heard mixed reviews, but would like to hear the yay or nay from you lot... those of you who are you still talking to me after my post on The Rector's Daughter!

A Case of the Whatifs: Pre-Publication Jitters

By Melanie Thorne

I’m going to tell you a secret. I’m scared.

It feels like there is some unspoken rule that I’m not supposed to admit this. As a soon-to-be-published author I should be over the moon with happiness. My book is being published! That’s amazing! Everyone keeps telling me how excited I must be, and I am, of course. It is unbelievably amazing to have sold this thing I started years ago, this thing that went from thoughts to words on a screen to a physical object in people’s hands. But selling a book is not the end of fear or worry or doubt that I think many writers, myself included, imagine it will be. It’s an accomplishment, a huge, wonderful, happily satisfying one for sure, but it’s not an eraser for insecurities. (Wouldn’t it be cool if that existed?)

Please don’t misunderstand my admission of fear to mean that I wish this wasn’t happening or that I don’t appreciate where I am. I’m thrilled—beyond thrilled—that this collection of my words, my story, will be an actual book in actual bookstores next to other real live books. I can’t wait to see what happens when she steps out into the world, how she’s treated, how far she travels, if people understand her. I also worry about what people will say about her behind her back, if she’ll make a good enough first impression, if readers will make promises they don’t keep and leave her alone on cold shelves.

You know that Shel Silverstein poem, “Whatif,” from A Light in the Attic? "Last night, while I lay thinking here,/Some Whatifs crawled inside my ear/And pranced and partied all night long/And sang their same old Whatif song.” I read it in first grade and was relieved to find it wasn’t just me who lay awake at night pondering both practical and ridiculous concerns. Some of the questions in the poem apply directly to my current book launch fears: “Whatif I start to cry? Whatif the fish don’t bite? Whatif nobody likes me?” Of course, my nighttime Whatifs have a million more hypotheticals with varying degrees of terrible-ness for me to mull over, and I bet yours do, too.

Hand Me Down is two weeks from publication. In two weeks this thing that I have slaved over, loved and hated (and loved and hated again), doubted, sacrificed for, and stressed about for years, this thing I invested time and energy and soul into, this thing that has so much of myself in its pages will be available for public consumption. I will be available for public consumption. Exposed. My life is going to change in ways I can’t even imagine, and along with being excited and hopeful, I’m also frightened.

I know some of you want to punch me in the face right now. Some writers out there who have not yet sold their books are thinking, Oh, boo-hoo, poor published author, and I get it. Two years ago I would have thought the same thing. When you’re in the throes of writing, your doubts and fears are about the project itself, about how it’s working, how the words fit together, how the story flows, and also about whether this project will ever make it out into the world the way you hope it will. The goal is to get published, and you’re convinced that if you can just reach that goal, everything will be okay. I am so thankful to have gotten to this point, and I would certainly not want to go back, but my fears and doubts didn’t suddenly disappear when I signed my contract, as much as I wished they would.

There are struggles at every level, but maybe that’s a good thing. Each hurdle is a chance to learn. Richard Bausch says, “Your doubt is your gift.” It’s what keeps us striving to improve our craft, tightening our language, studying the masters. When you think you have nothing left to learn—when you completely stop doubting your work—you stop getting better. Not that you shouldn’t be proud. You should. We should. I am. But as writers, we know how to persist. Our fears of inadequacy push us to work harder; the world’s skepticism strengthens our resolve, which is something I need to remember as I head into publication mode. My doubts will force me to study, to practice, to improve each step of the way. My fears will motivate me to prepare. I will come up with an answer for every single one of those nighttime Whatifs, and I’ll be as ready as I can possibly be when my book baby leaves the nest.

In two weeks my life is going to change in ways I can’t even imagine. Am I nervous? Yes. Can I handle it? Yes. And you never know, Whatif everything turns out better than I could dream?

The Rector's Daughter - F.M. Mayor

There are a few books which I expect to love, end up not loving, and then wonder why.  I lean back in my chair, eye the novel sternly, and ask myself (and it) what went wrong.  Was it timing?  Would a re-read make me fall in love?  Have I recently read something else which does the same sort of thing, but better?  That's a sure-fire way to leave me unimpressed.  Or is the book simply not as good as everyone tells me?

Well, recently a novel joined the ranks of Hotel du Lac, Gaudy Night, and A Passage to India.  All books which have their passionate fans, and (with me) a somewhat underwhelmed reader.  Well, The Rector's Daughter, I certainly didn't hate you.  I liked you rather more than the above trio of disappointments.  But nor did I love you in the way that I anticipated I would, based on reviews by Rachel and Harriet.  So I have stalled writing about this novel... I finished it right at the beginning of 2012, and yet... what to say?  How to write about it properly - justifying my lack of adoration for this much-adored title, but not only that: this was one of those novels which gave me no heads-up on how I would structure a review.  But... well, I'll try.

The Rector's Daughter (1924) concerns the life and ill-fated love of Mary Jocelyn, the rector's daughter in question.  She is motherless, and lives a life of obedient graciousness towards her father - who is deeply intellectual, but not able to show his love for his daughter.  I think Mary was supposed to be in the mold of silently passionate women, having to be content with their lot.  A bit like Jane Eyre, perhaps... but then I have always thought Jane Eyre a little overrated.  Here she is:

His daughter Mary was a decline.  Her uninteresting hair, dragged severely back, displayed a forehead lined too early.  Her complexion was a dullish hue, not much lighter than her hair.  She had her father’s beautiful eyes, and hid them with glasses.  She was dowdily dressed, but she had many companions in the neighbourhood, from labourers’ wives to the ladies of the big houses, to share her dowdiness.  It was not observed; she was as much a part of her village as its homely hawthorns.

Mary has one great chance at love, with Mr. Herbert - and I do not think it gives too much away (for it is no surprise) to relate that her chance comes to nothing, and she must live with the consequences of this unlucky, ineluctable failure.  Love is one of the major themes of the novel.  That's true of a lot of novels, but in The Rector's Daughter the theme is love-out-of-reach; the journey from innocence to experience, bypassing happiness.  What horrifies Mary - and what seems to horrify F.M. Mayor too - is any sort of irreverence towards love.

One winter day when Dora Redland had come to stay with Ella, she and Mary met for a walk.  Mary suddenly started the subject.  "I wish you would tell me something about love.  I should think no one ever reached my age and knew so little, except of love in books.  Father has never mentioned love, and Aunt Lottie treated it as if it ought not to exist.  There were you and Will, but I was so young for me age I never took it in."

"What a funny thing to ask!" said Dora.  "I don't think I know much about it either.  There was one of the curates at Southsea - I never imagined he cared at all for me; I had hardly ever spoken to him.  I think some one else had refused him.  That makes them susceptible, I believe, and also the time of year and wanting to marry."  There was a mild severity, perhaps cynicism, in this speech, which astonished Mary.

"But, Dora, don't you think there is a Love 'Which alters not with Time's brief hours and days, / But bears it out even to the edge of Doom'?"

"Take care, Mary dear, you stepped right into that puddle.  Wait a minute.  Let me wipe your coat.  I am not quite sure that I understand what you were saying."

Dora is also a spinster, but less angsty.  I think I would have rather enjoyed a novel from Dora's perspective...

It is usually easy to give reasons why a book didn't work for me.  Indeed, they are few more satisfying activities than laying into a poorly written novel... but The Rector's Daughter isn't poorly written.

Perhaps my ennui can be attributed to spinster novel fatigue?  I have read quite a few recently, and have to say that May Sinclair's Life and Death of Harriett Frean attempts a similar type of novel rather more (for me) successfully.  The public debate about unmarried women between the world wars (covered fascinatingly in a chapter of Nicola Beauman's A Very Great Profession, and less fascinatingly in Virginia Nicholson's Singled Out) was loud and often angry; the 1920s novels dealing with this issue were written at a time when the issue was contentious, as well as potentially tragic.  Maybe I've just read too many, now?

Perhaps I found The Rector's Daughter too earnest?  I have often noted that novels others love sometimes fail with me if they are very earnest.  It kills a narrative.  And certainly there appeared to be very little humour in Mayor's novel... at least in the first half.  I was surprised, in the second half, to come across moments which would be at home in Jane Austen or E.M. Delafield's lighter work.  This passage was brilliant - it's from Miss Davey, a character (looking back) whom I remember nothing else about:

"Who can that be coming down the road?  Why, it's the pretty little girl with the dark curls we saw yesterday when the Canon took me out a little walk - your dear father.  Oh no, it's not; now she comes nearer I see it's not the little girl with the dark curls.  My sight isn't quite as good as it was.  No, she has red hair and spectacles.  Dear me, what a plain little thing.  Did you say she would be calling for the milk, dear? Or is this the little one you say helps Cook?  Oh no, not that one, only ten; no, she would be rather young.  Yes, what the girls are coming to.  You say you don't find a difficulty.  Mrs. Barkham - my new lodgings; I told you about her, poor thing, she suffers so from neuralgia - she says the girls now - fancy her last girl wearing a pendant when she was waiting.  Just a very plain brooch, no one would say a word against, costing half-a-crown or two shillings.  I've given one myself to a servant many a time.  Oh, that dear little robin - Mary, you must look - or is it a thrush?  There, it's gone.  You've missed it.  Perhaps we could see it out of the other window.  Thank you, dear; if I could have your arm.  Oh, I didn't see the footstool.  No, thank you, I didn't hurt myself in the least; only that was my rheumatic elbow."

Had I simply missed this sort of thing at the beginning, or did Mayor alter the tone?  I'm not suggesting that all novels ought to be comic novels, but without a slightly ironic eye, or dark humour, or even a slight reflective smile, I am rather lost.  This came too late in The Rector's Daughter - or at least I missed it.  Hilary wrote in her review at Vulpes Libris that "There is no distancing irony or humour – its serious tone is relentless."  I didn't find it quite relentless, but otherwise I agree with this sentence (although Hilary, as you'll see at the bottom, was overall more positive about the novel.)  I admire good comic writers so much more than I admire good poignant writers - it is so much more difficult to be comic - but maybe that is simply horses for courses.

However, as I finish a lukewarm review of The Rector's Daughter, I am chastened by the memory of my initial response to Mollie Panter-Downes's One Fine Day.  Who knows, perhaps a re-read of The Rector's Daughter would give me an equally enthusiastic second impression?


Others who got Stuck into this Book:

"This is such a brilliant book, worthy of being a classic, really, in that it so perfectly encapsulates how limited unmarried women’s lives could be before the advent of feminism" - Rachel, Book Snob

"The novel is minutely observed; there is beautiful detail about each day and the East Anglian countryside, so that although time passes in the book very slowly, it is wonderfully described." - Verity, Verity's Virago Venture

"This is a novel about how hard it is to understand other people, and how many misunderstandings and even tragedies arise from it." - Harriet, Harriet Devine's Blog

"I wouldn’t have missed it, and I do recommend it. I can understand why this novel is regarded as a hidden gem."  - Hilary, Vulpes Libres

Read, mark, learn...

I sometimes think, regarding potential topics for SiaB, "oh, you've covered that Si, no need for another post."  But then I remember how different my readership is now from when I started (although there is some overlap, of course) and it is entirely possible (ahem) that you missed my post from 2nd June 2007.  I'll forgive you for that.  It did, I should warn you, include the phrase 'independent, non-contingent paratextual elements' - but fear not, I was speaking in jest, and the topic was... bookmarks.

I imagine there are few corners of the world where a discourse upon bookmarks would be welcome... but I do you the honour of supposing that blog-readers belong in one such corner.  Recently my book group discussed how we marked pages.  A disconcerting number of them were happy enough to turn down the corners of pages (VERY NO) and nobody at all used bookmarks - just the nearest train ticket or envelope, or nothing at all.

Perhaps it won't surprise you to learn that I take a different approach.

There is a little stash of postcards, particularly art postcards, by my bed.  When I start a new book, I have a rummage through these to find a postcard which works well with the book I'm reading.  That might be thematic or (more often) colour palette - basically anything which matches the spirit of the book.  It would feel quite discordant if I did otherwise...

So here are some examples... there are so many I could have chosen, but these were the first that came to mind.  I was reminded of the topic by the suitability of the postcard I used for A View of the Harbour:

I do have another boats postcard somewhere, but I think it's fallen victim to a common curse - when I finish the book, I reshelve it but forget to extricate the postcard.  Maybe I should check through all my maritime novels?  The Waves by Virginia Woolf, Beside the Sea by Veronique Olmi, Sisters By A River by Barbara Comyns...

Here are a few more, to whet your appetite.  For all those old red hardbacks I read (and there are plenty from the 1930s) this Lowry postcard comes in handy...

...when I was reading Maestro by Peter Goldsworthy, I was struck by how appropriate this postcard was. Although the novel's Eduard Keller is not, naturally, Andre Derain (as painted by Henri Matisse) I could easily picture Keller in this way.  Plus, the turquoise of the painting perfectly matched the turquoise of the spine - which was, after all, the reason I originally pulled Maestro off the shop shelf.

So, I've exposed the peculiar tangents of my bibliophilia... do *any* of you do the same?  Even a little?  Or am I in my own strange corner...?

And let me know if you'd like to see any more...

Your Views...

As promised, here are links to other reviews of A View of the Harbour - I'll keep adding reviews as they appear, so let me know if you've written one.  I haven't included reviews written on LibraryThing, but they can be read altogether here.

"I love Elizabeth Taylor's writing, which so vividly evokes the shabby seaside town and the recent impact of the war on its inhabitants." - Laura, Laura's Musings

"Elizabeth Taylor brilliantly illustrates that regardless of how banal or tedious our day-to-day lives may seem, a profusion of thoughts and emotions keeps us constantly engaged even when we are silent or solitary." - Darlene, Roses Over A Cottage Door

"I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, it is beautifully observed, and the setting and its community are touchingly portrayed." - Ali, HeavenAli

"As usual, I’m not sure that Taylor really likes any of her characters, and nor are they very likeable[...], but that doesn’t matter to me, as I enjoy her cool appraisal of them and their lives." - Liz, Libro Fulltime

"Quiet, pin sharp observation & layers of undercurrents that intrigue you every time you read it." - Alison, The TBR Pile

"The reader is allowed into the heads of these ordinary characters and that is where the magic begins." - Liz, efandrich

"Taylor doesn’t need to create intricate plots or dramatic scenes; she deals in the quiet understatement of every day life, managing to weave a tale of enormous profundity and interest whilst making it seem as if nothing has happened at all." - Rachel, Book Snob

"This is an extraordinarily  complex, subtle, and beautifully observed novel." - Harriet, Harriet Devine's Blog

"Wonderful prose carried me along, and so often I was touched by moments of pure insight and moments of vivid emotion." - Jane, Fleur Fisher Reads

Elizabeth Taylor - A View of the Harbour

If you've read any bookish blogs this year, you're probably aware that it's Elizabeth Taylor Centenary Year, and Laura has wonderfully organised a year-long celebration of this novelist.  I almost wrote 'underrated novelist', but she appears so often on lists of underrated novelists that I think she has to forfeit the title.  I can think of plenty who are equally deserving with less fanfare.  So let's just call her a very good novelist, and move onto March's book - A View of the Harbour (1947), published in the same year as One Fine Day, so (a) useless for A Century of Books (!) and (b) not the best novel published that year.  But definitely a darn good book.

I'm deliberately steering clear of everyone else's reviews until I have worked out my own thoughts, and thrown this open to discussion, but I shall post a list of all the reviews tomorrow - so if you've written about A View of the Harbour, either this month or earlier, than let me know!

A View of the Harbour is set in a seaside town, seen initially through the eyes of an amateur artist, Bertram, who is attempting to capture (indeed) a view of the harbour.  At the same time, of course, Elizabeth Taylor is capturing her own view of the harbour - and all the emotions which the people living there (pun alert) harbour.

It is not quite fair to say, as I often have cause to say, that nothing happens.  This is not an ordinary time in the lives of the harbour neighbourhood.  Each set of characters have come to a climax in their lives: Mrs. Bracey is nearing the end of her life; Lily Wilson is recently widowed young, and Tory is having an affair with her best friend's husband.  Such are the ingredients of soap opera, but in Taylor's hands they take place almost without fuss.  The confrontations which come every half hour in soap opera are here neatly avoided, or politely repressed.  Gossip is the order of the day, not screaming in the street.  Rumour and supposition circle around, not with the fervour of a Barbara Pym novel, but through a need to know as much as possible about one's fellow creatures.

If I were to suggest a theme for A View of the Harbour it would be right there in the title: viewing.  I think the central division between characters is whether they are observant or oblivious.  Neither 'type' takes much action as a result of their knowledge, but some seek this knowledge as though it were their lifeblood; others do not even consider its existence.  Mrs. Bracey - dying, but so slowly that it has become her way of living - is one of the watchers.  She vampirically wishes to know every movement of her daughter, but intends to spread her net wider.  Mrs. Bracey moves from her downstairs room to an upstairs room, simply so she can watch the harbour, and its inhabitants:

Up at her window, and in some discomfort (for her shoulder, her chest ached), Mrs. Bracey sat in judgment.  Guilt she saw, treachery and deceit and self-indulgence.  She did not see, as God might be expected to, their sensations of shame and horror, their compulsion towards one another, for which they dearly paid, nor in what danger they so helplessly stood, now, in middle-age, not in any safe harbour, but thrust out to sea with none of the brave equipment of youth to buoy them up, no romance, no delight.

That final few words brings to mind one of the more curious threads throughout A View of the Harbour.  The narrative, as well as characters, consistently attributes traits to all of youth.  Here's another example:

The young imagine insults, magnify them, with great effort overcome them, or retaliate.  A waste of emotion, Bertram thought, forgetting how much emotion there is to spare. 

This came so often, and so absurdly (of course young people cannot be summed up in these ways, any more than middle-aged or old people can) that I wondered whether it was a flaw in Taylor's writing, and there to serve some point that I missed?  For an author so interested in the peculiarities of individual personalities, it was inexplicable - not to mention the fact that Taylor was herself young (mid-thirties) when this novel was written.

Foremost amongst the oblivious characters is Beth, a novelist, who appears to have no idea that her husband  Robert (aren't husbands always called Robert?) is having a clandestine affair with her best friend Tory.  Taylor writes some perfectly observed scenes of conversation between Beth and Tory - the latter trying to maintain the friendship alongside a betrayal which Beth knows nothing about.  There is only one moment of fieriness - Beth still oblivious - which includes this section (the ellipsis in the middle has about half a page of dialogue in it, by the way):

"You talk as if you were Auntie Beth in one of the women's paper," said Tory scornfully.  "You've no idea of what is real, and how real people think."  She put her hand to her breast, as if she were saying: "I am real."  She was suddenly swept away on a tide of words such as came from Beth only through her pen.  "Writers are ruined people.  As a person, you're done for.  Everywhere you go, all you see and do, you are working up into something unreal, something to go on to paper... you've done it since you were a little girl... I've watched you for years and I've seen you gradually becoming inhuman, outside life, a machine.  When anything important happens you're stunned and thrown out for a while, and then you recover... God, how novelists recover!... and you begin to wonder how you can make use of it, with a little shifting here, and a little adding there, something can be made of it, surely?  Everything comes in handy. [...] One day something will happen to you, as it has to me, that you can't twist into anything at all, it will go on staying straight, and being itself, and you will have to be yourself and put up with it, and I promise you you'll be a bloody old woman before you can make a novel out of that." 

One of the novel's ironies is that Beth, as a writer, should be an expert at reading people - but though she has a complex understanding of the characters she creates, Beth does not look beyond the surface of those around her.  Or, rather, she trusts them implicitly.

When the novel opened with a painter, I thought "Right, the oldest trick in the book - an author explores ideas of creativity through the perspective of a painter, rather than a writer" - but Taylor gives us both.  It is Beth who takes on the Lily Briscoe role, in terms of structuring the book - which closes when she finishes writing her own novel.  It's always tempting, and usually erroneous, to assume that writers in novels are reflections of the novelists themselves.  However different Beth is from Elizabeth Taylor, surely something of Taylor's own thoughts and experiences must have gone into this excerpt?

"This isn't writing," she thought miserably.  "It is just fiddling about with words.  I'm not a great writer.  Whatever I do someone else has always done it before, and better.  In ten years' time no one will remember this book, the libraries will have sold off all their grubby copies of it second-hand and the rest will have fallen to pieces, gone to dust.  And, even if I were one of the great ones, who, in the long run, cares?  People walk about the streets and it is all the same to them if the novels of Henry James were never written.  They could not easily care less.  No one asks us to write.  If we stop, who will implore us to go on?  The only goodness that will ever come out of it is surely this moment now, wondering if 'vague' will do better than 'faint', or 'faint' than 'vague', and what is to follow; putting one word alongside another, like matching silks, a sort of game."

That's very striking - and perhaps illuminating.  Beth's absorption in her writing is certainly one of the most interesting threads in the novel.  But in case you think the whole book is anxious and fraught, here is one of the funnier sections (and there are plenty of moments of humour - mostly connected with the clash of perspectives, especially where children are involved.  Taylor is very good at the nonsensical commonsense of children.):

"It is for you," Stevie said, coming to lean against Robert's knees as he read.  "It is a shaver."  She laid the bunch of soiled gulls' feathers upon Robert's waistcoat.  They were loosely bound with coloured wools.
"Is it indeed?" Robert said, scarcely lowering his paper.
"It is for putting the soap on your face with instead of a shaving-brush."
Then he picked up the feathers and examined them.  When he had thanked her he glanced across at Beth, and they smiled gently at the thought of him dipping these grubby feathers into lather and painting his cheeks with them.  Amusement and affection linked them together for a moment.
"You see how soft it is!" Stevie said, entranced by her own generosity and the loveliness of the gift.
"It is very soft indeed," Robert agreed, flinching away.  ("What the devil do I do in the morning when I shave?" he wondered.)  "Next you should make a hat for your mother," he said, his eyes challenging Beth's.  "A nice feather hat for her to wear when she goes to London."
"Of course not," Stevie said.  "I am too young to make hats."
Beth nodded with triumph and malice at her husband.

You'll notice that most of my quotations come from this family - and there is a reason for that.  I found them, and their story, easily the most absorbing and original.  Although all the characters overlapped to some extent, there are really three separate threads through A View of the Harbour, and I think perhaps it was too many.  I know this is a celebratory year, but I have to admit a few problems I have with Taylor's novels... well, one major problem.  I always find that it takes me a sizeable chunk of her books to get into their flow, as it were (except for Angel - I loved that one from page one.)  She introduces so many characters, quite sketchily, and leaves us to hurry after them, trying to catch up.  That's one thing.  But what I do not understand - what I cannot rationalise, but which happens time and again for me - is why I do not appreciate her writing for the first third of each novel.  After that, I find her an extraordinary stylist, and could read away for weeks - and I definitely come away thinking Taylor incredibly good - but I always struggle to engage with her writing initially.  Does anybody else feel this way?

And is there an identifiable Taylor style?  Her quintessential sentences are almost callous - not the naivety or matter-of-fact darkness seen in Barbara Comyns or Muriel Spark, but the objectivity of the omniscient surveyor.  'Godlike', if you understand me to refer to the indifferent gods of classical mythology, rather than the very un-indifferent Christian God.  She lets her characters act, and watches them.  This struck me as a very Taylorian couple of sentences:

Prudence knew by her father's saying "whatsoever" that he had lost his temper.  When he had gone out Stevie's crying dropped into the minor key.

She describes cause and effect, but leaves a gap between them which could only be filled after intimacy with the characters involved.  Familiarity between characters, especially within family units, leads to a sort of shorthand of reactions, where emotions are seldom spoken, and actions considered but endlessly deferred: these emotions and potential actions are either understood intuitively by the observers of the novel, or.... missed completely by the oblivious.

Over to you!  This should be a sort of discussion, especially for those of you who have read the novel but don't have blogs.  What did you think of A View of the Harbour?  Do you think Taylor was successful in her aims - and what were her aims?  Would you have been able to tell this was an Elizabeth Taylor novel without her name on the cover - and if so, why?

Remember, I'll be posting links to all the reviews I can find (!) tomorrow - so let me know (and add here) if you've given your own view of A View of the Harbour...

Sunday Songs

Rather than have a load of posts tagged 'Sunday Songs' which you have to scrawl through, should you ever wish to see an overview of them, I thought I'd compile a list of all the songs that have featured...  it's alphabetical by artist surname/group name.  Enjoy!

Tori Amos - Winter
Julie Andrews - In The Bleak Midwinter
Beck - Everybody's Got To Learn Sometimes
Diane Birch - Rewind
Birdy - Skinny Love
Bombay Bicycle Club - You Already Know
Kate Bush - Running Up That Hill
Lindsey Butler - I Don't Want To Talk About It
The Cardigans - Communication 
The Carpenters - Rainy Days and Mondays
Alex Cornish - My Word What A Mess 
Marion Cotillard - My Husband Makes Movies
Amelia Curran - The Mistress
Lana Del Rey - Video Games 
Minnie Driver - Everything I've Got In My Pocket
Emma's Imagination - Drive
Everything But The Girl - I Didn't Know I Was Looking For Love
Rebecca Ferguson - Nothing's Real But Love
A Fine Frenzy - Electric Twist
Florence and the Machine - Shake It Out
Brooke Fraser - Something in the Water
Judy Garland & Barbra Streisand - Get Happy/Happy Days Are Here Again
A Girl Called Eddy - People Used To Dream 
Glee Cast - Shake It Out
Goldfrapp - A&E
Gossip - Heavy Cross
Nancy Griffith - Love at the Five and Dime
Sara Groves - Childhood Summer
Christine Guldbrandsen - Surfing in the Air 
Lisa Hannigan - I Don't Know
Richard Hawley - For Your Lover, Give Some Time
Darren Hayes - Dublin Sky 
Hem - The Fire Thief 
Jewel - Hands
Charlene Kaye ft. Darren Criss - Dress and Tie
Mat Kearney - Hey Mama
Becky Kelley - Where's The Line To See Jesus?
Cyndi Lauper - Sally's Pigeons
Amos Lee - Colours
Lemolo - Whale Song
Aimee Mann - Wise Up
Charlotte Martin - Wild Horses 
Daniel Merriweather and Adele - Water and a Flame
Alanis Morissette - That I Would Be Good / That Particular Time
Beth Orton - Stolen Car
Robert Plant and Alison Krauss - Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us
Princess and Mr. Tom - Come On
Bic Runga - Say After Me
Sian Reese Williams - The First Cut is the Deepest
Sia - Breathe Me
Elin Sigvardsson - Bang 
Charlotte Sometimes - How I Could Just Kill A Man
Vienna Teng - Antebellum
Vienna Teng - Kansas
Juliet Turner - Belfast Central
Shania Twain - You're Still The One
Kate Walsh - It's Never Over
Kate Walsh - Seafarer
Jessie Ware - Wildest Moments
Kathryn Williams - Jasmine Hoop
Kathryn Williams and Neil MacColl - 6am Corner
Amy Winehouse - Love Is A Losing Game
Rachael Yamagata - Worn Me Down

Stuck-in-a-Book's Weekend Miscellany

I was quite miscellaneous (as it were) yesterday, so this feels a bit like an elongated weekend.... but there is always room for a book, a link, and a blog post!

1.) The book - is Edgar Allen Poe's Murder at the Rue Morgue and other stories, sent to me by Penguin.  It's part of their new Penguin English Library series, each of which comes with a rather funky patterned cover.  (Yes, folks, that's right - I'm bringing back the word 'funky'.)  They're not reinventing the wheel with their choices - there certainly aren't any undiscovered voices being, er, discovered - but it's always fun to have classic books in attractive formats.  Trollope's The Warden has also arrived, and will hopefully be the incentive I need to read some Trollope (although I feel oddly guilty about reading non-twentieth century titles this year...)

2.) The blog post - is Eva's intriguing question: reading pilgrim or reading monk?  I'll let her explain the rest...

3.) The link - is a trailer (of sorts) to a film I'll be seeing on Sunday: Grand Hotel.  It's based on the book by Vicki Baum, which I have had in my possession but never read, and won the Oscar for Best Film back in 1932.  Oxford's wonderful Ultimate Picture Palace often show classic films, and this is the final in their 'season' on films set in hotels.  Great idea, no?



If you happen to be in Oxford at 3.45 on Sunday... do come along!

A couple of reminders...

First reminder!  There is one month to go until Muriel Spark Reading Week!

Quite a long way off, yes, but perhaps time to put in an order at the library, or root through your bookshelves... or, if you have an e-reader, Open Road emailed me to let me know that they have just released eight Muriel Spark ebooks.  More info here - but I'm pleased to see lots of rarer Spark titles have been included, alongside her most famous book The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.  Amongst the titles are two that I'm planning to read during the week (or in the weeks leading up to it, as I've sneakily started already) - The Only Problem and Reality and Dream.  These ebooks are available in the US and EU countries (excluding UK, sadly) - so it might well be easier than finding hard copies in your area.

My second reminder is about something happening rather sooner - my contribution to Elizabeth Taylor Centenary Year is hosting the discussion on A View of the Harbour, and that will be taking place next Monday.

You'll be pleased to know that I've now actually read the novel, and I'm looking forward to sharing my thoughts and hearing yours.  If you've already posted a review of the novel, go and add a link to Laura's Mr. Linky, and I'll also pop your link in a post here.  Otherwise, keep your eyes peeled for Monday morning's review!

Blurbs - What are they good for?

(Apologies to Edwin Starr)

A few months ago, my publisher asked me to supply a list of authors who might want to provide a blurb for my book, The Midwife’s Tale: A Mystery. After a few missteps (“Oh, she’s dead? That complicates things.”), I submitted my list, but I began to wonder:

Do cover blurbs sell books?

I have to admit that I began life as a blurb skeptic. In my experience (sample size 1), if I’m not already inclined to buy a book, no blurb is going to make a difference. Moses could come down from the mountain and tell me he liked Twilight, and I’m still not going to read it. And I’m going to read David Abrams’s Fobbit, whether or not there’s a blurb on the front from Joseph Heller. (He is alive, isn’t he?)

So, what good are blurbs?

It turns out the blurbs are for an audience beyond the book-buying public. (Oh, I said. I had no idea.) These people include:

Reviewers and Bloggers. Unless your publisher is going to pay for a national media buy, some of the responsibility for finding reviewers is going to land in your lap. But it’s a competitive world out there, and you are going to have to sell your book to someone before they’ll take the time and energy to review it. This is where the blurbs come into play. As fellow BPer Sophie Perinot put it, “A couple of bloggers I pitched to review my book (and I mentioned endorsements in my pitch) said, ‘you had me at Michelle Moran.’” In this case, you’re not convincing readers to buy the book, but you’re convincing someone else who might convince the readers.

Librarians and other Book Buyers. These folks are overworked and underpaid, and are having to make a ton of decisions in an increasingly-crowded marketplace. Blurbs situate a book among its peers, and will help librarians and other buyers know what kind of book it is, and to whom it might appeal. If a library’s clientele is primarily old, conservative, and devoutly religious, a blurb from Chuck Palahniuk won’t do you much good. But if you have one from Pat Robertson you might be in better shape. In this case the blurb keeps the buyers from having to buy a book sight unseen.

Another BPer, Amy Franklin-Willis, made the excellent point that a blurb can help if you have a book that straddles genres. Nancy Bilyeau’s book, The Crown, is both a thriller and historical fiction, and she was able to land blurbs from writers as diverse as Deborah Harkness (Discovery of Witches), M.J. Rose (Book of Lost Fragrances), and Katherine Neville (The Eight). It’s not going to pull a reader or buyer all the way over the fence, but it can demonstrate that you book has broader appeal than might appear on the surface, and once again this is something that the buyers will want to know.

So while I started the day as a blurb skeptic, I walked away convinced that they do make a difference, just not in the way I expected.

Opus 7 - Sylvia Townsend Warner

I'm reading around my next DPhil chapter, on Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes, and thus there might well be a little spate of Warner related posts coming up here over the next few weeks.  I have an inkling that this might be one of those reviews which is very specialist, and might not attract much interest (1930s narrative poem, anyone?) but I shall plough ahead and see what happens!

I read Opus 7 (1931) by Warner mostly as a counterpoint to Lolly Willowes, but it is also interesting on its own account.  It's a narrative poem, about fifty pages long, about Rebecca Random - an unsociable woman who lives in an idyllic cottage, 'lives on bread and lives for gin', and has an almost uncanny ability to grow flowers:

Some skill she had, and, more than skill, a touch
that prospered all she set, as though there were
a chemical affinity ‘twixt her
stuff and the stuff of plants.

Indeed, the most obvious connections between Opus 7 and Lolly Willowes are the countryside, and this almost witchlike ability that Rebecca has.  Flowers spring up almost overnight, and make Rebecca and her garden something of a spectacle for the villagers.

But the topic is really just a way of exploring the dynamics of village life, especially the darker side.  Rebecca starts to sell her flowers - but only because she needs money for drink.  The villagers buy her flowers for their mantelpieces, parties, and funerals - but do not accept her; she engages in these exchanges, but does not talk to the people next to her in the pub, nor buy them the drinks they anticipate.  In a really interesting aside, Warner leaves the stance of anecdote-reteller and dips into the author's voice - comparing her addiction to writing and rewriting with Rebecca's reliance on alcohol:

And down what leagues of darkness must I yet
trudge, stumble, reel, in the wrought mind's retreat ;
then wake, remember, doubt, and with the day
that work which in the darkness shone survey,
and find it neither better nor much worse
than any other twentieth-century verse.
Oh, must I needs be disillusioned, there's
no need to wait for spring!  Each day declares
yesterday's currency a few dead leaves ;
and through all the sly nets poor technique weaves
the wind blows on, whilst I - new nets design,
a sister-soul to my slut heroine,
she to her dram enslaved, and I to mine.

I rarely read poetry, as you know, so perhaps I am not the best judge of quality.  I recently wrote a little bit about Warner's collection Time Importuned, which I didn't really like or dislike.  I felt I got a lot more out of Opus 7 - perhaps because it had a sustained narrative, and everything which comes along with that, particularly the foregrounding of character.  Once I had that all set in my mind, I could sit back and enjoy Warner's writing.  It was occasionally a little forced, and I didn't approve of all her attempts to create end-rhymes.  This was rather inexcusable:

But now Rebecca, wont to chatter ding-
dong with the merriest, and when drunk to sing

But in general I found it rather beautiful - her use of metaphor is quite striking, for instance.  This excerpt isn't to do with Rebecca, but concerns the aftermath of village life after the first world war - looking back to the war with quite a chilling, effective image.  Even with all the writing about the trenches which I have read (which we have all read, I imagine) this made an impact on me:

I knew a time when Europe feasted well :
bodies were munched in thousands, vintage blood
so blithely flowed that even the dull mud
grew greedy, and ate men ; and lest the gust
should flag, quick flesh no daintier taste than dust,
spirit was ransacked for whatever might
sharpen a sauce to drive on appetite.

I can't imagine any publisher willing to publish Opus 7 now, simply because of its form and length.  It's not long enough to be considered a novel in verse, but it is obviously too long to be merely a poem.  However I am glad that Chatto and Windus decided it was worth issuing back in 1931, in their lovely Dolphin Books series (which I collect when I stumble across them) - it's not my favourite book by Warner, but it is rather powerful and striking.  And, for a poetry ignoramus, rather an accessible way to enjoy the form, without forfeiting the qualities which make me primarily a lover of prose.

Please Don't Eat The Daisies - Jean Kerr

After I read Shirley Jackson's Raising Demons, I went on a little Google spree to see what others had said about it.  Well, turns out, not an awful lot.  But I did find another name mentioned alongside hers once or twice - and that was Jean Kerr.  She might well be very famous, but I'd not heard of her before... but I was looking for more in that amusing-tales-of-wife-and-motherhood line, of which E.M. Delafield's Provincial Lady will always be the doyenne, and so read Kerr's Please Don't Eat The Daisies (1957).

It's very fun.  It isn't as good as Delafield or Jackson, in my opinion - perhaps because there is less attempt at an overall structure.  Although all three authors were initially serialised, it's most obvious with Kerr - and her book is really one-note: the exasperated wife and mother.  This sort of thing: 'You take Christopher - and you may; he's a slightly used eight-year-old.'  That is more or less what I was looking for, of course, and she is rather brilliant on that one-note - it's just not going to enter my pantheon of greats.  It was turned into a 1960 film with Doris Day, and later a TV series with Pat Crowley, although I can't imagine how.

Oh, I forgot, there was one piece which slid onto a very different topic - 'Touours tristesse' was a rather amusing pastiche of Francoise Sagan.

I'll leave you with an example.  I realise I've been very brief about Please Don't Eat The Daisies, but, to be honest, I'm pretty sure you'll know whether or not you'll want to read this based on the title and concept alone...   (Oh, and bear in mind, when you read the word 'pants', that this is an American book.)

Another distressing aspect of disciplining young children is that somehow you are always left with the flat end of the dialogue - a straight man forever.  It's not just that you feel idiotic.  The real menace in dealing with a five-year-old is that in no time at all you begin to sound like a five-year-old.  Let's say you hear a loud, horrifying crash from the bedroom, so you shout up:

"In heaven's name, what was that?"

"What?"

"That awful noise."

"What noise?"

"You didn't hear that noise?"

"No.  Did you?"

"Of course I did - I just told you."

"What did it sound like?"

"Never mind what it sounded like.  Just stop it."

"Stop what?"

"Whatever you're doing."

"I'm not doing anything."

"Stop it anyway."

"I'm brushing my teeth.  Shall I stop that?"

Obviously this way madness lies.  Personally, I knew I had to win this battle of dialectics or seek psychiatric care.  I don't promise that my solution will work equally well in all cases, but it does do nicely around here.  Nowadays when I hear that crash I merely call up, clearly and firmly, "Hey you, pick up your pants."

I am, of course, operating on the absolute certainty that whoever it is will have at least one pair of pants on the floor.  And the mere motion of picking them up will distract him, temporarily at least, from whatever mayhem he was involved in.  As far as that crash is concerned, I never really wanted to know what it was.  I just wanted it to stop.

The Rules

By Julie Kibler

photo credit Dori Young

My recent first round of edits while under contract has shown me that sometimes the best route from point A to point B is breaking a rule.

You know … “The Rules.” The ones that say how we’re supposed to write. (There are also plenty of "rules" for pregnancy, right?)

This has come as a bit of a shock. We’ve had these rules drilled into us for so long, fully believing they are critical to whether we find an agent, get a book contract, wow the world.

Of course, they always say it’s okay to break the rules at times, but if you are going to break a rule, you better break it well. What does that mean, exactly? How will we know? Oh, you’ll know. You’ll know. Right.

I tried really hard to avoid backstory while writing Calling Me Home. Backstory, according to millions of articles and blog posts about querying your first novel, is anathema. Suicide, really. If your first few chapters, especially, contain backstory, you might as well quit now.

Then, as I was completing my revisions for my editor, I worried and worried and worried over this one point in my story that just wasn’t coming together, and I realized I needed a flashback. (Thanks to the suggestion of someone in a really great online group I belong to ... not mentioning any names … BOOK PREGNANT!)

My kneejerk reaction was, “NO! NO BACKSTORY!” I had totally discounted flashback in the attempt to follow the rules. I inserted what ended up feeling like a really nice section that rounded out a relationship I’d been trying to flesh out in the moment, when what these characters needed was history. We’ll see what my editor thinks. 

On another note, I was shocked to find my editor calling for more of this, more of that, with very little cutting of something else. WHAT? I thought. If I do THAT, my manuscript breaks the 100K word barrier! Oh, nooooo! Run away! Run away! I was being so legalistic, I thought I must lose a word for every word I added in order to stay below that holiest of all word counts.

Guess what? I turned in an edited manuscript that weighed in around 103K words, even while I had pinched it so hard, you could hear the words screaming as I knocked them off the page. And the world hasn’t fallen apart yet. Again, I’ll let you know what my editor thinks later. And, ultimately, that story is stronger, deeper, longer, and brighter, I hope.

This has been a good reminder to me that writing rules are almost always about the spirit of the law, and not the letter of the law. Remember that—when you’re finishing your masterpiece, when you’re querying your first-choice agent, when you’re getting ready to go on submission for the first time. (When you're pregnant and gaining 32 pounds instead of 30.) In the words of someone else, I can't remember who ...

It’s about the story, stupid.

(p.s. It is now a month after I wrote this. My editor loved the revisions and nary a word was mentioned about word count!)

Raising Demons - Shirley Jackson

Raising Demons is the 1957 sequel to Shirley Jackson's hilariously wonderful memoir/novel about being a wife and mother, Life Among the Savages (1953).  I paid a steepish amount for a hideous paperback (pictured), and thus managed to secure Raising Demons, saving it for a treat - and I read it whilst recently beleaguered with a cold.  It is an absurd indictment of the publishing industry that these books are so difficult to find, especially on this side of the ocean.  They are brilliant, and deserve to be classics (please, some publisher or other, please!)  I don't often laugh out loud while reading, but with Raising Demons (as with Life Among the Savages before it) I sat in the corner giggling away to myself, getting curious and worried glances from my housemates.

I went back and read what I wrote about Life Among the Savages (you can do the same thing if you click here) and basically everything I said for that book is true of this one.  Funny, warm, happy, funny, clever, and did I mention funny?  But I shan't be lazy; I shall write a new review for this book, and not just send you back to that review...

Despite my enthusiasm for Life Among the Savages, I'm well aware that Shirley Jackson is much more likely to make you think of Gothic, creepy, psychological novels - like the excellent We Have Always Lived in the Castle.  She does that sort of thing incredibly well.  But she also excels at this sort of gentle, family-orientated, self-deprecating writing - a genre which many would dismiss, I'm sure, but which I (and many of you) adore.

By the time Raising Demons starts there are six in the family, plus attendant animals, and they have outgrown the house which was so amusingly bought at the beginning of Life Among the Savages - and so they start hunting for a new house.  Or, rather, everyone tells them which house they should choose - the one with the wonky gatepost, converted into four self-contained flats.  Despite insisting that they don't want to move, nor rent their house, they find themselves sending all their belongings into storage, and converting the flats into one house.  It is here that they live out their ordinary, hilarious lives.

Jackson has a talent for two types of humour at once: the knowing grin we grant to the recognisable, and laughter at the bizarre and unexpected.  These initially seem like opposite sides of the coin; that authors would have to pick one or the other - but Jackson manages both at once, by taking the everyday, identifiable dynamics of the family home... and exaggerating them.  And then putting them in a pattern, so that events pile on events, creating a surreal outcome.  Yet one which seems entirely possible - had, perhaps, happened to Jackson herself.

Having written about illustrative quotations yesterday, I should provide excellently evocative ones today, shouldn't I?  I liked this one, about the mother preparing her son for his first Little League game - obviously rather more nervous than he is:

As a matter of fact, the night before the double-header which was to open the Little League, I distinctly recall that I told Laurie it was only a game.  "It's only a game, fella," I said.  "Don't try to go to sleep; read or something if you're nervous.  Would you like some aspirin?"

"I forgot to tell you," Laurie said, yawning.  "He's pitching Georgie tomorrow.  Not me."

"What?"  I thought, and then said heartily, "I mean, he's the manager, after all.  I know you'll play your best in any position."

"I could go to sleep now if you'd just turn out the light," Laurie said patiently.  "I'm really quite tired."

I called Dot later, about twelve o'clock, because I was pretty sure she'd still be awake, and of course she was, although Billy had gone right off about nine o'clock.  She said she wasn't the least bit nervous, because of course it didn't really matter except for the kids' sake, and she hoped the best team would win.  I said that that was just what I had been telling my husband, and she said her husband had suggested that perhaps she had better not go to the game at all because if the Braves lost she ought to be home with a hot bath ready for Billy and perhaps a steak dinner or something.  I said that even if Laurie wasn't pitching I was sure the Braves would win, and of course I wasn't one of those people who always wanted their own children right out in the centre of things all the time but if the Braves lost it would be my opinion that their lineup ought to be revised and Georgie put back into right field where he belonged.  She said she thought Laurie was a better pitcher, and I suggested that she and her husband and Billy come over for lunch and we could all go to the game together.

That also gives an example of my favourite technique in the book.  It's simple, but I find it endlessly amusing: it is what Jackson doesn't write.  So much of Raising Demons is left to the reader's imagination.  Not much is needed, to be honest - any reader is likely to deduce that the mother is distrait, and the son calm.  Jackson isn't trying to be super-subtle with that point.  But I love that it is never quite spelt out - and that other characters thus often miss what is so obvious to the amused reader.  Here's an example in that vein:

By the Saturday before Labor Day a decided atmosphere of cool restraint had taken over our house, because on Thursday my husband had received a letter from an old school friend of his named Sylvia, saying that she and another girl were driving through New England on a vacation and would just adore stopping by for the weekend to renew old friendships.  My husband gave me the letter to read, and I held it very carefully by the edges and said that it was positively touching, the way he kept up with his old friends, and did Sylvia always use pale lavender paper with this kind of rosy ink and what was that I smelled - perfume?  My husband said Sylvia was a grand girl.  I said I was sure of it.  My husband said Sylvia had always been one of the nicest people he knew.  I said I hadn't a doubt.  My husband said that he was positive that I was going to love Sylvia on sight.  I opened my mouth to speak but stopped myself in time.

My husband laughed self-consciously.  "I remember," he said, and then his voice trailed off and he laughed again.

"Yes?" I asked politely.

"Nothing," he said.

Lovely!  I really can't recommend this book, and Life Among the Savages, enough.  It's such a shame they're so difficult to find - but I promise they are worth the hunt to anybody who likes Provincial Lady-esque books.  (Hopefully you'll find a nicer copy than mine - I quite like the other image featured, yours for $500.)  Like the PL et al, I know I'll be returning to this family time and again.  I'm rather bereft that only two were written... and on the hunt for other, potentially similar, books.  And more on that before too long...

A little about When God Was A Rabbit, but not really.

I've mentioned it before - I'm always fascinated by the behind-the-scenes of blogging.  I know when, how, and where I write my own blog posts, but I'm aware that each blogger does these things slightly (or, indeed, very) differently.  I've recently finished When God Was A Rabbit by Sarah Winman, which I'm going to talk about a tiny amount, because my musing on it headed me off in a different direction - about how we structure blog posts.  Yep, it's going to be a meta-post, if you will (stolen joke alert: I'm so meta, even this acronym.)

How do you start?  (Sorry, non-bloggers, these questions won't mean much to you.)  How do you structure your posts?  I have realised that, increasingly, I start from one or two key quotations, noted in the book (in pencil, naturally) and one or two key bullet points, in my head.  Without those (especially given the gap in time between reading and reviewing) I am rather lost.

But how do I go about finding those quotations?  The short answer is, I don't know.  I think my blog reviews are a little more reliant on supportive quotations than many bloggers, but I know there are some of you who also quote a lot - how do you choose?  Studying English literature, especially when at undergraduate level, I was well trained in the art of reading a novel without knowing how I would write about it - usually, then, without having a predetermined essay question - so I'd just be reading, say Fanny Burney's Evelina and hoping to find a good essay topic in the midst of reading.  (In Evelina's case, I wrote about laughter... did you know that she half-laughs and almost-laughs and thought-of-laughing a huge amount, after the embarrassing laughter scene at the ball, but doesn't actually laugh again until she is engaged?  Truedat.)

Gosh, I am easily sidetracked.

So, how do I (how do you) choose these excerpts?  I tend to have a pencil at the ready, to note down any particularly amusing or poignant sections - or, preferably, a paragraph or two which seem to me to encapsulate the feel of the book.  Which is quite a nebulous and ill-defined brief, but perhaps you do the same, and thus can understand?  I certainly have almost no hope of finding a useful quotation once I've finished reading the book.  Once I've got that, I can expand outwards - my summary and response of the book needs that central few examples to circle out from.  If I didn't make a note of the page number whilst I was reading, then... those are the posts which don't have any excerpts.

Which brings me onto Sarah Winman's When God Was A Rabbit (2011), which I read recently for book group.  I quite liked it; I thought the writing was good and the structuring not very good.  There was just far too much in it - a bit like a soap opera.  I think Winman will either go on to write increasingly good novels, or she will stop now, having put everything she could think of into When God Was A Rabbit.

But the main reason I'm not going to write a full-length review of the novel is because I got to the end of it without having noted down any excerpts.  There wasn't a single passage which struck me as being especially noteworthy - for whatever reason.  Of course, you could simply say that this makes Winman very consistent; there weren't any pages I noted down for being awful, either.  But it does make it more or less impossible for me to begin to structure a post about the book.  Or, rather, it would end up like one of the reviews I wrote when I started my blog - very short and very hazy!


So, there you have it.  If a novel doesn't present two or three of these excerpts whilst I'm reading, I'm all lost at sea.  How about you?  Do you flick back for quotations after you've finished, or make notes as you go along?  And are there any books you've just felt incapable of writing about - for different reasons than those discussed in relation to In Cold Blood last week!   Just because you don't know where to start, or how to frame it.

Gosh, Stuck-in-a-Book is just becoming a place where I discuss why I'm not reviewing books, isn't it?!

Song for a Sunday

Today's Sunday Song isn't my usual dreamy/folky choice - but rather a loud anthem sort of song.  I still love it, but I wouldn't lie back in a hammock with a Rose Macaulay novel and hum along to it!  Over to Gossip, and 'Heavy Cross'...

Stuck-in-a-Book's Weekend Miscellany

Hope you're having a good weekend!  I'll be off on one of my trips to villages with odd names - this time it's the turn of Ready Token.  Brilliant, no?  I'll leave you with a book, a link (or two), and a blog post.

1.) The links - I started writing a post last November on book covers (and by 'started writing', I mean I copied out two links and wrote 'COVERS' as the post title) but I've realised that it's not going to come to fruition for a while. So instead I'll just give you the links.  The first is to an excellent Caustic Cover Critic  interview with designer Alison Forner, which includes many examples of her beautiful work - one of which is above.  The second is a sort of review of the best covers of 2011 (which sadly too few illustrations), from the Guardian.  JUST what you wanted in the middle of March, no?

2.) The book - fans of the Mapp and Lucia series by E.F. Benson will be pleased to know that another sequel has been written by Guy Fraser-Sampson (also known as Pursewarden).  His Major Benjy really caught the spirit of the original series (my thoughts here) and, if we can't have Benson writing new books, then Guy Fraser-Sampson is second best.  And although these things shouldn't matter, I'm glad that he's been given a lovely cover this time around - for Lucia on Holiday.  If you're quick, you might be able to hear Guy talk about it about on Radio 4's Open Book.  Lucia on Holiday is published on 29th March.

3.) The blog link -  is Trevor's fantastic review of Tove Jansson's The Summer Book, on his site The Mookse and the Gripes.  If you've yet to be convinced to try it out, I think he might just do the trick.