Win a copy of Literary Lapses by Stephen Leacock

It's been ages... sorry; I'll make it up to you with a lovely little giveaway... from me, not from a publisher or company. And it's inadvertently to celebrate Canada Day (which I didn't even know was happening; thanks for telling me, Elizabeth!)

The other day I found a cheap copy of a book I adore, Literary Lapses by Stephen Leacock - and I thought it would be a shame to leave it neglected on a bookshelf when I could be sending it somewhere around the world.  As you can see in my right-hand sidebar, it's one of my 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About.  It was a fairly unthorough review, but I still believe it to be a wonderful book.

Everyone in Canada has heard of Stephen Leacock, I am led to believe, but almost nobody outside of Canada has had the pleasure.  I was very lucky that my Aunt Jacq put me onto him - I read a lot in 2002 and 2003, but haven't read one for, gosh, probably a decade.  Must rectify soon.  But, for now, I'll spread the joy.

Leacock was (among other things) a humorist, and Literary Lapses is a collection of humorous sketches and silliness, but with an intelligent and wry tone.  I think any fan of A.A. Milne's humour, or P.G. Wodehouse's novels, would find this hilarious... and so I'll send it off worldwide.

Actually, proviso.  I'll send this anywhere except Canada.  Sorry, Canadians, you have easy access to Leacock, and don't need me to tell you he's great!

To be in with a chance of winning, simply put your favourite Canadian thing, or person, or your favourite thing about Canada, in the comments - I'll do a draw later in the week.  And I'll start the ball rolling.  My favourite Canadian person is Alanis Morissete (once I've taken my favourite Canadian bloggers out of the equation!)  Over to you...

Three Reasons to Pack Your Bags and Get Thee to a Writers Conference

by Sophie Perinot

I am a big advocate of attending writers’ conferences.  Being a stay-at-home book mama can make the world shrink to an unbearably small size—with all the depression and obsessing over minutia which that entails.  Packing away the yoga pants, packing up your professional duds and heading out to a conference plunks you right down in the big picture again—reminding you that you are not the only crazy nut writing a book and why you really do love what you do.  Need a little more persuading?  Here are three reasons you should be registered for a writing conference in the next 12 months: 

Conferences have more than pretty locations to recommend them

1) Conferences put the big-C in “C” Community.  It is a massive battery-recharge to realize that you are part of something bigger than yourself.  If you've selected your conference with care it’s like jumping into a pool of warm-fuzzies.  I am recently back from the 5^th North American Historical Novel Society Conference.  That means I spent 3 days in the company of 300+ people who love reading and writing historical fiction as much as I do.  Um, I am simply not going to run into that many history-nuts at my local Safeway, or pretty much anywhere else.  Everywhere you turn at a writer’s conference you will find people discussing things that interest you and don’t interest 99% of the people who sit at your dinner table or otherwise know you in “real life.”  You will also find support—for your dreams and your work.  Think getting an email from a reader saying how they connected with your book or a good review from a blogger is great?  Well meeting that blogger and exchanging hugs in the lobby, or having dinner next to someone who tells you they just loved your book takes it to a totally different level.   Oh, and when you go (note, I say when not if), don’t forget to give as good as you get.  Be supportive of others—that’s what community means.

2) Even in a world increasingly dominated by virtual gatherings and social media there is no substitute for in person contact when it comes to networking.  We make a different kind of connection when we look people in the eye and shake their hand; a different kind of investment in them.  Much of what we do as authors on facebook, twitter, etc. is sound-bite driven.  Meeting in person allows long-form discussions and the building of relationships rooted in more than quips.  It can put a special sort of seal on relationships begun in the virtual realm.  Think this doesn't matter?  Think again.  When it is time to look for authors to blurb your next book, or when you receive a blurb request personal contact can make the difference between a yes and a no.  When I get a promotional opportunity (e.g. I am asked to present somewhere) I know that the more authors the bigger the audience draw, and who do I reach out to for those additional panelists—people I consider as friends as well as colleagues.  When you need a critique partner, folks you've met at writers conferences often fill the bill.  Three of my critique partners are authors I met at past HNS Conferences, and at the 2013 Conference I met a flourishing writers group formed at the 2011 event.

3) A good conference packs an educational punch.  The best writers conferences have content appropriate to all ages and stages of the book parent, from those looking to find a midwife (agent) to those juggling the demands of toddler books while gestating the next book baby.  I am not saying you can’t learn about the publishing business, craft, or industry trends in other ways.   I am asserting that you can get more information—often from top industry professionals and household-name authors in your genre—in a shorter period of time.  That’s because a good writers’ conference is focused on bringing attendees the information most useful to them and cramming it into two or three days of panels and speeches.  The conference planners have done a lot of your work for you—vetting panel topics, selecting speakers, filtering out the noise and nonsense and presenting you with the most up-to-date information possible.

Finally, a word about cost.  I know a lot of writers who have yet to attend a conference because conferences represent an expense (often a significant one).  If I were going to add a fourth point to my list it would be this—you are worth it.   A few years ago I heard an industry speaker (yes, at a writers’ conference) say that writers—and female writers in particular oh book-mamas out there—often hesitate to invest in themselves before they are actually earning money with their writing.  His point—writing is a small business and all small businesses have start-up costs.  You have to invest in your professional development to give yourself the best chance of making it in this tough business.

So get thee to a writers’ conference.  It’s going to be a transformative experience.  I promise.

Sophie Perinot (right) networking at a conference with book-bloggers
and fellow Book Pregnant author Nancy Bilyeau (2nd from left)

Sophie Perinot is the author of The Sister Queens(NAL/Penguin, March 2012) a novel of sisterhood set in the 13th century. Her debut was widely well-reviewed and made a number of “best of 2012” lists.  When Sophie is not chauffeuring one of her three kids or lint rolling the hair of one of her three cats she is hard at work on a new novel novel set in 16^th century France. 

Simon into fox

A quick post (and sorry for the sparsity of updates this week) to say that I have an exciting piece of news to share - I have become a fox!

Yes, the lovely folk at Vulpes Libris have asked me to become one of their number - and I didn't even know I was under consideration!  You might have spotted the guest posts I've done for them over the past few months (on my favourite books, foxes in literature, and failing with poetry) and I've loved it, so I'm thrilled to be one of their number!  They'll be making mention of it soon, but I thought I'd give you guys advance notice.

In practical terms, I will probably still be posting around once a month there, but in a more official capacity.  Thanks for having me, foxes!

Winifred and Virginia

I'm sure that most of us have authors who follow us around - not literally, you understand, although I swear Ian McEwan keeps getting on the same bus as me and the authorities have been notified.  No, I mean the authors we keep seeing mentioned, or on the shelves of bookshops, or recommended to us, and we're sure that we'll love them, only... we never quite get around to reading them.

Well, Winifred Holtby is one such author for me.  I've known about South Riding for about as long as I've been reading novels, and it used to be in more or less every bookshop I visited.  Eventually I took the hint, and bought it.  And, of course, there has been the recent television series, not to mention the beautiful Virago reprints.  So... I read her book about Virginia Woolf.

Yep, I've still not read any Holtby fiction, even though my shelves are full of the stuff, but I have read Virginia Woolf (1932), which my friend Lucy gave me back in 2010.  Oh, and having mentioned in my Felixstowe talk that I sometimes put sketches on SiaB, I realised that (a) I still need to make my Year Six Sketches post, and (b) I haven't put up a sketch for ages.  So there's one of an early draft of the cover for Holtby's book...

You've got to admire Winifred Holtby's guts for writing about Virginia Woolf in the early 1930s.  Not only was Virginia Woolf alive, but their respective reputations were even further apart than they are now - Holtby was a respected writer on women's issues, but as a novelist, she was realms away from Woolf.  In a literary society more firmly divided into highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow than we would now recognise, it was audacious (to say the least) for Holtby to dare to write critically about Virginia Woolf.  I use the word 'critically' in its neutral sense - that is, an assessment.  Holtby subtitled this 'a critical memoir', and it is far closer to an analysis and critique than it is a memoir - indeed, let's call a spade a spade.  For much of the time, Virginia Woolf is an appreciation.  And that suits me down to the ground.  Reading Holtby's book reminded me that Woolf is, in my opinion, the greatest writer of the 20th century.

Let's set the scene.  When Holtby was writing this, Woolf had recently published The Waves, easily her most experimental book.  (I imagine few people would have guessed that her final two novels [The Years and Between the Acts] would be a return to more traditional narratives; until that point, her writing had got steadily more and more experimental with prose style).  So she had certainly done enough to establish her place as one of the best and most important writers alive, with Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, Orlando, and The Waves (sometimes known as The Big Four, possibly only by me) under her belt - but, of course, none of her diaries or letters had been published.  It is very intriguing to read an account by a woman who knew her tangentially, and had met and corresponded with her, and yet knew so much less of her internal life than has been revealed now to anybody who buys a copy of A Writer's Diary (which is exceptionally brilliant) or flicks through the six volumes of her letters.

But Holtby can do what none of us can do, and give a firsthand impression of Woolf:

Tall, graceful, exceedingly slender, she creates an impression of curbed but indestructible vitality.  An artist, sitting near her during a series of concerts given by the Léner quartette, said afterwards, "She makes me think of a frozen falcon; she is so still, and so alert."  The description does in some measure suggest her elegance veiling such intellectual decision, her shyness lit by such irony.  Meeting all contacts with the world lightly yet courageously; withdrawn, but not disdainful; in love with experience yet exceedingly fastidious; detached, yet keenly, almost passionately interested; she watches the strange postures and pretences of humanity, preserving beneath her formidable dignity and restraint a generosity, a belief, and a radiant acceptance of life unsurprised by any living writer.

The biographical section of Virginia Woolf focuses chiefly on what it would be like to grow up with Leslie Stephen for a father - a man of letters, known for his work on the Dictionary of National Biography - and doesn't look much at her adulthood, marriage, or the Bloomsbury group.  Perhaps that is to be expected, knowing that Woolf would read it (and not being a prurient person - what halcyon days those must have been!)  So, instead, she turns her attention to Woolf's writing.

I have to say, I was really surprised by how modern Holtby's criticism felt. I knew that Woolf was much admired during her lifetime, but so much of Holtby's critique was so adroit, and covered arguments I'd assumed were rather more recent (such as comparing Jacob's Room to filmmaking, or noting the importance of time in Mrs Dalloway.)  Even her assessment of Woolf's greatest and least achievements seemed to me completely to reflect decades of later discussion - with Night and Day at the bottom, and The Waves at the top.  Comments like this one were illuminating:

She has never understood the stupid.  Whenever she tries to draw a character like Betty Flanders or Mrs. Denham, she loses her way.  They are more foreign to her than princes were to Jane Austen. Her imagination falters on the threshold of stupidity.

How beautifully phrased, too!  As I say, I've not read any of Holtby's fiction - I have read part of Women and the odd essay - but it seems that something of the precision and beauty of Woolf's writing has been picked up by Holtby, and seems to lace her sentences here.  And that mention of Jane Austen reminds me - Holtby names a chapter 'Virginia Woolf is not Jane Austen'.  Curious that the distinction was felt necessary, but I think Holtby puts forth an excellent point when she says that Night and Day is a somewhat failed attempt to write in the Austen school of fiction.  One of the reasons it doesn't work is explained by Holtby:

The events of a novel must appear important.  Trivial though they may be, they must create the illusion that they fill the universe.  Jane Austen was able to create the illusion that a delayed proposal or an invitation to a ball could fill the universe, because, so far as her little world was concerned, it did.  But in England during the twentieth-century war no single domestic activity was without reference to that tremendous, undomestic violence.  At any moment a telegram might arrive; the sirens might signal an approaching air-raid; somebody might come unexpectedly home on leave.  The interest of every occupation, from buying groceries to writing a love-letter, was in some measure deflected to France, Egypt or Gallipoli.

But reading about Woolf's early, non-experimental fiction probably isn't why anybody would pick up a critical memoir.  Instead, I was keen to find out how her characteristic, Modernist prose struck Holtby.  Woolf is now famous for distorting the sentence, for stream of consciousness writing and playing with the conventions of prose.  She is not alone in doing this, of course, but she is perhaps the best.  Well, Holtby writes brilliantly about that too.  This paragraph describes the earliest of Woolf's experimental novels, Jacob's Room, and the segue from that to her Big Four:

She had thrown overboard much that had been commonly considered indispensable to the novel: descriptions of places and families, explanations of environment, a plot of external action, dramatic scenes, climaxes, conclusions, and almost all those link-sentences which bind one episode to the next.  But much remained to her.  She had retained her preoccupation with life and death, with character, and with the effect of characters grouped and inter-acting.  She had kept her consciousness of time and movement.  She knew how present and past are interwoven, and how to-day depends so much upon knowledge and memory of yesterday, and fear for or confidence in to-morrow.  She was still preoccupied with moral values; she was immensely excited about form and the way in which the patterns of life grow more and more complex as one regards them.  And she was more sure now both of herself and of her public.  She dared take greater risks with them, confident that they would not let her down.

Yes, Winifred, yes!  What an excellent understanding of the elements of the traditional novel that Woolf kept, and those that she left behind her.  Which does beg the question - if she was able to identify Woolf's genius so perfectly, and analyse the techniques she used, why did Holtby herself not try them?  (Or at least, I have always assumed her novels followed a more traditional format.)  To some is given the gift of being at the forefront of literature; to others, the ability to recognise it.  Each needs the other.

Not that Woolf seems to have been particularly grateful.  Marion Shaw's introduction (in the edition I have, pictured) is useful on the myriad mentions Woolf makes of the biography in her letters and diaries.  I shan't go into detail, but essentially Woolf was rather patronising and contradictory - par for the course for a woman who wrote wonderfully, but would have been rather a nightmare to know, particularly if one happened to be poorer or younger than her (and she'd have hated me for being a Christian).  Would Holtby have minded about this reception?  I rather think she might - she clearly puts Woolf-the-writer on a pedestal, and probably wanted to please Woolf-the-woman too.  Or, who knows, maybe Holtby would have been satisfied with having paid homage to the novels, and not worried too much about the author?

The only biography I've read of Virginia Woolf before this one was Hermione Lee's exhaustive tome - and, my goodness, it was exhausting too.  Very scholarly, incredibly thorough, and quite a chore to read.  For my money, Winifred Holtby's is much more worthwhile for the average reader - a unique perspective on one of Britain's greatest writers, by one whose fiction I now really must read...

Song for a Sunday

Not obscure at all, as 145 million views attest, but... oh, P!nk does sing some very catchy songs.  She might even write them... not sure, pass.  Happy Sunday!

Stuck-in-a-Book's Weekend Miscellany

It's been a little while since I did one of these... and this one's going to be brief, because the painkillers I'm on for endless headaches have made me very sleepy!  (They're not especially heavy-duty painkillers, but... well, maybe I have a predisposition to sleepiness. It's been noted before.)

1.) The book - is The Matriarch by G.B. Stern, which Daunt Books sent me a day or two ago - I've been wanting to read some of her fiction for ages, and this is a great opportunity in a lovely edition.

2.) The link - oh, just Buzzfeed. I spend my life there now.

3.) The blog post - Washington Wife has put up another two hilarious posts - read 'em here and here.

Lucia on Holiday

Many of us sigh despondently when we reach the end of a much-loved book or series of books.  It seems unfair, somehow, that there is no third book in the Winnie the Pooh series, or that Jane Austen wrote no sequel to Pride and Prejudice, or that E.F. Benson, despite being incredibly prolific, only wrote six books in the Mapp and Lucia series - and only three featuring both heroines together.

In each of these cases, other authors have stepped into the authors' shoes.  I wrote about David Benedictus's Return to the Hundred Acre Wood earlier in the year, and of the writing of Jane Austen sequels there is no end.  Some are brilliant (Diana Birchall's Mrs. Darcy's Dilemma, for instance) and some are decidedly not.  Our eagerness for more of our favourite characters is matched only be our wariness and trepidation that usurping authors will have made a mess of things.  Thank goodness, then, for Guy Fraser-Sampson.

I adore the sniping, gloriously funny world of Mapp and Lucia, and I know I will read and re-read Benson's books throughout my life. But it's also wonderful to know that there are others to read when the series is complete.  I've not tried Tom Holt's two sequels, although they are waiting on my shelves, but I love and adore Major Benjy and (now) Lucia on Holiday by Guy F-S.

The reason they are so delicious is that Guy 'gets' the voice of Benson so perfectly.  I can honestly say that, while reading Lucia on Holiday, I kept forgetting that it wasn't Benson's pen which had written it - and what higher compliment could possibly be paid?

Lucia on Holiday takes place after Mapp and Lucia, but it is not made clear exactly when in the chronology the story takes place. The ambiguity is bashfully explained in the introduction - because there is an event in the novel which dates it very precisely, but which would make it a touch out of kilter with the publication history of the original series - but, as Guy says in this introduction, since Benson moved his principal village from one county to another, he'd be very forgiving.  It does not, in the end, much matter - Mapp and Lucia et al behave precisely as they would at any point in their history.

As you may guess from the title, Lucia is on holiday - she cashes in some clever (if risky) investments, and heads off to Italy with husband Georgie in tow.  But Elizabeth Mapp isn't having that, of course - not for she to be gloried over forever in Tilling society.  Luckily, her friendly Maharajah wishes his son to be accompanied on holiday to Europe... and Mapp decides that precisely Lucia's hotel would be the best place.  Mr and Mrs Wyse also turn up, as does my favourite character, insouciant opera singer Olga Bracely, so (with a few Bensonian coincidences) we have a microcosm of Tilling society gathered.  If we miss Quaint Irene and Diva Plaistow, then, well, we've coped without Daisy Quantock for several books, and both ladies are much present in recollection and quotation.

What ensues certainly has a plot, and goes nearer the knuckle than Benson could possibly have done in the 1920s and 1930s (c.f. Georgie and his handsome valet), but is chiefly joyful for the constant oneupmanship and subtle bitchery between our heroines.  Anyone who has read the original series will be familiar with the sort of thing - neither ever makes an outright insult (or, if they do, it is in an unguarded moment) - but there are plenty that hide behind the thinnest of veils.  Lucia delights, for example, in making subtle references to occasions on which Mapp sabotaged someone else's cake, and Mapp... well, Mapp, as always (sadly!) so rarely gets the overhand.  And, as always, I cheer her on, hoping that Lucia will be smited just once.

As I say, Guy F-S has understood and echoed Benson's tone so wonderfully - I especially like his moments of narrative bitching, exposing the self-delusion of the grande dames.  This excerpt, early in the novel, was the moment I cheerfully knew I was in safe hands - it is perfect as a depiction of how ridiculous Mapp is, and how delusional:

"Benjy!" she gasped, clasping her hands together in what she felt sure was girlish glee. "But of course - that's brilliant!"

My only reservations in characterisation were that things are pushed that tiniest bit too far for my liking.  Georgie seems genuinely to hate Lucia much of the time, without the constant, grudging admiration and love he feels in the original series (although this does come out eventually in Lucia on Holiday).  Mapp is a shade too monstrous, and Major Benjy a shade too lascivious - but these are only shades, and the fact that it comes down to tiny details is itself astonishing.

Of course, you must start with the originals.  If you haven't read them, do start with Queen Lucia (not Mapp and Lucia itself, which is the fourth in the series) - you may have to struggle past the baby talk, which is mercifully scarce in Guy F-S's book, but it's worth it.  Once you've read and relished them - you can be overjoyed to know that these will be waiting.

Peter and Alice

One or two of you (*cough* Samara *cough*) have been asking when I'll get around to writing about seeing Judi Dench in Peter and Alice and, truth be told, it's been on my conscience for a bit.  Considering I spent my undergraduate years writing theatre reviews for the student newspaper, and being drama editor for a couple of terms, this should really be right up my street, shouldn't it?  But I find student theatre rather easier to analyse and critique than theatre of this calibre - so this won't be a review per se, but more a blog about an experience.

My friend Andrea and I have similar tastes in film and theatre, and have seen quite a few plays together (before the days of easy online booking, in our undergraduate days, we used to squabble over who would have phone the theatre company) and now we have a two-person film club where we watch plenty of older films - remind me to write about the fantastically funny 1944 film On Approval.  Indeed, the only real fault Andrea has is that she (wrongly) believes that Maggie Smith is superior to Judi Dench.  What nonsense.  Dame J is obviously the best.

Well, to persuade Andrea to see the error of her ways (ahem) we went off to see Peter and Alice. A colleague at the Bodleian told me about it, and I couldn't believe quite how perfect it sounded.  Not only was Judi Dench in it (did I mention?) but it combined one of my favourite books (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) with one I very much like (Peter Pan).  Even better, the playwright - John Logan - didn't pick these names out of nowhere.  Did you know that the woman who inspired Alice once met the man who inspired Peter? 'Tis true - it happened at a bookshop, as they were preparing to speak at an event.

And this is where the stage is set as the play begins - with a fantastic bookshop set, high shelves, ladders, and all. It'll come as no surprise to you to know that I loved that.  Note to all set designers everywhere: nothing is more captivating than books on stage.  Correction: nothing except Judi Dench - for she soon enters, to meet the ambling, nervous Peter Davies (played by Ben Whishaw, of Q fame).  Alice Hargreaves (nee Liddell) is quite the opposite - confident, rather brusque, and with that wonderful spirit with which Judi Dench so often infuses her characters.

(Can we take a moment, folks, to acknowledge how provoking it is to me that JUDI DENCH was on stage playing MRS HARGREAVES.  Do you know how close that it is - in my head, at least - to an adaptation of Miss Hargreaves, my favourite novel?  Oh, Lady Theatre, how you tease me so.)

At first, Alice doesn't know who Peter is - he does, after all, introduce himself as a publisher, asking about the possibility of her memoirs - and it is not until she says something along the lines of "You have no idea what it's like" that Peter reveals that he does, in fact, know exactly what it is like.

From there, Peter and Alice goes a bit mad - in the best possible way; in a way that is perfectly in keeping with Wonderland and Neverland.  The bookshop set is pulled up to the ceiling, and behind is a land with Tenniel and picaresque illustrations intermingled.  J.M. Barrie, Lewis Carroll, Alice, and Peter (the fictional characters in these last two cases) all join the stage, and the dialogue whips back and forth among them all.  Childhood memories mix with retrospective reservations, which interweave with the excited shouts of the childish characters, or the justifications of the authors.  It should be confusing, but the excellent writing and acting mean that it is not.  So many tones come together - there are moments of nostalgia, and seeing Judi Dench take on the gait and manner of a young girl is quite breathtaking to see; there are moments of recrimination; of guilt; of confusion; of regret.

For all its joys and surrealism, there is certainly a strong feeling of sadness to the play.  I was worried that Logan would wander off into the (largely unsubstantiated) accusations of paedophilia towards Barrie and Carroll, but instead he focuses on the undeniable after-effects of being forever associated with fictional character - especially, as in Peter Davies's case, when the character was closer to his brother Michael anyway.  I cried.

Perhaps nothing new is revealed about these people in Logan's play - how could it, when it takes place chiefly in impossible lands, in an impossible amalgam of thoughts and memories? But it does bring together everything one has ever suspected about the lives of Alice and Peter, and a great deal that one would only know from biographies.  The midpath between nostalgic indulgence and Nihilistic noir has been expertly judged - and perfectly acted by a brilliant cast, led, of course, by Dench and Whishaw.

I have only been to two plays which received standing ovations, I believe.  One was the final performance of All My Sons, with David Suchet leading the cast, and which is the best thing I have ever seen on stage.  The second, as you will have guessed, is Peter and Alice.  Some of the reviews have been mixed, but I can't tell why.

I have only just gone to investigate dates, and seen that it closed shortly after I saw it.  I had hoped to send you all off to see it.  If it is ever revived, particularly if the cast is the same (does that ever happen?) make sure you are first in line.

Books from Felixstowe

As promised, here are the books I bought in Felixstowe... I intended to take a photo of them on the beach, but I forgot, so... here they all are at Felixstowe train station...

Almost all of these came from Treasure Chest Books (which was even more wonderful than I'd remembered - it looks like quite a small shop, but just keeps going on and on, room after room) but I'll start with the one that wasn't. I can't remember the name of the shop it came from, actually... a secondhand bookshop nearer the sea, anyway.  Having been to Guy's wonderful talk, I couldn't leave behind a copy of E.F. Benson's first book (and, during his life, his most successful) - Dodo.

Let's start at the top of the pile, shall we?

Patricia Brent, Spinster - Herbert Jenkins
Although the word 'spinster' in a book title is almost certain to make me want a copy on my shelves, this one comes with an even greater recommendation - or series of them, because several people from my online book list have been reading this one lately.

Virginia Woolf - E.M. Forster
You can barely see it in the picture, but there's a little pamphlet in the pile.  I love it when authors write about other authors, so E.M. Forster on Virginia Woolf sounds great - indeed, I have actually read it in the Bodleian, and now I get to have my own copy.

The Windfall - Christopher Milne
I do already own this, but I couldn't leave it behind when it was only £1... so I'll find someone to give this to at some point...

Magda - Meike Zeirvogel
Meike is better known to many of us as the doyenne of Peirene Press - I think I was actually offered a review copy of this, but knew I wouldn't be likely to have a chance to read it for a while, and this way I get to try it without the self-imposed time pressure!

Moving House - Katharine Moore
I love the idea of someone publishing their first novel in their 80s, and have previously enjoyed Moore's letters with Joyce Grenfell, and her novel Summer at the Haven.

Nothing Sacred - Angela Carter
I keep stocking up my Carter shelves, and I've still only read one book by her... but now I have another one!

Mr. Bridge - Evan Connell
There has been quite a lot of talk about this, and Mrs. Bridge, in the blogosphere lately - and Simon S's recent review of the latter made me want to give Connell a try.

My Father and Myself - J.R. Ackerley
There might be people in the world who can see a beautiful NYRB Classics edition of an author they've been intending to read - but I am not one of these people.  This comes as no surprise, does it?

Dodo - E.F. Benson
As mentioned above!

On The Side of the Angels - Betty Miller
See my comment about NYRB Classics, and transpose to Virago Modern Classics...

This is Sylvia - Sandy Wilson
A £1 sale means I give things like this a go... the memoirs of a cat! It could be very funny or it could be utterly mawkish. We'll see...

Autobiography - Enid Bagnold
This book wasn't in the £1 sale, but I couldn't resist buying it... once I saw that it was signed by Enid Bagnold, with a lovely inscription from her. One to treasure!

As always, do let me know if you've read any of these, or if any are tickling your reading fancies.
Over to you!

Run, Baby, Run. Write, Baby, Write.

by Amy Franklin Willis

2013, I completed my first half-marathon.  That’s 13.1 miles.  I am not a runner.

I do not possess the classic “runner’s body”—i.e. all hard, pointy edges of lean muscle and solid compactness.  At forty-one, I am round, curvy, soft, fleshiness.

In college I was on the rowing team.  But that was twenty years and three children ago.  Over the past decade I ran short distances to forestall the middle-age gut intent on wrapping itself around my waist.

As 2012 drew to a close, an ad for the Bay Area women’s running store See Jane Run’s half-marathon featuring Champagne and chocolate caught my attention.  Champagne and chocolate are among my top all-time combinations, above Laverne & Shirley re-runs and below “beach cottage.”

When my eldest daughter expressed interest in doing the marathon together, I committed, entranced by visions of us crossing the finish line simultaneously, cue Chariots of Fire theme music.  Those visions evaporated in to the mist—discarded next to my fantasies of a perfectly clean and organized home and a bottomless well of maternal patience--when our training runs proved that my fourteen year old ran at a slightly faster pace.  In short, she left me in the dust.

For the first half mile, I maintained contact with Georgia, her slender, classic runner’s shape always just ahead in the distance.  But then her muscles would warm and her pace would quicken and my muscles would warm and my pace would stay the same and I would have to content myself with a shouted, “Make sure your cell phone is on!”

Two months before the race, we got serious and tackled a nine-miler around Lake Chabot and then a relentlessly boring, unmarked 11.5 mile trail along the Hayward Shoreline—for the first four miles I told myself it was the Cornish coast of England and I was running towards my thatched roof cottage but my rational self caught on quickly and said, that is the San Francisco Bay, Amy, and you are running this trail so you can run the race and not embarrass yourself.

We logged over one hundred and fifty training miles.  And during those interminable stretches of aloneness and unpluggedness—running at Lake Chabot offered preening wild turkeys, a great egret surveying the water, and a brush rabbit huddled alongside the trail that distracted me enough not to require pulsing digital beats in my ears—I recognized the singular truth of running.

The only way to fail was to stop.

To cease putting one foot in front of the other.

And, in fact, the only way to rest the burning, fatigued muscles was to run faster, to reach the end more quickly.

Before 2013, I had never run distances longer than three miles but this business of just slogging through, quarter mile after quarter mile, struck me as very similar to writing novels.

Novels are the marathon of the writing world.  People, generally short story writers, argue that other types are more difficult and I think this is complete and utter nonsense.  Sustaining a coherent and interesting fictional story over the course of eighty-thousand some odd words is a uniquely challenging endeavor not meant for the meek.  It takes days, weeks, months, and more often than not, years to get a novel done.

You begin with an idea—a character who intrigues you, a situation that puzzles you, a setting you want to memorialize within a story.  The writer has no guarantee she will finish.  No assurance the idea can grow and stretch and bear the weight of three hundred pages without collapsing in to the ash of might-have-been stories.  One never knows what obstacles narrative will present us.   A character who does not perform as the plot requires.  A structure that is impossibly complex.  An unsatisfying resolution.  

In the beginning, the writer can also not anticipate what the outside world will throw at her.  She may be diagnosed with a life-threatening disease.  She may divorce her spouse.  She may lose her job.  She may temporarily take leave of her senses.  Her children may experience physical or mental crises.

Each one diverts her from the writing.  From the story.  From finishing.

On race day, the weather report predicted record highs for parts of the Bay Area and, most troubling, no cloud cover. Georgia and I trained in low 70s temperatures with abundant cooling fog.   The See Jane Run course was set on the quasi-island of Alameda, a small city attached to Oakland by drawbridges and fragile stretches of land, and thus typically prone to breezes off the San Francisco Bay and the Oakland Estuary.

As I hit the first mile and a half of the race, three truths emerged:  in my nervousness, I neglected to put sun screen on either myself or Georgia; the sun appeared intent on burning stubbornly hot and bright for the first half of the course; and lastly, the race was going to be much more difficult than I imagined.

Novel writing is a grind.  The only way to complete one is to make the pages pile up.  I force myself through this by using daily and weekly word count goals.  Printing the pages and seeing their vertical height grow is the only way I know to push forward through the story.  It’s the structure I impose on a task that feels all too loose and magic-like, subject to the idle winds of procrastination and despair.

The middle is the worst part.  In the race, miles six through eleven felt like twenty.  I was beginning to tire—hamstrings pulling ever tighter; multiple water blisters forming on my right foot, disappointment that the course wound through bland office parks and covered acres of steaming blacktop, the sun leaving a swath of my right arm blazing.

Mile thirteen nowhere in sight.

In writing, the middle is where I lose my mind and my faith.  It’s the point in the story where everything gets complicated and is not at all like you thought it might be and the ending you originally had in mind is now, clearly, not going to work.  The writer may say to herself, What have I done?

And this is the dangerous part.  The part where she is most likely to give up.  To stop because it has become too hard.

At the start of the race, I found a pacer—a person who carries a sign with the miles per hour pace she promises to keep and who functions as your beacon in the midst of five thousand running bodies trying to throw off your pace.  I thought, yes, this is a pace quicker than my usual but surely I can do it.  And won’t it be better to run with this group connected to her?

I couldn't keep up.  My race pace ended up two minutes slower than my normal training pace.  Why?  No idea.  The heat?  Concern about failing to finish?

Around mile seven I settled in to a pace far behind the last of the pace ladies.  It was just me and a small Wonder Woman doll tucked in to my belt for inspiration.  It was the speed I could manage.

When I hit mile eleven, I rejoiced.  I knew I could finish the last two miles.  The course curved next to the bay and nearby home owners held hoses over their yards to give runners a cooling mist.  A young girl of seven pointed a hose at me and I ran through it grinning, my arms thrown open wide.  People held up signs of encouragement as we passed—“U Hella Inspire Me”--and the clang of cowbells rang out.  A man in his forties and his teenage son gave me a high-five, yelling, “Finish strong.  You’re almost there.”

A novel requires fortitude.  And when one passes through the valley of the shadow of the middle, if you can keep going, keep putting one word after another, the end will rise up before you.

If you are lucky enough to have people cheering you as your near it, all the better.  If not, you cheer yourself.  You see the end coming.  You write it.  You collapse.  You celebrate.

Fifty feet from the finish line I caught sight of my six and ten year old daughters and my seventy year old mother.  The long wait finally over, they hooted.  They hollered.  They jumped up and down.  In that moment, the six stinging blisters and the tight hamstrings disappeared from my consciousness, making room for joy.

And then I saw my wife and my oldest.  Georgia had arrived fifteen minutes earlier.  The “I Ran for Chocolate” medal already around her neck.

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Amy Franklin-Willis's debut novel The Lost Saints of Tennessee is out in paperback now.  She is writing more and running less this summer.

Felixstowe Book Festival: reporting back

Well, what a wonderful weekend!

Elaine and I in the lovely ex-stable venue

Felixstowe Book Festival may be in its first year, but you wouldn't have guessed it from the polished organisation, public enthusiasm, and general success of the weekend.  It certainly looks encouraging that there will be many more, and I would definitely like to go along to future years.

I should report back on my talk with Elaine - I'd decided that I would be happy if there were 6 people in the audience, so I was delighted with 14 - particularly since they were an incredibly friendly, engaged audience who seemed genuinely interested, and (what's more) laughed at our jokes - for example, Colin, you got a mention with your comment that you "read Stuck-in-a-Book, except for the bookish bits".

Our talk was about book blogging in general and particular - how it fits in with traditional media, how we got involved ourselves - and then onto the changing opinions of publishers towards bloggers (we especially cheered on the forward-thinking enthusiasm of Bloomsbury) and meeting people from the internet.  We were a bit nervous that we hadn't got enough material, but we needn't have worried - since Elaine and I have known each for so long, we were able to bounce off one another, and add in extra anecdotes and comments in turn.  All in all, I'm very pleased with how it went, and want to thank the audience for making it such a fun experience - and, of course, thank lovely Elaine for asking me to participate.

Elaine, me, Linda

In that audience were two online author friends, Guy Fraser-Sampson and Linda Gillard.  It was lovely to see Guy again, for the third time I think, and his talk on E.F. Benson's family and Mapp and Lucia was sublimely funny (as is the second Mapp & Lucia book Guy has written, Lucia on Holiday, which I read this weekend and will post about soon.)  And I finally got to meet Linda, having known her online for, gosh, the best part of a decade - and, of course, loving her novels. We had a lovely long chat, and it was an absolute delight.  It was a good weekend for meeting online friends, because I also met a lovely lady called Daphne, who has been an online friend for about as long as Linda, I believe - and is an absolute scream, I must add.

Daphne also asked me, after I'd spent a couple of hours browsing the two excellent secondhand bookshops in Felixstowe, whether I'd bought anything.  I think she probably knew the answer anyway.  Treasure Chest Books (the one I remembered from a trip to Felixstowe aged about 16) had a sale, so that most of their fiction was £1 each. I came away with quite a haul... all will be revealed in my next post!

Bookish weekend

Oh dear! I seem to have opened a can of worms with my comments on Dorothy L Sayers... I've read two (Strong Poison and Gaudy Night), wasn't hugely impressed by the former, and liked the latter even less... I shan't go into much detail, because I don't want to upset her fans, but suffice to say that Sayers and Lord Peter are not for me! To propitiate Sayers fans, here is a piece written by Diana on the OxfordWords blog today, commissioned by yours truly.

And another reminder that I'll be appearing (with Elaine) at the Felixstowe Book Festival on Saturday - I spent the evening putting together some notes for it, which has got me quite excited and looking forward to it.  My one hope is that people come, so if you live remotely near Felixstowe, please do come along and introduce yourself!  More details here.

The next few days are going to be really busy, so this might be my last post until Monday.  Have a fantastic few days, and I'll let you know how the talk went!

And PLEASE bully me until I write about seeing Judi Dench in Peter and Alice, and the excellently funny 1944 film I watched the other day.

In my absence... why not tell me what you're reading?  I'm just about to finish my first book by Winifred Holtby - but perhaps not one you'd expect to be my first...

So How's the Book Coming? or Why You Shouldn't Talk to Non-Publishing People About Publishing

by Mindy McGinnis

Those of us interested in publishing have heard it - publishing is slow. And you can hear it, believe, and know it - but until you've actually experienced it, you can't quite respect the amazing molasses flow that it truly is. I've written before about why it takes so long for a book to make it publication, so that's not what this post is about. Instead, this concerns how to talk to people outside of the publishing bubble about... publishing.

Quick answer: you just don't.

Seriously. Do you think someone actually wants to hear about how long it took you to go from first draft to final edit? Does your neighbor really care how long your edit letter was? Does your mom want to hear about the sex scene that just had to go? Um, probably not.

So, for example - I signed the contract for NOT A DROP TO DRINK two years ago. Yes, two years ago (hint, it's still not out). At that point in time it was in fact, a finished book. It wasn't polished and edited. It hadn't gone through first pass pages or copyediting. But it was a book with a beginning, a middle and an end - and that was two years ago.

It's been through some experiences since then, lots of little morphs and changes. Some commas sliding away, some periods slipping in. A few cut scenes that weren't necessary in the first place, some combined dialogue and shaved tags. Essentially at its core, it's still the same book it was two years ago. It's just shinier and better.

So - fast forward to... oh let's say any day of the week last month when a very nice, sincere, random person (no, this isn't directed at anyone, it's happened about 2,000 times) says, "Hey! How's the book coming?"

The honest answer - It's already came and went. The book is finished. It existed in its entirety two years ago. It's existed in it's final stage for nearly six months. It stopped "coming" and has in fact receded to a far point in my head where I have to go fact-check occasionally when talking about it to people, because I've written two other books since I worked on it last.

But I can't expect people outside of publishing to understand that. Just like an eye doctor can't expect me to understand how my glasses help me see, and why I absolutely cannot get my head around how a cell phone works, even though I'm sure there are people out there whose job it is to understand that.

Likewise, it's not the average person's job to understand that the book about to come out in a few months isn't something you're still working on. So, when people ask me "How's the book coming?" I smile and say, "Great!"
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Mindy McGinnis is a YA author and librarian. Her debut, NOT A DROP TO DRINK, is a post-apocalyptic survival tale set in a world where freshwater is almost non-existent, available from Katherine Tegen / Harper Collins September 24, 2013. She blogs at Writer, Writer Pants on Fire and contributes to the group blogs Book Pregnant, Friday the Thirteeners, From the Write Angle, The Class of 2k13, The Lucky 13s & The League of Extraordinary Writers. You can also find her on Twitter, Tumblr & Facebook.

Folio & Agatha

photo source

For those of us who love the book as a physical, aesthetic object, the Folio Society is spoken of with breathless delight.  They are the antidote to the ebook or the mass market paperback - their beautiful hardbacks with slipcovers, with exquisite paper and specially commissioned illustrations, are joys on anybody's shelves.  Since they're at the pricier end of the book market, I don't have huge numbers, although I do prize the first one I ever owned - Selected Stories of Katherine Mansfield, given by my friend Barbara, which not only introduced me to one of my favourite writers, but to the beauty of Folio.  I'm under no obligations to say anything about them, I should mention, but they really are perfect gift books, and I aspire to having shelves full of them one day.

This became all the clearer when, yesterday evening, I sat in their members' room in Bloomsbury, shelves and tables filled with their beautiful books.  I managed not to shove any in my bag, you'll be pleased to know - except for the one they sent me home with in my goody bag, which was the Miss Marple Short Stories - because I was in London to hear a talk about Agatha Christie by her biographer Laura Thompson, in the company of various other bloggers.  I'd only actually met one before, and we just said hello across the room - most of those present seemed to be crime bloggers, and know each other, but I did get to chat to a lady from a fashion blog with a sideline in book blogs.  If a fashionista is going to like any books, they ought to be Folio books.

Anyway, there is nothing quite like hearing about Agatha Christie.  I think only Jane Austen unites so many diverse readers in eager agreement and enthusiasm - but, while most Austen fanatics have read all her novels (even if not her abbreviated novels, letters etc.) it's quite possible to love Agatha Christie without having read a very big percentage of her prolific output.  Take me, for instance - I love Dame Agatha.  Like many people, she was my transition from teenage reading to adult reading.  And yet I've only read (quick scurry to Wikipedia) 16 or 17 of her novels.  So many left to discover!

Thankfully Laura Thompson didn't assume we'd all have read everything by Christie, and so she didn't give away endings - or at least she didn't give away specific endings, so she mentioned that a murderer turned out to be a child, or every possible candidate, or a suicide - but didn't spoil which novels these endings belonged to.  (Please be similarly considerate in the comments!)

And, indeed, Laura Thompson's talk and Q&A afterwards was brilliant all round.  She was very personable, and obviously a big fan of Christie as well as a biographer (has anybody read her biography, incidentally?  I haven't, but want to now.)  Her favourite Christie novel is Five Little Pigs - she said that the plot movements and character movements work in sync beautifully, which makes me want to read that too - and, conversely, The Clocks is her least favourite.  My favourite comment she made was that Agatha Christie didn't feel the need to prove herself better than the detective novel genre.  She embraced it, and (as Thompson said too) although she thought a lot about what she did, she didn't analyse what she did.

My feelings are that Agatha Christie is such a perfect detective novelist that other authors don't only seem inferior, but seem failures.  They have wandered from the blueprint Christie excelled at - her plots are almost always breathtakingly flawless - and so people like Dorothy L Sayers and Margery Allingham barely even qualify as detective novelists to me, however enjoyable they may be in other  qualities (and, for my money, Sayers is short of those too!)

I asked a question about Christie's romantic novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott - which I've never read - and turns out they were better reviewed than her main output!  Thompson adds that some are, indeed, very good.

All in all, a highly enjoyable (if swelteringly hot) evening, which has cemented my admiration for Folio books and my affection for Agatha Christie.  Thank you, Folio!

The Road to Publication Is A Long & Bumpy One

by Erin Cashman

I gained a lot of weight with my first pregnancy. So much that I closed my eyes during weigh-ins at the doctor’s office. I didn’t want to know the numbers on the scale. After I had my third child, I started dieting and exercising, and after many months of limiting my chocolate and ice cream intake (torture!), enduring aerobic classes, power walks, etc., I finally lost most of the weight. Many people asked me how I did it. Surely I knew some secret. A half a grapefruit before meals? Eating anything I wanted but stopping at 4? Eating only purple food? No one wanted to hear the truth. Lately several people have asked me about how I became published. But, like my weight loss, what they really want to know is what’s the secret. These writers (and I used to be one of them) have written a book, queried countless agents and editors, and still have no publishing deal. There must be a secret they don’t know about. Well, I’m here to tell you that there isn’t. The road to publication is a long one, filled with pot holes, detours, and road blocks.

My debut novel, The Exceptionals, was published last year. It was my third finished novel. It took eight long years from the date I started writing my first novel until my third one was published. And six years of writing, revising and editing two different manuscripts, querying agents and submitting partial and fulls until The Exceptionals sold. I asked the writers here at Book Pregnant what their experiences were. Most of us have written at least one other (often several other!) book that never was published. So, like me, our “debut” novel is really our third, fourth, fifth . . . you get the idea. Several BPers (as we call ourselves) found an agent, but the agent couldn’t sell that manuscript. One author worked on writing and revising her book for seventeen (yes, seventeen!) years. Two different agents tried to sell her manuscript but were unable. Finally she sold it herself. Another worked on her novel for eleven years, and she had two different agents and two different editors. In fact, many of the authors in this blog have had more than one agent. As Lydia Netzer, author of Shine, Shine, Shine told me: “Shine was not my first book, or even my second or third, that I got through a FIRST draft of, however it was the first book I got to a FINAL draft of.”  One writer told me that the reason he thinks his debut novel (not his first finished manuscript) sold was that he had thirty years of rejection behind him, to learn from.

And that’s the key. To learn from the rejections. Maybe the novel needs more revising, maybe the plot is too convoluted, maybe the characters aren’t compelling enough. Take a long, hard look at your book and try to find areas for improvement. Why do I tell you all this? To depress you? No. Exactly the opposite. There is no trick. There is no a secret that we published authors know that you don’t. If you hope to be published one day, work tirelessly on your manuscript. Revise and edit, and then revise and edit again. Join a critique group or find a critique partner if you can, a fresh set of eyes (not a friend, or a family member, but another writer!) can make a huge difference. Sometimes I know the story I’m writing so well that it’s hard for me to see the problems with it. Read everything you can get your hands on. Devour books. It will help you “know” if something doesn’t ring true or is stale or cliché. And most importantly, don’t give up.  We didn’t!
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Erin Cashman is a YA author. Her debut fantasy novel, THE EXCEPTIONALS, was published by Holiday House in 2012 and named a Bank Street College of Education Best Book of the Year. You can find her at the group blogs The Enchanted Inkpot, BookPregnant Blog, and on Twitter, Facebook, and her Website

Me, elsewhere...

Quick post today, pointing you in the direction of two posts I've written for other people!

Today I appear on Vulpes Libris as part of their Poetry Week - explaining why I struggle to get on with it!  (I also throw in some of those poems about authors I wrote recently.)

And last week I appeared on the OxfordWords blog, writing about Alanis Morissette. Great fun!

Some Tame Gazelle - postscript

Following on from my review of Some Tame Gazelle, below... I'm too late to enter Thomas's competition for designing your own Barbara Pym cover (it closed on 7 June) and nothing can compare to the beautiful Moyer Bell designs he posts here, but I couldn't resist giving it a go anyway.  And I only have MS Paint to work with...

Teacup image from here

Some Tame Gazelle - Barbara Pym

I wasn't intending to join in with Barbara Pym Reading Week, which I've seen everywhere around the blogosphere (well done Thomas and Amanda!) and, it seems, I might be late to the party - because I hadn't spotted that the week ended on a Saturday.  Oops.  Well, hopefully they'll let me sneak in as a last minute participant, because I have just finished Some Tame Gazelle (1950) - Pym's first novel - because I realised Mum had given it to me, and thus it would qualify for Reading Presently too.

This isn't my first Pym - although it is only my second.  The first one I read, back in 2004, was Excellent Women.  I'd rather expected to love Barbara Pym devotedly, and was a bit nonplussed by my lukewarm response.  I certainly liked it, but it wasn't quite what I was expecting - it was set in London, for a start, which wasn't at all what I envisioned Pym being like.

Some Tame Gazelle, at any rate, is set in the countryside.  That helped me get in the right frame of mind.  It has the same "three or four families in a country village" that Jane Austen recommended as the perfect novelistic topic (for her niece at least, and to many Pym is a figurative niece of Austen) - more emphatically, it reminded me of the close-but-carping rural communities inhabited by Mapp and Lucia in E.F. Benson's series of novels.

The families in question are really households, I suppose.  I shan't write too much about the plot, because there have been so many reviews of Some Tame Gazelle in the blogosphere this week (scroll through Thomas's blog to find all Barbara Pym Reading Week links), but I'll give a brief precis.  Belinda and Harriet Bede are eldely sisters living together, and we see most of the goings-on of the village through Belinda's eyes (although Pym often gives a moment or two from perspective of other characters, which gets a bit dizzying.)  Neither are immune from the arrow of Cupid - the title, indeed, derives from the poet Thomas Bayly:

Some tame gazelle, or some gentle dove:
Something to love, oh, something to love!

 Harriet develops a love for every curate she sees - a love somewhere between maternal and romantic - while Belinda is more constant in her love.  It's for their local vicar, an Archdeacon, who was with Belinda at university, is unaffectionately married, and gives sermon which were 'a long string of quotations, joined together by a few explanations'.  Indeed, a less lovably man would be difficult to create.  He is selfish, snaps at everyone, quotes self-importantly and at length at the drop of a hat, neglects most of his vicarly duties... and yet I get the idea that we are not supposed to think Belinda foolish in her affections.  Is he in the same boat as Jean-Benoit Aubrey, Heathcliff, Rochester, and all manner of other literary romantic heroes whose charms entirely pass me by?  Belinda, on the other hand, is very lovable - as, indeed, is Harriet, despite one being cautious and the other impetuous.

But I suspect Pym is chiefly read for her tone.  As I mentioned, she is frequently mentioned in the same breath as Jane Austen - recently by Thomas himself - and while (from my limited experience of two Pym novels) I would say she has neither Austen's genius nor her tautness, Pym is certainly a worthy successor to Austen's love of irony.  And now, of course, I can find no examples.  But time and again the narrative voice says something which coyly suggests - oh so innocently - that the character is foolish, or doesn't know as much as they pretend, or in some other is not being honest.   This narrator is far too polite to say so outright, and isn't so common as to wink, but... raises her eyebrows a touch.

As for me?  I still like Pym.  I liked Some Tame Gazelle rather more than Excellent Women - it was funny, affectionate, moving without being heavy-handed.  As the son of a vicar, I relished reading about church families, even while it all seemed rather unlikely from my experience. It even felt like the 1930s novels I love so dearly (although published in 1950, I couldn't work out when it was meant to be set - everyone has servants, and levels of propriety are decidedly pre-war, but I suppose these things were both true for some 1950 villages).  But I still don't love Pym.  I love Jane Austen, and (later) E.F. Benson, E.M. Delafield, and other authors who laid out the blueprint Pym picked up - but I still felt as though I were reading at one remove from the originals.  And, of course, even Austen was not an original - if I'd read Pym before I'd read Austen, perhaps I would love Pym more.

If other people did not love Pym so wholeheartedly, then I think I would sound very enthusiastic.  I think Pym is a very good writer, and Some Tame Gazelle is a lovely novel - but it will not be on my top ten for this year, I suspect.  Perhaps I am still too young?  Perhaps I am too familiar with the generation above Pym. When so many people rate her as one of their absolute favourites, even my very-much-liking of Pym feels a little bit like a failure.

What I really do love is the cover, and indeed all the covers of these Virago Pym reprints.  But curiously I can't find any information about the designer or artist on the book jacket - I hope I'm just being dozy, because otherwise very poor show Virago.  Very poor show indeed.

Books, Baguettes, and Bedbugs - Jeremy Mercer

First things first: I added an Oxford comma to the title of this book in the subject line, and I'm going to be doing the same throughout.  That's just how I roll.

Secondly - I've found that any exercise which makes one turn to unread books on one's shelves, whether that be the TBR Double Dare, A Century of Books, or Reading Presently, brings up all sorts of unexpected joys.  That's hardly a surprise, perhaps, but it does give me pause for thought - how many wonderful books are waiting for me in my own room?  I have about 1000 unread books, probably - if a tenth of them are as good as Books, Baguettes, and Bedbugs (2005) is, then I've got some definite treats ahead of me.  Thank you Charley, for buying this for my birthday in (gulp) 2010.

Books, Baguettes, and Bedbugs was published as Time Was Soft There in the US, but for some reason the publishers decided we Brits couldn't cope with such high-flown language, and gave us this variant title - rather unfairly, since at one point it is made clear that there weren't any bedbugs.  I'm getting ahead of myself - this is Mercer's non-fiction account of living in Paris's famous Shakespeare & Co bookshop for a year.  I've visited it myself - indeed, the first ever photograph I put of myself on Stuck-in-a-Book is outside the shop - and although it isn't much of a treasure trove for the secondhand bibliophile, being mostly new books now, it is an amazing place to visit.

But I was a few years too late to move in.  Although (unbeknownst to me) George Whitman was still alive when I visited in 2010 - he died in 2011 - it was no longer a haven for artistic types from around the world.  When Jeremy Mercer arrived at the turn of the 21st century, he could not really be considered an artistic type.  Before I started reading Books, Baguettes, and Bedbugs, I'd rather assumed it would be about cosy, literary folk, and that Mercer myself would be the sort of bespectacled, cardigan-wearing book-fiend that I am myself.  Turns out, no.  He was only in Paris (from his native America) because someone had threatened his life after some criminal confidences were broken.  Mercer was a crime reporter who also wrote trashy true crime books, and his past exploits include attacking a neighbour and drug dealing.  Not exactly a lovable guy - and, although he is mostly repentant, I have to say I had a hard time reading the bits where he complained about being judged for attacking the neighbour.  Hmm.

But, if Mercer isn't exactly a man I'd invite round for a night watching As Time Goes By, he certainly knows how to write an engaging memoir.  In exchange for bed and board, he was chiefly expected to help out around the shop, and follow George's often curious whims:

The official store hours were noon to midnight, but most days George opened earlier to accommodate the crowds.  The major rule was that residents were expected to be out of bed in the morning to cart out boxes of books for the sidewalk display and sweep the floors before the customers arrived.  Beyond that, George liked everyone to help out for an hour each day, whether it be sorting books, washing dishes, or performing minor carpentry chores.  More idealistically, George also asked each resident to read a book a day from the library.  Kurt said many chose plays and novellas to meet the quota, but he was still tackling novels.

George does sound rather a strange taskmaster, expecting everyone to live on food taken from restaurants as they close for the night, criticising anyone for spending any money at all - but then losing thousands of francs by leaving the till unattended or hiding wads of notes behind books (some of which ended up being a nest for mice.)  George is 86 at the time that Mercer moves in, and as eccentric as they come - but still with an affection for young ladies.  This isn't romantically reciprocated by any of them, but it does explain why so many young women find themselves working curious hours at Shakespeare & Co.  And then Mercer discovers that George has a teenage daughter, and decides to reunite them...

That's quite a big moment in the memoir, engineering significant upheaval, but for the most part Books, Baguettes, and Bedbugs just tells of Mercer's everyday experiences with the hopeful, but yet slightly hopeless, artistic people surrounding him - from the ageing poet Simon to handsome, lost Kurt.  It;s not at all the portrait of Shakespeare & Co that I was expecting, but it is a fascinating glimpse into a small society that has only recently disappeared, and yet stretches back to the camaraderie and ethos of another time.

Four Hedges - Clare Leighton

I have no recollection why I put Clare Leighton's Four Hedges (1935) on my Amazon wishlist, but I'm assuming it was either because of a blogger or something Slightly Foxed mentioned (any guesses/answers?) - but it was enough to get my good friend Clare (not Leighton) to send this beautiful Little Toller edition to me for my birthday last year.  And where better to read a book about a garden, thought I, than in a garden.  So over the past few days, I've been reading it in study breaks from doing DPhil editing.  And reading it in a hammock.  Jealous at all?

It really wouldn't have worked to read Four Hedges in a city, because it is such a hymn to nature.  It's non-fiction (I always seem to forget that you can't know these things unless I mention them), and tells of Leighton's experience creating a garden, through the course of a year - the year isn't dated, but the garden is about three years old, and presumably it wasn't long before the book was published in 1935.

As you might have guessed by the cover, the book is filled with Leighton's woodcuts (I assume 'engravings on wood', as they are termed in the book, are the same as woodcuts?)  It was this that undoubtedly attracted me to Four Hedges - there is something so simply and dignified about a woodcut; such a celebration of the forms and movements of nature.  Leighton writes at one point that people don't appreciate the feel of nature enough, valuing only sight, sound, and smell - and, later, writes that flowers are considered too much for their colours, rather than their shapes.  Woodcuts are a rebuttal to both these errors, aren't?  Without colour, they somehow offer texture as well as appearance - at least, they do in the hands of a craftswoman like Leighton.

As you would suppose, a lot of her woodcuts show plants - and I can only presume that they are accurate, and might well be of especial interest to the botanist.  For my part, I particularly appreciated the ones with people or animals in them.  For I am almost entirely ignorant about nature.

That's a shocking thing to confess, for a country-boy who is desperate to get away from the city (even a city as beautiful as Oxford) and live in the countryside.  Right now I'm in my parents' garden in Somerset, listening to the cows in the adjacent field eating parts of the hedge (indeed, I can see a couple about two metres to my left) and I love it.  One day I will write properly about my deep love for everything about villages.  But, with nature, my love is passionate but uninformed.  I love nature in the way that I love friends - joyously living alongside them, discovering more about them when they want to share, but not needing to know everything in order to love.

But I was a bit nervous before starting Four Hedges.  A few years ago I read some letters between gardeners and, while I enjoyed the camaraderie and friendship, I didn't have much of a clue what was going on.  I don't know when certain plants need bedding, or when others need pruning.  Latin names are so many Flowerus floweriori to me.  I love gardens, but I love walking through them and not doing an ounce of work in them - because I loathe gardening.

Luckily, Four Hedges was still perfect for me.  True, Leighton took it for granted that her reader loved gardening, and would be entirely unable to resist weeding (believe me, I resist it very easily), but she also writes in a way that can be loved by anybody.  She writes about watching birds being reared and caterpillars metamorphosing; she writes about a baby goat moving into a nearby field, and the perils of windy days - most importantly of all, she writes about her thoughts, feelings, and responses.  It is a delight to hear how thrilled she is about bulb catalogues, and I was swept away with her admiration for certain weeds, reclaiming them from gardeners' snobbery.

It struck me how timeless this book was.  No mention is made of experiences outside the garden - barely even the house, to the extent that I thought there wasn't a house for a great part of the book.  Certainly no hints of a forthcoming war (which was obvious to most by the mid-'30s) or anything like that.  Everything in Four Hedges could be happeningin 1835, or today - the only anachronism would be the non-electric mower and the scythe.  (Having said that, in the last place I lived in Oxford, our landlords only gave us a non-electric mower - one of their very many oddities.)

Although Leighton does not write humorously (nor intends to), there is a great deal in common between joyful writing and comic writing.  They reach towards the same goal, of sharing and bringing delight - and Leighton is so joyful, so able to find excitement and hope in the smallest detail, that it is a lift to the spirits to read her words, even for the non-gardener.  And which entirely humourless gardener, after all, would write this:

We should never take our gardens too seriously.  It is hard to curb ourselves in this, if we have any love for our plants, even as it is difficult to take a walk round the garden without pulling up weeds.  But too professional an attitude is apt to give us the same taut, strained feeling that comes into the faces and lives of all specialists.  It is better to have a few weeds and untidy edges to our flowers beds, and to enjoy our garden, than to allow ourselves to be dominated by it.  To be able occasionally to shut our eyes to weeds is a great art.  Let us relax in our gardens, and as a dear old countrywoman used to say, let us "poddle" in them.  We waste else the very beauty for which we have worked.

I am never in danger of taking gardening too seriously, but it is refreshing to hear Leighton say this nonetheless - any expert or avid hobbyist should include humour and self-awareness in their activities, shouldn't they?  Now excuse me while I tend to my book collection - it's getting rather overgrown, and it's threatening to take over the floor.  A bit of weeding, and it'll be fine.