BooksPlease

New Blog

2008-05-20T14:49:00.009+01:00

BooksPlease has moved. You can now find me at www.booksplease.org - or click here. I do hope you will still visit my blog. All my old posts are over on the new blog as well as here but after today I'll just be using the new one.

Tuesday Thingers

2008-05-20T09:55:00.003+01:00

Marie, an Early Reviewer for LibraryThing, has started a weekly online get-together of LT book bloggers at her web site, The Boston Bibliophile. She says, "anyone is welcome to participate but the idea is to catch up with each other on what's new in our LT libraries- new books, books just finished, thoughts, anything like that." To participate, simply write a post in your blog, then go to her entry Tuesday Thingers and leave her a comment containing the link to your post.

This week's topic is: Discussion groups. Do you belong to any (besides Early Reviewers)? Approximately how many? Are there any in particular that you participate in more avidly? How often do you check?

First a little bit about LibraryThing and me. I’ve been adding our books (that’s mine and my husband’s) to LT for a while now. It’s very time-consuming but most rewarding, coming across old favourites I haven’t read for years. I’ve been doing in sections and I think most of the fiction is on there now and I’m working through the non-fiction.

Books have always been part of my life as long as I can remember. It was my father who suggested I could be a librarian and I can’t think why I hadn’t thought of it myself. I went to Manchester Library School at what was then Manchester Polytechnic (now part of Manchester University) and worked for a while for Manchester Public Libraries. I haven’t worked in a library since I left to start a family, although I did have a spell in a bookshop working as a cataloguer, in pre-computerised cataloguing days. When I found LT at first I thought I wouldn’t use it – after all I used to be a cataloguer. But I soon realised its benefits and signed up.

I have looked at the Discussion groups but have only joined the Early Reviewers group. I have had one book to review – Our Longest Days, which I wrote about in my last post. There are only a few books available through Early Reviewers for UK members, so I was really pleased I got a book at all. I do hope some more will come my way.

I suppose I check LT about once a week, more if I’m adding books. It all takes time. I’ve found that writing a blog and reading other people’s blogs is also more time-consuming than I’d realised and it all cuts into reading time.

Sunday Salon - Our Longest Days

2008-05-18T08:52:00.002+01:00

This week I've concentrated on reading Our Longest Days: A People’s History of the Second World War by the writers of Mass Observation, edited by Sandra Koa Wing. I've been completely immersed in the war years through this fascinating and personal book.

Mass Observation is a social research organisation, founded in 1937, with the aim of creating an "anthropology of ourselves" - a study of the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain. The information was gathered in various ways, including a team of paid observers and a national volunteer panel of writers. People were interviewed on a number of topics and filled in monthly ‘directives’ on themes such as jokes, eating habits, money and marriage. In August 1939, with war approaching, the organisation asked its panel to keep diaries to record their daily lives and selections from fifteen of these diaries are included in Our Longest Days. They make fascinating reading.

From Sandra Koa Wing’s introduction:

“It is worth noting, however, that the diarists did not represent a true cross-section of British society during the war. Although they came from a variety of backgrounds, and from different regions, most of them were middle-class, well-read and articulate. They tended to be people with a natural capacity for observing – and for recording what they observed. Moreover, on the whole their political leanings tended towards left of centre; several were pacifists or conscientious objectors.”

Because they are personal accounts there is that sense of being actually there during the air raids, hearing Churchill’s speeches, reading the newspaper reports, experiencing the grief at the number of casualties and deaths and the terrible devastation of the war, the food and clothes rationing and the excitement of D-Day. There is also the hopelessness of the defeats during the first years of the war, the weariness as it went on and on, the yearning for peace and then the excitement, the anticipation and the anti-climax of VE Day and VJ Day.

The main events of each year are summarised before the diary entries for that year, which I found very useful as a quick guide to set the diaries in the context of world events. I began to feel as though I knew the people who wrote the diaries, so the brief biographies are the end were also interesting as there were brief details about what happened to them after the war. There are also a number of photographs, an excellent index and a selection of further reading of Mass Observation publications and other histories of Britain in the Second World War together with a list of related websites.

I think one of my favourites is Muriel Green, who was 19 when the war began. She became a land girl and moved around the country. On her 21st birthday she was working as an under-gardener at Huntley Manor in Gloucester. She wrote:

“I shan’t forget my 21st birthday. Apart from getting two greetings telegrams and achieving the first bath for nearly a month it has been the last word in flat. Totally depressing in fact.” Life wasn’t all depressing for Muriel and she is one person who kept mainly optimistic and in October 1944 she reflected: “It seemed strange to think that the war had been on over five years and how little different it was for us in spite of the ravages of war and what some had gone through. … Of course it will never be the same again, but there are many families with far greater losses than our petty grumbles.”

Muriel’s family was among the lucky ones. Not so Kenneth Redmond’s whose brother Tom was killed in action. His entry on 11 November 1944 reads:

“This day only means Remembrance of Tom – War and its horrors, Peace and the best of life that it can bring – all these things will mean to me Tom. I get very morbid when I think of it.”

Herbert Brush was 70 in 1939. He was living in south London, a keen gardener, art lover, reader and writer of verse. He wrote diary entries from September 1940 to March 1951 and I particularly liked the personal details he included. He couldn’t buy any razor blades in June 1942 and at the same time he was wondering how accurate the reports of the numbers of casualties reported by the Germans and Russians were, thinking of how pleasant it was “to read about so many Nazis being slaughtered” and noting the number of different pronunciations of ‘Nazi’.

“Churchill says ‘Nazzi’, others say ‘Nartzi’, or ‘Nertzi’ of ‘Nassie’. I like Churchill’s best as he puts a snarl into the word.”

My dad must have liked Churchill’s best too as that is how he said it.

Margaret Forster is quoted on the front cover: “I relished all these diaries”. Me too. An excellent book.

Saturday Scene

2008-05-17T16:14:00.001+01:00

Today I finished reading Our Longest Days, 6 years of wartime diary entries from the start of the Second World War on 3rd September 1939 to its end in 1945. I feel as though I have emerged from the book with a much greater understanding of those years. More about the book maybe tomorrow.

The rain that was forecast again for today didn't arrive this morning and this is what I saw looking out of the window. The cattle are back in the field opposite. I took the first photo through the window and you may be able to see a ghost in the hedge - that's my reflection.

So I opened the window to get a better view and the bullock nearest the hedge spotted me. Here he is posing for the camera.

The rest of the cattle didn't like the photoshoot and took off up the field.

The rain is here now, so it's just as well we got some gardening in first and managed to shred the branches D had chopped off the pussy willow earlier in the week. It had got huge and was hanging over our neighbours' roof. Shredding is a very satisfying job using a small woodchipper or hogger (as D calls it), although it's a bit noisy.

Friday Fill-Ins

2008-05-16T15:19:00.000+01:00

This is the first time I've done a Friday Fill-In

There is absolutely NO way you can get me to eat fish eyeballs as shown on Gordon Ramsay’s “The F Word”!

Planning a holiday reminds me that summer is almost here!

I cannot live without my books.

Painting and quilting are two things I'd like to try.

When life hands you lemons make lemon meringue pie and lemon cheesecake.

Christmas Day with my family, opening presents, and eating Christmas dinner is my favourite childhood memory.

And as for the weekend, tonight I'm looking forward to going out for a meal, tomorrow my plans include gardening if the weather is fine and cooking and Sunday, I want to relax, write my blog and read!

Who is this "Old Man"?

2008-05-15T10:00:00.004+01:00

My husband took this photo of the book he was reading this morning when he was trying out my camera. See if you can identify the book and the name of the "Old Man".

Hint: It's not the sort of book I usually read - you should know, Paul.

Booking Through Thursday - More Work?

2008-05-15T08:08:00.005+01:00

This week's BTT question is Manual Labor Redux

Following up last week’s question about reading writing/grammar guides, this week, we’re expanding the question….

Scenario: You’ve just bought some complicated gadget home . . . do you read the accompanying documentation? Or not?

Do you ever read manuals?

How-to books?

Self-help guides?

Anything at all?

I don't like manuals, usually I can't understand them anyway. I haven't read the ones for my phone or camera and I just use them - or I ask my husband, who also never, ever reads instructions.

I can't think of any How-to books right now that I've read; years ago I tried some of the "Teach Yourself" books but they never helped me learn much.

I do like to read Self-help guides, but never do any of the things they suggest.

An Armful of Books

2008-05-14T21:53:00.001+01:00

These books have little, if anything in common, other than the fact that they are all recent acquisitions. Every now and then I decide not to buy any more books and then along come some that I just can’t resist. They all look so enticing I want to read them all at once. As that’s not possible I thought I do quick summaries of each one (from information on the book covers) to help me decide which one to read next.

Remember Me by Melvyn Bragg. This is the latest book from Melvyn Bragg based on his own life. I enjoyed the others - The Soldier's Return, A Son of War and Crossing the Lines - so much that I couldn’t wait for this book to come out in paperback.

“A passionate but ultimately tragic love affair starts when two students – on French, one English – meet at university at the beginning of the sixties. From its tentative, unpromising early stages, the relationship develops into a life-changing one, whose profound impact continues to reverberate forty years later.”

The Last Enchantment by Mary Stewart – bought in the Library Sale for 10p. I read and loved Mary Stewart’s trilogy of Arthur/Merlin books many years ago. The first two are The Crystal Cave and The Hollow Hills.

“The Last Enchantment is a richly woven story peopled by princes and soldiers, grave-robbers and goldsmiths, innkeepers and peasants and witches …”

As it's so long since I first read ths book I expect it will be like reading a new book.

Never On These Shores by Stephen R Pastore. Lisa Roe at the Online Publicist sent me this to review. Have a look at her site; she has a number of books available fo review. This is a “what if” book –

what if in 1942 “the Nazis had landed in Mexico and invaded the United States through Texas. The Japanese have conquered Canada and have captured and occupied most of the west coast from Seattle to the outskirts of Los Angeles.”

In a way this fits in with my current reading of books about the Second World War.

Admit One: a Journey Into Film by Emmett James, a review book also from Lisa. This book follows British born actor Emmett James on his numerous adventures

“as he jumps from forgery to pornography to crashing the Academy Awards under the alias of a nominated writer. All the while, the films that inspired each tale contextualize this humorous collection of stories. The narrator provides a unique insight into the fascinating industry of film, eventually himself stumbling into the biggest box-office grossing movie of all time.”

Discussion about films attracted me to this book.

Down To a Sunless Sea by Mathias B Freese, a review book from the author. This collection of short stories

“plunges the reader into uncomfortable situations and into the minds of troubled characters. Each selection is a different reading experience – poetic, journalistic, nostalgic, wryly humorous, and even macabre.”

This sounds so different and quite challenging.

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett, a bookshop buy.

“Set in the turbulent times of twelfth-century England when civil war, famine, religious strife and battles over royal succession tore lives and families apart, The Pillars of the Earth tells the story of the building of a magnificent cathedral.”

Historical fiction and family drama combined makes this very attractive to me.

Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman. I saw this in the bookshop at the same time. I bought it as Joanna had suggested it when I wrote about Garden Spells, another magical book. I was also influenced by the name of one of the main characters – “Sally Owens”, as that was the name of my Great Aunt, who I thought was magical. It says on the back cover that this book

“blends together the mundane and the mysterious, the familiar and fantastic”.

It promises to be good.

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. From the same bookshop buying spree. I remember reading good things about this book on several blogs and it was the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005. There is very little information about this book on its cover so I looked on Wikipedia which summarises it :

"Gilead is the fictional autobiography of the Reverend John Ames, an elderly congregationalist pastor in the small, secluded town of Gilead, Iowa who knows that he is dying of a heart condition."

From the back cover:

“A visionary work of dazzling originality”.

I’m prepared to be dazzled.

Engleby by Sebastian Faulks, the final bookshop buy.

“This is the story of Mike Engleby, a working-class boy who wins a place at an esteemed English university. But with the disappearance of Jennifer, the undergraduate Engleby admires from afar, the story turns into a mystery of gripping power."

This sounds promising - a murder mystery set in a university and a "creepy central character".

Can Any Mother Help Me? By Jenna Bailey. This is a bargain buy from newbooks. It’s about a group of women and their magazine – the Cooperative Correspondence Club (CCC) which lasted 55 years.

“They wrote articles about the things that mattered most to them – children, work, love, politics – and commented on each other’s work."

The magazines are part of the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex, which also is the source for Our Longest Days - diary entries from ordinary people during the Second World War. The CCC began in 1935, so the war years are also covered in this book. I’ve already read a little of it and I may start it properly when I’ve finished reading Our Longest Days.

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss, bought in the Library Sale for 40p. I’ve been wondering about this book for some time whenever I saw it in the bookshops, but the title put me off for some inexplicable reason. But at 40p I thought why not? There are many quotes both on the back cover and inside singing its praises:

“The history of Love has perfect pitch and does its dance of time between contemporary New York and the wanderings of the Jews with unsentimental but heartbreaking grace [Krauss] also happens to write like an angel.” Simon Schama, Guardian.

He does make it sound very good.

Six Random Things

2008-05-13T09:20:00.003+01:00

I've been tagged by Ashleigh to share six random things about myself.

Here are the rules:

· Link to the person that tagged you
· Post the rules somewhere in your meme
· Write the six random things
· Tag six people in your post
· Let the tagees know they’ve been chosen by leaving a comment on their blog
· Let the tagger know your entry is posted

So here goes:

1.I wake up most mornings with the dawn chorus. The birdsong is just tremendous these days, it's like an orchestra tuning up outside the bedroom window at about 4.00am. I usually doze off again but am awake before 6.00am again most days.

2.As a child I was scared of dogs. I wouldn’t go anywhere where there was a dog if I could help it. Visiting friends and relatives with dogs was a nightmare; I wouldn’t go in the house if a dog came rushing to the door or be in the same room if the dog was loose. I was just terrified – they were so big and boisterous with ferocious-looking teeth and deafening barks. No matter how much my parents and the dogs’ owners tried to reassure me that the dogs wouldn’t hurt me I didn’t believe them. This continued as I grew older and I would cross the road if I saw a dog ahead of me on the same side.

My mother said she thought my fear stemmed from the time I was a baby and a barking dog jumped up to my pram. I think it also comes from the dog my grandfather kept tied up by his chair. I was scared of him as well as of his dog. He had a big bristly moustache and was very gruff and it seemed as though he barked himself when he spoke. My fear persisted, although I was able to control it better as I became older, until our son was five and started school. Both he and my husband wanted a dog and I ran out of excuses not to get one – and I didn’t want my son to have the same phobia. So we got a Golden Retriever. She was a beautiful dog and helped me overcome my fears, so much so that a few years later we got another dog as well.

3.My first job was a Saturday job in a grocery when I was still at school. The owners, Mr and Mrs Davies, lived above the shop and kept a large Alsatian dog in the backyard. I used to wait for my friend to arrive to go in with her, as I was still scared of dogs. It was a very busy shop, especially in the morning. I used to sell the fancy cakes and bread. The chocolate cup cakes and cream cakes were my favourites. I used to like serving the cooked meats, but was a bit nervous of the meat slicer. When it was quiet, before closing time I had to stock up the bags of sugar, which were kept behind the freezer – there was just enough room to squeeze in and stock the shelves. I earned 12/6 each Saturday. Mrs Davies was very old-fashioned and used to ask if I was “walking out” with a boy (I was).

4.I love natural yoghurt. I make my own and have some with my breakfast every day. The best yoghurt I've ever eaten was in Greece, but the Greek yoghurt I buy here just isn't the same. My homemade yoghurt is nearly as good, though. I make it in a yoghurt maker and then strain it.

5.I don’t have a head for heights and get dizzy just climbing a ladder. It’s really difficult getting down again. This is not too bad as I don't climb ladders very often (I've never been able to get up into our loft because of this) but it's a real handicap coming down spiral staircases in castles and church towers, which I do like to explore.

6.I was in a car accident when I was 17. I smashed my head against the windscreen, had cuts all over my face and a few in my legs.but fortunately I only needed a few stitches in my forehead, chin and neck and have only slight scars, but three of my front teeth were broken and I had to have them crowned. I also bit right through my tongue which was very painful.

I've seen this on many blogs recently, but if you haven't done it and would like to, please consider yourself tagged.

The Sunday Salon – Looking Back at Wartime Britain

2008-05-11T10:24:00.006+01:00

This week I’ve been reading more of Our Longest Days: a People’s History of the Second World War by the Writers of Mass Observation. It’s composed of diary entries from a number of people of their personal observations, thoughts, and hopes. The one criticism I have of it is that I’m finding it difficult to remember the details of each person. Their first entry is annotated in the margin with their name, age, occupation and location. After that there is just the name, so I have to flick to the end of the book where there are brief biographies for each person. But I am gradually getting used to each person. This morning I was reading about April 1941 with the declaration of war on Yugoslavia and Greece. In Eastern Europe, Hungary, Rumania and Bulgaria were effectively Nazi puppet states. Maggie Blunt, a writer living alone with her beloved cats in a cottage in Slough, wrote on 21 April 1941,

“Are we really going to lose this war? The Nazis sweep from triumph to triumph making no mistakes while we make all the mistakes. … God alone knows what we shall be called upon to endure these next few years but as others wiser than I have said, it is not what one endures but how one endures it that counts. There were bad raids again on London last week. Planes overhead again tonight. The horror of the sound has become dulled by familiarity and resignation.”

It seems strange to say I’m enjoying reading this, but I am. It is an amazing insight into how ordinary people felt about the war. I remember hearing the stories my mother told about her wartime experiences and thinking how terrible it must have been, yet at the same time how much fun they managed to have despite the circumstances.

I also picked up at the library a week or so ago London War Notes 1939 – 1945 by Mollie Panter-Downes (I read about this first on Danielle’s blog). I’ve just started to read this in conjunction with Our Longest Days. Together these books throw so much light on those years. Mollie Panter-Downes covered the war from England for the New Yorker. The letters are witty, humorous and full of poignancy. I can’t decide whether to read until I’ve caught up with Our Longest Days, or to just stick to one book and then read the other one.

I’ve also got Wartime Britain 1939 – 1945 by Juliet Gardiner (recommended by Litlove). I’ve only dipped into this so far and looked at the photographs. It’s a long, detailed book with many endnotes and an extensive bibliography. In the foreword it states that is about the pervasiveness of the war and how it affected people’s lives. So that’s up next too.

One last book for today is The Ration Book Diet by Mike Brown, Carol Harris and C J Jackson. This uses the wartime diet as a model and includes sixty recipes, some taken straight from cookery books of the time, with only minor adjustments, but most are new dishes created using the ingredients that were available during the war. From the introduction:

“When VE-Day finally came in May 1945, Britain was a very different place from the country it had been in 1939. Six years of war had taken their toll on the fabric of the nation. In many cases the effects were far-reaching in terms of Britain’s social, economic and demographic characteristics. But if there was one good thing to have come out of the war then it was food rationing: the war left us healthier as a nation than we had ever been before or have been since."

This is a lovely book and I’ll be writing more about it at a later date.

It’s a glorious day here, hot and sunny, with no breeze. I’m not sure I really like this weather; it makes me feel drained and languid. I shan’t be reading much more today as the family are coming over this afternoon and the garden calls. We’ll be getting the paddling pool out for the children, although my son and husband will be firmly indoors from 3.00pm onwards watching their team Manchester United play the last game of the Premier League against Wigan. The championship hangs on this match. See my son's post here for a more informed view.

Annie Dillard - The Maytrees

2008-05-10T10:15:00.003+01:00

The Maytrees by Annie Dillard, published by Hesperus Press Limited 2007, 185 pages

Impenetrable in parts, lyrical in others, describing the love between Toby and Lou Maytrees in such a detached fashion that I never felt close to or really understood any of the characters, this book was not easy to read. I understood the words, but put in sentences and paragraphs there were pages where I felt that somehow the meaning had eluded me. I re-read sentences and pages but still came away feeling puzzled. Thinking back now after I’ve finished reading this book once I’ve got past the awkwardness of the parts that puzzled me and tried to analyse what it is about, I think that it’s about love, and about ageing and dying. I was rather disappointed in this book, having read and enjoyed Pilgrim at Tinker Creek some years ago and reading the acclaim it received I expected it to be a fantastic book: the Washington Post quote on the back cover is ‘full of the kind of pleasures one looks for in fiction’. I can’t truthfully say that I found them.

The setting is beautiful, on the beach near Provincetown, Cape Cod in the 1940s. But this is no overdeveloped beach full of tourists; it’s a wilderness of scrub and dunes jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean. After 14 years of marriage Maytree left both Lou, his son Petie and his dune shack for Deary Hightoe. Twenty years later he and Deary returned to Provincetown when Deary was dying. Lou then looks after both him and Deary. Deary starts out as a free spirit, sleeping in the dunes swaddled in a canvas sail, but living with Maytree in Maine she becomes weighed down with possessions and “stuff”. The most moving part of the book for me is the description of Deary’s death, which took place over eight weeks.

The characters seem unable to express their feelings or thoughts to each other. Maybe it’s because Lou is such a self-sufficient personality; when Maytree left her, “She did not whine or voice grief or anger.” Maybe it’s because the book covers a period of over twenty years with little information about what has taken place during those years. There is love in there – love of the land, the sea and nature. Human love too in the form of agape, in Lou’s selfless care of both Deary and Maytree.

Maytree ponders on the nature of love after Deary’s death:

“Of course everyone had tended Deary. Was that tending love genetically or socially determined convention? The idea of love as irresistible passion died hard in Maytree long after he knew better. Was he ‘in love’ with Deary all those years? No, but he never dreamed of shipping his iced-over oars. … Still less was Lou in love with Deary. Nor was noble Pete. Then what guides will - reason? The darling of dead Greeks, that guarantor of the science he loved? Surely reason never trafficked in a man’s love life. Science rinsed love’s every scent from its hands. Maytree had been sensible of no particular sentiment except the natural wish to help Deary find comfort. That steady wish for her comfort on which he had acted for years and Lou and Pete had acted for eight weeks - was love?
Wishing and doing, within the realm of the possible, was willing; love was an act of will.”

(pages 160-161)

Love is not seen as a matter of emotion, but a “wilful focus of attention”; it is not like “love’s first feeling of cliff-jumping”. This is not a book about passion in the bodice-ripping, erotic sense. It’s about lasting love: “The feeling of love is so crucial to our species it is excessive, like labor pain. Lasting love is an act of will.” (pages 111-112)

Still I came away from the book feeling a cool detachment from it and not sorry that I'd finished it.

The Chrysalids by John Wyndham

2008-05-09T10:46:00.000+01:00

My copy of The Chrysalids by John Wyndham is the Penguin Books edition published in 1955. This is the second book I've read in the Once Upon a Time Challenge.

As this is science fiction and I’d read The Kraken Wakes, about an alien invasion of Earth and I know that The Day of the Triffids (which I haven’t read) is about grotesque animal eating plants, I was expecting The Chrysalids to be about monster insects hatching out of pupae. It isn’t.

It’s a post-apocalyptic novel set in an imaginary Labrador. The people have vague recollections of the “Old People” who lived before the Tribulation (maybe a nuclear war), which they believe God sent to punish the population for their sins. The society they live in now is strictly governed by a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible, one of the few books that survived the Tribulation. Anything that deviates from the Norm had to be rooted out and destroyed or sent to the Fringes. This applied to people, animals and plants. David Strorm has grown up in a house where the walls are covered in texts such as,

“THE NORM IS THE WILL OF GOD”, “THE DEVIL IS THE FATHER OF DEVIATION” and “WATCH THOU FOR THE MUTANT!”

So when he realises that his friend Sophie has six toes he is worried, and with reason. Sophie is not the only deviant from the Norm, David himself and a group of other young people have telepathic powers and can tune in to each other’s thoughts. When they realise that Petra, David’s little sister is developing even stronger telepathic abilities, David and Petra and his friends flee to the Fringes, where they expect to find fearsome mutations, but hope to find sanctuary. Petra’s long-range telepathy puts them in touch with a woman in Sealand, on the other side of the world, who promises to rescue them.

Wyndham’s story still has relevance today, with its central theme of intolerance of anyone or anything that does not conform to what is considered to be “normal”. Intolerance based on what a group of people “know” to be the truth is always scary, especially when they persecute others who believe or think differently. The question of identity is also explored - what it is to be an individual and also part of society. His characters are real people, the story is compelling, and I had to read on to find out what happened as the tension built.

The title, I suppose, comes from the analogy with the evolution of insects from grubs to the adult stage. The people of Labrador are stuck in the chrysalis stage; they have not evolved and do not want to change. David and his friends are changing however and moving towards a more advanced stage of humanity. As the woman from Sealand tells them:

The essential quality of life is living; the essential quality of living is change; change is evolution; and we are part of it.

It’s a book I should like to re-read, now that I know the story. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Booking Through Thursday - Manual Labour (Labor)

2008-05-08T10:40:00.005+01:00

This week's Booking Through Thursday's question is:

Writing guides, grammar books, punctuation how-tos . . . do you read them? Not read them? How many writing books, grammar books, dictionaries–if any–do you have in your library?

My English teacher at school, Miss Orr, would be pleased and amazed if she could read this now - I like books on grammar and punctuation! I love dictionaries and writing guides.

I regularly use The Chambers Dictionary, which boldy says on its cover "the largest, bestselling and most comprehensive single-volume English dictionary" and also "the richest range of English language from Shakespeare to the present day". It's more than a dictionary as it also has lists in the back - first names, phrases and quotations in Latin and Greek and modern foreigh languages, books of the Bible, plays of Shakespeare, chemical elements and so on and so forth. It's the meaning that I'm looking for because you have to have some idea of how a word is spelled to look it up. I do use on-line dictionaries but really prefer my "real" dictionary, somehow it's more satisfying. I just opened it now to check the word "labour" (that's how I would spell it not "labor" - I'm not too bothered about spelling) to see if my idea of using writing guides etc is covered by that word. "Labour" means, among other definitions "physical or mental toil; work, especially when done for money, or other gain, pain, a task requiring hard work". So no, using these books is not all laborious for me.

I also have The Oxford Library of English Usage which I really ought to read more than I do. It's a box set of 3 volumes - Grammar, Spelling and A Dictionary of Modern Usage. I bought the set some years ago when I realised that my memory of English Grammar from school was fading fast (sorry Miss Orr).

More recently I bought Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss, which I think makes grammar so much more interesting. I love her examples and the wrong use of the apostraphe in "its/it's" infuriates me, although not quite as as much as it does her:

"No matter if you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, "Good food at it's best", you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave."

My typing is not always up to much and I cringe when I see I've typed "it's" instead of its".

I'm really good at reading writing guides in hope of improving my writing or to give me inspiration to actually write something creative, but I never do what they say. I have a few books on Creative Writing - my favourite is Dorothea Brande's Becoming a Writer. I'm encouraged by her analysis of the difficulties of writing, her practical approach to the business of writing and this sentence in particular strikes a chord:

"Writing calls on unused muscles and invloves solitude and immobility."

Although not a writing guide in the usual sense I also love Margaret Atwood's Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. She writes about what is a writer and how she became one; the drawbacks of being a female writer; and asks question such as, "For whom does the writer write?" and "Is there a self-identity for the writer that combines responsibility with artistic integrity? If there is, where might it be?" She quotes many other author, enticing me to read yet more and more books.

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

2008-05-07T14:49:00.004+01:00

I seem to have been reading Eat, Pray, Love a very long time. That is because I only read short sections each morning. I’d read quite a lot about the book on a number of blogs and some people loved it and others didn’t and for a while I resisted reading it. Then a few months ago I found it sitting on the shelf in my local library and thought I’d have a look at it. At first I found Elizabeth Gilbert’s style irritating, so chatty and verbose, but after I’d got beyond the sorry details of her marriage, divorce and disastrous relationship with the next man, and she took herself off to Italy I began to relax and enjoy the book. I’m glad I finally did read this book as in the end I found it very entertaining.

She travelled to Italy (Eat), India (Pray) and Indonesia (Love) spending four months in each place, searching for pleasure in Italy, mainly through food, God in India at an ashram, and balance in Indonesia.

I’ve written a bit about her time in Italy here and this was my favourite section of the book. Whatever Elizabeth Gilbert does it seems as though she throws herself into it 100% - so in Italy she put on weight, eating pizza and gelato. Well not just those two Italian basics, but loads of delicious sounding food. It made me feel happy just reading about her happiness in eating soft-boiled eggs, asparagus, olives, goat’s cheese and salmon, followed by a fresh peach. By the end of her stay in Italy I wasn’t surprised that none of the clothes she brought with her fitted - I found the same after two weeks! Needless to say I enjoyed reading “Eat” and it made me want to visit Italy again.

On to India, where it was back to intense, emotional experiences; much soul-searching and naval- gazing too. (I also wrote a bit about this section here.)I have practised Yoga so I was looking forward to reading of her time in an ashram, but soon decided that I’m glad I was never tempted to spend time in one myself. Elizabeth Gilbert was hoping for “a dazzling encounter with God, maybe some blue lightning or a prophetic vision”, but for a while this eluded her. I was amused when I read that she wrote that she’d been talking too much, not just at the ashram but all her life, so she decided she didn’t want “to waste the greatest spiritual opportunity of her life by being all social and chatty the whole time.” She was going to become known as “That Quiet Girl”! Her hopes were dashed when she was asked to be “Key Hostess", looking after people coming to the ashram on retreat.

But it was during these retreats that she had her “dazzling encounter” with God. Elizabeth writes about God as though she’s writing to a penfriend or is talking to a friend at the end of a telephone. She also writes about it in abstract terms – she “stepped through time“ and “entered the void”; she

“was the void … the void was God, which means that I was inside God. But not in a gross, physical way – not like I was Liz Gilbert stuck inside a chunk of God’s thigh muscle. I was just part of God. In addition to being God. I was both a tiny piece of the universe and exactly the same size as the universe.” (p209)

My interpretation of this is that Elizabeth was experiencing a state of “oneness”, where she was not aware of the limits of her own being. She says that it wasn’t hallucinogenic or exiting or euphoric, even though she states "it was heaven"; maybe she is saying that she slowed down and experienced calm and tranquillity, a sort of blend of Christianity and Buddhism perhaps. At the beginning of the book Elizabeth writes that she is "culturally, though not theologically" a Christian, which goes some way to explaining her experience of "being God". She explains her position thus:

“… while I do love that great teacher of peace who was called Jesus, and while I do reserve the right to ask myself in certain trying situations what indeed He would do, I can’t swallow that one fixed rule of Christianity insisting that Christ is the only path to God. Strictly speaking then, I cannot call myself a Christian. Most of the Christians I know accept my feelings on this with grace and open-mindedness.”(p14)

In the final section of the book she travelled on to Bali in Indonesia where she had first met Ketut, the medicine man, who resembles Yoda from Star Wars. I have to admire Elizabeth Gilbert’s confidence in travelling alone without even any idea of where she is going to live, and what she is going to do. She arrived in Bali not knowing Ketut’s address or even the name of his village and when she did find it at first he did not recognise her. Life in Bali is very different from her time in India, much more relaxed and Ketut’s methods of meditation were much less intense than those at the ashram.

Along the way she also made friends with Wayan, a poverty stricken woman healer and spent the mornings with her “laughing and eating”, the afternoons with Ketut “talking and drinking coffee” and the evenings relaxing in her garden, either by herself or with another friend, Yudhi who came over and played his guitar. She decided to raise money from friends in America to buy Wayan a house and this nearly ended in disaster when Wayan kept finding more and more difficulties with purchasing land and said she needed more money. Fortunately Elizabeth had met a charming Brazilian man, with whom she fell in love and he explained that that is the way of life for people there – to try to get the most money they can out of visitors.

So, it all ended happily as Elizabeth sailed

“to this pretty little tropical island with my Brazilian lover. Which is – I admit it!- an almost ludicrously fairy-tale ending to this story, like the page out of a housewife’s dream. … Yet what keeps me from dissolving right now into a complete fairy-tale shimmer is this solid truth, a truth which has veritably built my bones over the last few years – I was not rescued by a prince: I was the administrator of my own rescue.” (p 344)

I found an on-line video of Elizabeth Gilbert talking about this book at http://www.learnoutloud.com/Free-Audio-Video/Social-Sciences/Cultural-Criticism/Authors@Google-Elizabeth-Gilbert/25150

Sunday Salon - This Week's Reading

2008-05-04T17:00:00.000+01:00

I'm late coming to the Sunday Salon today, because just as I was finishing writing this post we had a power cut, which lasted nearly four hours and when it came back on I found that I hadn't saved all of it!

Last Sunday the heavy rain that had been forecast held off for our walk among the bluebells, in fact it was a warm sunny afternoon and there were still lots of bluebells in the woods. It’s been a mixed week weather wise – we’ve had sunshine and torrential rain, coming down like stair rods as my father used to say. But it has meant that everything in the garden is growing like mad. I love this time of year when the leaves are still small enough to see the branches. We have two small apple trees and a cherry tree which have now blossomed – promise of fruit later in the year.

On the reading front for some of the week I’ve been in the company of Dalziel and Pascoe, but mostly Pascoe as the book is The Death of Dalziel by Reginald Hill. Because I watched the BBC series before I read any Dalziel books in my mind I see Warren Clarke as Dalziel and Colin Buchanan as Pascoe. It’s a complicated plot with all the sub-plots intricately interwoven. The characters are so believable and the mystery so absorbing that I just had to read it through to the end. It was a while ago that I watched this on TV so, even though I knew what the outcome was I couldn’t remember the details. What I don’t remember from the TV are the episodes describing what is going on inside Dalziel as he lies in hospital unconscious (he was caught in the blast of a hugh Semtex explosion).

This is a nice example. Dalziel is

“floating uneasily above Mid-Yorkshire. His unease derives not from his ability to defy gravity, which seems quite natural, but his fear that someone below might mistake him for a zeppelin and shoot him down.”

Because he is Dalziel he breaks wind and his
“... relief is hugh and more than physical.
‘Dead men don’t fart!’ he cries triumphantly.
… Dalziel breaks wind again, this time with such force he gets lift-off and accelerates into the bright blue yonder like a Cape Canaveral rocket. Soon the startled starling is nothing more than a distant mote, high above which an overweight, middle-aged detective superintendent at last realises the Peter Pan fantasy of his early childhood and laughs with sheer delight as he tumbles and soars between the scudding clouds of a Mid-Yorkshire sky.”

In complete contrast I’m in the middle of The Maytrees by Annie Dillard. Some years ago I read and thoroughly enjoyed Pilgrim at Tinker Creek which won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 1975. In that book I was fascinated by the detail and description of the natural world that Dillard saw at the Creek and I expected her novel would much in the same vein. But for me it is too sparsely written, too economical. The Maytrees is about a couple, Toby and Lou who marry and have a son Petie, living out their seemingly non-eventful lives at Provincetown on the tip of Cape Cod. After 14 years of marriage Maytree just ups and leaves with Deary Hightoe, which is as far as I have read. Part of me loves this book for the descriptions of the setting and characters, but part of me struggles with prose that seems so detached from emotion.

I always like to have more than one book on the go, so although I’m only progressing slowly with Les Miserables I’ve also started to read Our Longest Days, diary entries of people living during the Second World War. It’s fascinating reading about the war as it was experienced by the people left at home, enduring the bombing of Britain and the threat of invasion. I’m up to December 1940 - Herbert Brush, then aged 71 was living in London, described what he had done to make staying in the dugout more comfortable, with a paraffin stove, a curtain across the entrance and shields to keep the draught off the bunks on each side of the dugout:

“It is quite a comfortable place now, when one gets used to the cramped space and the inability to turn over without falling off the bunk, for folk of my size.” It’s a touching account of the war years full of personal hopes and fears.

Finally I started to read John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids yesterday. So far I’m finding this an immensely satisfying book, easy to read, and full of suspense about a world where genetic variations are seen as Offences and Abominations that have to be rooted out and destroyed. Chillingly, when a baby is born it has to be inspected and if there is any deviation from what has been decided is normal, ie made in the image of God, even if there is the slightest blemish then it is taken away and never heard of again. My copy is an old second-hand Penguin book published in 1959 and I’m intrigued by the references on the cover to “what is unhappily known as ‘science fiction’, and again as writing that is “so unscientifically called Science Fiction”. I must look up the history of sci-fi writing.

Dante Quiz

2008-05-03T17:14:00.004+01:00

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

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

First Level of Hell - Limbo

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

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

Mayday! - Booking Through Thursday

2008-05-01T08:05:00.003+01:00

This week's BTT question:Quick! It’s an emergency! You just got an urgent call about a family emergency and had to rush to the airport with barely time to grab your wallet and your passport. But now, you’re stuck at the airport with nothing to read. What do you do??

And, no, you did NOT have time to grab your bookbag, or the book next to your bed. You were . . . grocery shopping when you got the call and have nothing with you but your wallet and your passport (which you fortuitously brought with you in case they asked for ID in the ethnic food aisle). This is hypothetical, remember….

I rarely go anywhere without a book, so it's most likely that I'd have a book in the car. But if I didn't I'd buy one at the airport, or at least a magazine or newspaper, maybe a book of codewords or something.

I'd want to read something but I probably wouldn't be able to concentrate on anything as I'd be so nervous about catching the plane on time, worrying about the emergency and goodness knows what else ...

Exploring Britain - In Books. A Thursday Thirteen

2008-05-01T07:22:00.000+01:00

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

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

From bottom to top they are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel

2008-04-30T16:01:00.001+01:00

In the first chapter of Hilary Mantel’s memoir she writes, “I hardly know how to write about myself. Any style you pick seems to unpick itself before a paragraph is done.” She then advises herself to trust the reader, to stop spoon-feeding and patronising and write in “the most direct and vigorous way that you can.” She worries that her writing isn’t clear, or that it is “deceptively clear”.

It comes across to me as being clear, honest and very moving. She’s not looking for sympathy but has written this memoir to take charge of her memories, her childhood and childlessness, feeling that it is necessary to write herself into being.

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

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

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

Oh yes, I remember that too!

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

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

I found it a remarkable memoir.

Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen

2008-04-29T20:00:00.004+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The author's website has more information plus recipes of dishes using edible flowers mentioned in the book .

This book qualifies as my first read in the Once Upon a Time II Challenge.

A Good Hanging by Ian Rankin

2008-04-28T09:24:00.001+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sunday Salon – Travels in the Scriptorium

2008-04-27T10:00:00.001+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What's On Page 123?

2008-04-25T14:37:00.001+01:00

Actually I’ve done this before, but I’ve been tagged by Angela for the page 123 meme and I’m going to do it again – it’s easy.

All you have to do is:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

Well, I’m not going to stick completely to the rules because the nearest book, would you believe, is Ian Rankin’s A Good Hanging, which is the book that was nearest to me last time. It’s on the desk as I’ve started to write about it. So the next nearest book is one I haven’t started but have been meaning to read ever since I bought it. It’s Paul Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium, a short book, but fortunately it has 130 pages.

On page 123 the sixth, seventh and eighth sentences are:

“Once he got you out of the room, he was planning to kill you.
Ah. I figured as much.”

I’ll have to read the book now.

I didn’t tag anybody last time but now I’m tagging, that's if they want to do it - Melody, Paula, Stephanie, Lisa and Alison

Spring - Booking Through Thursday

2008-04-24T08:52:00.002+01:00

For this week's Booking through Thursday Deb writes:

"Well, here where I live, Spring is sprung–weeks early, even. Our lilac bush looks like it will have flowers by this time next week instead of in the middle of May as usual. The dogwood trees, the magnolia trees–all the flowering trees are flowering. The daffodils and crocuses are, if anything, starting to fade. It may only be April 24th but it is very definitely Spring and, allergies notwithstanding, I’m happy to welcome the change of season. What I want to know, is:

Do your reading habits change in the Spring? Do you read gardening books? Even if you don’t have a garden? More light fiction than during the Winter? Less? Travel books? Light paperbacks you can stick in a knapsack?

Or do you pretty much read the same kinds of things in the Spring as you do the rest of the year?"

Spring is here too; everywhere is looking much greener, the trees are sprouting leaves, the primroses are still flowering, the daffodils are past their best but the tulips are still standing proudly. We're going for a walk through the bluebell woods on Sunday so I hope they're still in bloom.I'm wondering if I've got hay fever, or is it just a cold.

As for reading I don't really change my reading habits. Maybe I'm out in the garden more - the grass has to be mown and the weeds dug out - I'm not a natural gardener. I do consult my gardening books each year to try to see what I should be doing in the garden, for help with pruning and how to stop the slugs and snails from making their homes in the plants. Now I think about it I do like gardening books; they're so full of beautiful photos of lovely well-kept gardens and then I wonder what I'm not doing because our garden doesn't look the same. Of course I do know the answer - I haven't got green fingers, although I suspect that it's really because I don't spend as much time gardening as I do reading. And that's not going to change.

I also like to read about places we're thinking of visiting or planning a holiday, so yes travel books are on the menu, but I find the internet can be better for looking up places than books. I don't think my reading habits change much with the seasons. Light (as in weight) paperbacks are always good, whatever the season to pop into a bag or leave in the car just in case there's an opportunity to read.

A - Z Favourites

2008-04-22T20:30:00.010+01:00

Simon at Stuck in a Book has come up with a great idea A - Z Favourites. The idea is to pick a favourite author for each letter of the alphabet, and the accompanying novel. This set me thinking and although it’s practically impossible for me to decide who my favourite authors are I decided to make it a bit easier and only considered books I’ve read in the last few years. This means leaving out favourite authors such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Wilkie Collins, and Charles Dickens. (There’s the start of another list.)

ATWOOD, MARGARET – Alias Grace
BROOKS, GERALDINE – March
CUNNINGHAM, Michael – The Hours
DU MAURIER, DAPHNE - Rebecca
ELIOT, GEORGE -Middlemarch

FRANKLIN, ARIANA – Mistress of the Art of Death
GAARDER, JOSTEIN – The Solitaire Mystery
HARDY, Thomas – The Woodlanders
ISHIGURO, KAZUO - Remains of the Day
JAMES, P D – Original Sin
KINGSOLVER, BARBARA – The Poisonwood Bible
LIVELY, PENELOPE – The Photograph

McEWAN, IAN -Atonement
NARAYAN, R K – The Painter of Signs
OLSSON, LINDA – Astrid and Veronika

PULLMAN, PHILIP – His Dark Materials
QUINDLEN, ANNA – Blessings (the only book I’ve read recently/ever by an author whose name begins with ‘Q’)
REEVE, PHILIP – Here Lies Arthur
SANSOM, C J – Revelation

TOLSTOY, LEO – War and Peace
U – none
VICKERS, SALLEY – Instances of the Number 3
WOOLF, VIRGINIA – Mrs Dalloway
X - none
YOUNG, ANGELA – Speaking of Love
ZAFON, CARL RUIZ – The Shadow of the Wind (the only book I’ve read recently/ever by an author whose name begins with Z)

The Sunday Salon - this week's books

2008-04-19T17:15:00.023+01:00

I was away from the Salon last Sunday, but I did lots of reading - although it wasn't my usual choice of book - to my granddaughter, mainly Dora books, which she loves, oh yes and Peppa Pig.

It's been a mixed week for reading. On Tuesday I finished reading C J Sansom's Revelation, a marvellous book, possibly the best in his Shardlake series. I wrote about it here. After that every book I picked up seemed a bit flat and I struggled to come up with another book to read. I'm still reading Eat, Pray,Love. It seems as though I've been reading it for ever as I'm only reading a few pages a day, probably not the best way to read it. So far I have mixed feelings about this book. This morning it made me smile though. Elizabeth Gilbert is now in Bali with Ketut,the elderley medicine man who she hopes will teach her to find God through Balinese meditation. She has spent months in India studying Yoga - intense and heart searching - and now Ketut tells her

" ...Yoga too hard. ... To meditate only you must smile. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy."

It took me until Friday to decide that Hilary Mantel's Giving Up the Ghost was the right book for my frame of mind; it's a complete contrast to Revelation. I think that when I've read one book that makes me 'live' in the story I need something completely different, so I've moved from historical mystery to present day memoir. In Hilary Mantel's book she looks back over her life, so different from mine and from Elizabeth Gilbert's too. This is one of the things I like about reading - the access that it gives into other people's lives, thoughts and experiences. Some would say that it's not real life and you should get out and live life rather than read about it. As for me I'd rather read about Hilary Mantel's experiences with her family, school teachers and doctors than live them and I'd much rather read about life in an ashram in India than go there myself, but it's good to know about these things.

I read yesterday that Melvyn Bragg has published a new book - Remember Me .... You can read a review of the book at the Times Online where there is a link to to Melvyn Bragg's talk about Remember Me ... at The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival.

This is the fourth novel about Joe, now grown up, based on Melvyn Bragg's own life. The first three, The Soldier's Return, Son of War and Crossing the Lines, tell the story of Joe from age 6 when his father returns at the end of the Second World War up the time he left home to go to Oxford University. As well as beng good stories these books bring to life what it was like living in the post war period. I'm looking forward to reading Remember Me ... with eager anticipation.

I hope everyone has a good day today - keep smiling!

Just The Right Book II

2008-04-18T10:47:00.000+01:00

Today "just the right book" (see here) is Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel.

I wish I could write like she does!

After Work Cookbook

2008-04-17T22:40:00.001+01:00

After Work, by W H Smith, published by Octopus Publishing Group Ltd 1999.

I’ve had this book a few years and have made several of the recipes. As the title suggests all the recipes are for making quick meals from fresh ingredients plus some storecupboard items. Each recipe is illustrated with a photograph. Some dishes need more preparation than others, but none of them are difficult to make – just what you need at the end of a busy day.

There’s a good mix of recipes divided into sections:

· ‘light bites’ – sandwiches, salads and soups
· ‘international flavours’ – a selection from around the world – pasta, stir-fry, curry, chow mein etc
· ‘quick fish dishes’ – fish cakes, fish casserole etc
· ‘’meat and poultry for dinner’ – family meals and special occasions
· ‘sweet endings’ – using fruit and chocolate eg double chocolate brownies

Today I made Two-Tomato Mozzarella Salad, one of my favourite recipes from this book. Really all you do is put it all together and eat it. It only takes a few minutes to prepare.

For 4 people you need:

· 500g fresh plum tomatoes sliced – or as many as you like
· chopped oregano
· 375g mozzarella cheese sliced – or use as much or you like - buffalo mozzarella is the nicest
· 12 sun-dried tomatoes preserved in oil and cut into strips. I don’t cut them up unless they are very large – again you can use as many as you want
· fresh basil leaves
· salt and pepper – I use rock or sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

For the dressing, whisk the following ingredients together in a small bowl or put in a screw top jar and shake well to combine:

· 5 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
· 3 tablespoons oil from the sun-dried tomatoes
· 3 tablespoons red wine vinegar
· ¼ garlic clove crushed - I usually use a whole clove
· pinch of sugar

1. Arrange the plum tomato slices in a single layer on a large plate and sprinkle with salt and pepper to taste together with the oregano.
2. Arrange the slices of mozzarella on top of the sliced tomatoes and tuck in the sun-dried tomatoes between them.
3. Scatter the basil leaves over the top and drizzle on the dressing.

Sometimes we just have this with maybe some crusty bread. Today we added some Parma ham, pasta shells with green pesto and asparagus tips – simply delicious.

Also posted on Soup's On! blog.

Just the Right Book?

2008-04-17T17:00:00.003+01:00

I still can’t decide which book to read next. I’ve picked up The Sixth Wife, by Suzannah Dunn but it seems wrong somehow; another time might be better for that book. I’ve read three of the short stories in Ian Rankin’s A Good Hanging – they’re OK but not riveting. I don’t fancy Dante’s Descent into Hell (Inferno) today – I want something more cheerful, and not historical. They’re not the right books just now.

I had to go to the dentist yesterday as a filling had come out. Fortunately he was able to replace the filling and I didn’t have to have an injection, which I really dislike – I have a needle phobia, I think. Anyway to reward myself I went to the library for a mooch. I had only just got passed the returns desk when I saw The Maytrees by Annie Dillard on a display stand. I’d read somewhere that this is a good book and as I’ve read several of her books, particularly Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, I hoped this would be just the right book.

Then I saw Going into a Dark House by Jane Gardam on another display stand and thought that might be the right book. This is a collection of short stories, maybe as good as The Sidmouth Letters and Old Filth. But maybe not just the right book yet – I’m not really in the mood for short stories.

Further into the library and I came upon the autobiography/biography section, where I picked up two books by Joan Bakewell. Now I like Joan Bakewell, so I had a look at both of them. The Centre of the Bed is about her life from her childhood in Stockport, growing up during the war, life at Cambridge University and with the BBC as a radio and television broadcaster – called “the thinking man’s crumpet”, no less. Stockport is near where I was born and that was enough for me to borrow this book, that and the description on the book cover that said she “provides a fascinating record of the changes in British society and culture over the last seventy years.” That should be good.

Right next to that book was The View from Here: Life at Seventy, which promises to be “an exhilarating, funny and always thought-provoking take on the human condition that most of us dread and yet count ourselves lucky to achieve: old age.”

I’m not as old as that yet, but I hope to get there, so it’s best to be prepared. This may be Just The Right Book.

Then again, maybe now is the right time for The Needle in the Blood, by Sarah Bower - it's been sitting on my bookshelves for months now ...?

Vocabulary - Booking Through Thursday

2008-04-17T07:40:00.002+01:00

Suggested by Nithin:
I’ve always wondered what other people do when they come across a word/phrase that they’ve never heard before. I mean, do they jot it down on paper so they can look it up later, or do they stop reading to look it up on the dictionary/google it or do they just continue reading and forget about the word?

A short answer today -it varies depending upon what I’m reading. If I come across a word I don’t know sometimes I try to think what it means by the context, especially if I’m engrossed in the book and it would spoil it if I stopped to get the dictionary out. I may try to remember the word and look it up later to check I’ve understood it properly. Other times I jot it down and look it up later, or if words keep cropping up that I don’t know I’ll get the dictionary out and have it handy for reference.

Sometimes I think I know just what a word means, but if you ask me for a definition I’ll become a bit vague and say I’ll have to look it up.

Oscar Wilde

2008-04-16T16:30:00.007+01:00

Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders by Gyles Brandreth (published in the USA as Oscar Wilde and a Death of No Importance), John Murray Publishers Ltd, 2008, 355 pages).

I suppose you could call this book an “historical whodunit”. It’s set in 1889 - 1890, fin-de-siècle London and Paris and the mystery begins with Oscar Wilde finding the naked body of Billy Wood, a 16 year old boy in the candle-lit room in a small terraced house in Westminster, close to the Houses of Parliament. Billy’s throat has been cut and he is laid out as though on a funeral bier, surrounded by candles, with the smell of incense still in the air. It’s a combination of fiction and fact, with both real and imaginary characters. Wilde with the help of his friends Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Sherard sets out to solve the crime. Sherard (the great grandson of William Wordsworth) who wrote poems, novels, biographies (including five of Oscar Wilde) and social studies is the narrator.

The story reads quickly (so quickly that I didn’t want to stop to make notes as I read) and is full of colourful characters such as Gerard Bellotti, who runs an “informal luncheon club for gentlemen”. Bellotti is

“grossly corpulent” giving the impression of “a toad that sits and blinks, yet never moves” wearing “an orange checked suit that would have done credit to the first comedian at Collins’ Music Hall and on the top of his onion-shaped head of oily hair, which was tightly curled and dyed the colour of henna, he sported a battered straw boater.”

Wilde is a fan of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories so much so that as the mystery is unravelled he picks up clues in the manner of Holmes, observing and deducing, exclaiming when questioned by Conan Doyle “Come, Arthur, this is elementary stuff … Holmes is where my heart is.” I think it is this combination of fact and fiction that I enjoyed most in reading the book. I knew little about Wilde or Doyle and nothing about Sherard before reading it, but I think I learned a lot about all three people, about their characters, their views on life and love, and their works, as well as about the society in which they lived.

According to The Oscar Wilde Murder Mysteries website the book is peppered through with quotes from Wilde, or Brandreth’s versions of Wilde’s words, together with Brandreth’s own inventions. I couldn’t tell which was which, as I’ve only read Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and seen a TV production of The Importance of Being Ernest, but it all seemed perfectly in character to me. I found the details of Wilde’s love for his wife Constance particularly interesting in contrast to his trial for gross indecency in 1895. In fact I came away from the book really liking Wilde and wanting to read more about him and by him. Fortunately the biographical notes at the end of the book give more details of works by and about Wilde, Conan Doyle and Sherard.

I didn’t find the mystery too difficult to work out, with lots of clues throughout the book, but that didn’t detract from my enjoyment. On the contrary it made it all the more pleasurable. The next book in the series, Oscar Wilde and the Ring of Death, is due out in the UK in May and in the USA, called Oscar Wilde and the Game of Murder, in September. Apparently there are seven more in the pipeline. That should mean I end up knowing an awful lot more about Oscar Wilde!

Revelation by C J Sansom

2008-04-15T16:15:00.003+01:00

I know who the murderer is – I’ve finished Revelation!

I haven’t written anything on this blog since Saturday, partly because we’ve been staying with our son and his family and partly because I just had to finish reading Revelation. It’s the fourth book in the Matthew Shardlake series. The first three are Dissolution set in 1537, Dark Fire set in 1540 and Sovereign set in 1541. I think they all stand alone but I like to read books in sequence. It’s been a year since I read the third book and Revelation was well worth the wait. It’s a long book full of intrigue, mystery and murder. (At 546 pages long it qualifies for the Chunkster Challenge.)

Revelation is set a few years later than Sovereign; the action takes place during March and April 1543. Catherine Howard, Henry VIII’s fifth queen, has been beheaded and he has asked Catherine Parr to be his wife. She, understandably, is somewhat reluctant, fearful of what that may lead to, not to mention her involvement with Sir Thomas Seymour. This is a time of the struggle for power between religious reformers and reactionaries. Thomas Cranmer is still the Archbishop of Canterbury, despite opposition from Bishop Gardiner and Bishop Bonner, who was pursuing religious radicals, looking for heretics. The reformers are preaching that the Apocalypse was coming, inducing “salvation panic”, with people craving certainty that they are among those whom God has pre-ordained to be saved. Parliament is passing legislation to prevent the working classes and women from reading the new English Bible Thomas Cromwell (executed in 1540) had introduced. It’s a time of change and uncertainty.

That’s the political and religious scene in which Matthew Shardlake, a lawyer, finds himself when the murder of his old friend Roger Elliard, brings him back to the attention of Archbishop Cranmer. He is working on the case of Adam Kite, a teenage boy, who is imprisoned in the Bedlam hospital for the insane, helped by Guy Malton (previously a monk and now licensed as a doctor). Adam is a ‘self-hater’ fearing that he is ‘unworthy of God’s love’. The question is, is he mad or possessed by the devil? Then more bodies are found and Matthew along with his assistant Barak joins forces with Gregory Harsnet, the London coroner is trying to find out who is committing the horrific murders.

I’m not going to say any more about the plot. I was completely convinced of the reality presented in the book, the setting is clearly described (there are maps of the main scenes, north of the River Thames and of Westminster) and the characters are just so alive. I felt as though I was there, a spectator to everything that went on.

I particularly liked the information in the book on such topics as the state of medicine at the time, the treatment of various illnesses, how knowledge of human anatomy was discovered through post-mortems, challenging previously held beliefs. Mental illness for example was thought by some to be caused by an imbalance of humours in the brain but others were coming to think it was caused by physical disorders, such as tumours, in the brain and yet others thought it was possession by the devil, which must be driven out. There was the threat that religious-obsessives would be considered as heretics and condemned to be burned at the stake. (I found it interesting that the treatment of mental illness in the 17th century in read about in The Verneys was not much different from that in the 16th – see my post on The Verneys here.) I was fascinated by the idea of teeth set in wooden dentures, but squeamish at how the teeth were obtained and I was intrigued by the use of drugs, such as dwale (deadly nightshade) as an anaesthetic.

Another topic that fascinated me was the question of the religious beliefs of the fundamentalists. Just as Christian fundamentalists today seen signs of the end of the world, people in Tudor England were convinced that the Apocalypse was coming upon them. The Puritans were convinced of the literal truth of the Book of Revelation, accepting the violent destruction of those who were not ‘saved’ without a qualm. It is of course, as the title indicates, the prophecies in the Book of Revelation that fuel the murders. Guy, next to Matthew my favourite character in the Shardlake series, looks on these subjects more compassionately. Talking of the contemporary scene he says that men have been

“Thrown into a world, where the Bible is interpreted as literal facts, its symbols and metaphors forgotten, and fanatics react with equanimity to the blood and cruelty of Revelation. Have you ever thought what a God would be like who actually ordained and executed the cruelty that is in that book? A holocaust of mankind. Yet so many of these Bible-men accept the idea without a second thought.”

How do I rate this book? The plot had me turning the pages to see what happens next and find out who committed the murders, there was enough commentary on the political, religious and social scene for me to grasp what it was like living in Tudor England together with information on the location of the action that did not detract from the action but enhanced it, well-defined and believable characters and a fluent, readable style with a good balance between dialogue and description.

In a less analytical mode I’d say, “I loved it, loved it, loved it!”

It’s hard to settle down now to another book, even though I’ve plenty lined up waiting to be read. It’s like that sometimes when I’ve just finished a really good book. I’m still reading Eat, Pray, Love, but I like to have more than one book on the go. I’m behind with reading Les Miserables, so I might get back to that, but as Revelation ends with the news that Henry VIII finally married Catherine Parr in July 1543 I’m really tempted to read Suzannah Dunn’s The Sixth Wife to carry on reading more about Catherine Parr.

Happy Birthday BooksPlease!

2008-04-12T21:03:00.006+01:00

Today my blog is one year old.

Actually I set up the blog in July 2006 but I think of that as its conception because I didn’t write another thing until 12 April 2007, when I left work. Then I wrote: “I've been meaning to write more, both in this blog and in other writing, but somehow there's always something else to do. Well, now I have time during the day and I will write.”

From a slow start I've been writing ever since – not every day but on average I write about 5 posts a week. But without help from my husband I'd never have got started and he's always there to help with the technical stuff. I've enjoyed writing not only about the books I've been reading but also and the places I've visited. I really look forward to writing although the downside is that I actually read fewer books now than I did before I left work. The photo is the first one I put on the blog and I still haven't read all these books! I've still got three of them I haven't even started. It's just so tempting reading about books other bloggers are enthusing over that I'm easily sidetracked. But I do mean to read Falling Angels, The Sixth Wife and After the Victorians before long.

Blogging is addictive - I love writing the blog, I love reading other people’s blogs (I must expand my list on the sidebar because I read many more than are listed), and I love joining the challenges and linking up with other bloggers. It’s been a good year.

Do You Want To Know the End?

2008-04-11T12:20:00.005+01:00

I’m reading C J Sansom’s book Revelation. Don’t worry there are no spoilers here!

This is the fourth in the Matthew Shardlake series and he’s working on the case of a teenage boy held in the Bedlam Hospital for the insane (or is he possessed?) and also investigating a series of brutal murders. The murderer is using a chapter in the Book of Revelation as the pattern for the killings.

There’s a lot more to say about this book, which will have to wait for a later post. I’m about half way through the book and am wondering just who is the murderer – I’m picking up clues, but are they red herrings? I’m always tempted to turn to the end of the book and see who done it, but I don’t want to.

But this morning I couldn’t resist just a little peek. So just opening the book enough to see just a few words on the last page I read part of the last sentence – with my hand over the rest of the page –

“Out there in a chapel in a palace, the King had finally married Catherine Parr.”

So no surprises there then!

Just a Glimpse of the Orient

2008-04-10T17:11:00.001+01:00

On Monday D and I went for a walk with a friend alongside the Wendover Arm of the Grand Union Canal. It was a beautiful, sunny day and we enjoyed these views. This is the start of our walk.

The Wendover Arm was first constructed in 1797, but as sections of it leaked it was "de-watered". From 1989 onwards it has been restored and this is what it looks like today.

Kingfishers can be seen along the canal, but we didn't see any on Monday. There were lots of other birds though, ducks, moorhens, coots and dabchicks (otherwise known as little grebes), busy diving and collecting nest material.

The ducks were in fine form, taking off a high speed and then landing with legs flailing before splash-down.

Further along the canal we saw a swan sitting on a large nest over on the other side.

The canal opens up into an area known as the Wides, with areas of grass and shrubs with a tiny island on the far side. Trees have invaded what was once open water and without management the canal would disappear in a few years.

Then came a surprise - a pair of mandarin ducks. I'd never seen these before; they looked very different from the other birds on the canal, but just so beautiful. The male has very distinctive chestnut brown and orange fan wings sticking up above his body, whilst the female is a duller brown with white spots. They were swimming together in and out of the trees. When I came home I looked them up in our bird books. Originally from China these ducks like streams and overgrown lakesides in broad leaved woodland and they nest in tree cavities. The canal is the perfect place for them.

Writing Challenge - Booking Through Thursday

2008-04-10T08:39:00.001+01:00

This week's Booking Through Thursday question is another variation on the page 123 theme post I did yesterday! But it needs more thought!

Pick up the nearest book. (I’m sure you must have one nearby.)
Turn to page 123.
What is the first sentence on the page?
The last sentence on the page?
Now . . . connect them together….
(And no, you may not transcribe the entire page of the book–that’s cheating!)

Well, actually, the nearest books are a pile of unread books on the desk and because to answer this question I need to understand what has gone before page 123 I'm using the nearest book that I have read, which isn't in the pile (it's in another pile). It's The Secret Garden and I wrote about that too yesterday (see here) and I haven't put it back on the bookshelves yet.

The first sentence on page 123 is: Very soon afterwards a bell rang, and she rolled up her knitting.

The last sentence is: Colin was still frowning.

This is the scene in The Secret Garden the morning after Mary had met her cousin, Colin, whom she didn't even know existed. She had found him the night before when she had heard him crying. He believes himself to be an invalid and has been allowed to do just what he likes all his life. The "she" in the first sentence is Martha, Mary's maid. Martha and Colin's nurse are both astonished at Mary's effect on Colin and that he wants to see her. The nurse tells Martha that Mary has bewitched Colin and that he has demanded that she visit him again as he has been thinking about her all the morning. Mary goes to see him and tells him that Martha is terrified that she will lose her job because Mary has met Colin - his existence was being kept secret from Mary. Frowning, Colin orders Martha to be brought into his presence and is still frowning when Martha comes in shaking in her shoes in fear of what he will do and say.

He could easily fly into a tantrum, hates people to look at him and all the servants feared his rages. He has the power to dismiss them from his father's house.

Of course you'll have to turn the page over to read what happens next.

The Secret Garden

2008-04-09T21:10:00.009+01:00

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, first published in 1911, my copy is a Penguin paperback published in 1958, 254 pages.

For the Heart of a Child Challenge

I read The Secret Garden several times as a child and the story has stayed with me ever since. For years my picture of the ideal garden has been a walled garden, just like the secret garden. The story can be read on different levels. As a child it seemed to me to be a straight forward story of Mary Lennox, orphaned after her parents died of cholera in India. Up until the age of nine she had lived a cosseted life looked after by servants, in particular her Ayah, ignored by her parents. After their death she was sent to live at Misselthwaite Manor, on the bleak Yorkshire moors, with her uncle, who was a hunchback recluse, who took little interest in her. Soon after Mary’s arrival, her uncle went abroad leaving her again in the care of servants. These were very different from the servants in India and Mary struggled to adjust.

Soon after she discovers she is not the only child in the house, when she finds Colin, her cousin, a hypochondriac, unable to walk, who believes he won’t live to grow up. Both Mary and Colin are selfish children, hating both themselves and the adults in their lives. Both also hate the outdoors, but encouraged by Martha, her maid, Mary wanders in the gardens of the Manor house and comes across a walled garden, which apparently has no door. There seems no way to get inside it – until guided by a robin, she finds an old key buried in the earth. I loved the descriptions of the Yorkshire countryside, the garden and how under the influence of Martha and her younger brother Dickon and even the grumpy gardener, Ben Weatherstaff, Mary blossomed as the year progressed along with the garden.

Reading it now I can see it is full of symbolism using nature, the Bible and myths, that I never noticed as a child. The image of the garden is used as both paradise lost and paradise regained. As the garden is nurtured and begins to blossom so do Mary and Colin, through springtime and into summer, culminating in the autumn when both are brought to full health. Dickon is accompanied by a young fox, a lamb, a crow and tame squirrels, reminiscent of St. Francis of Assisi and plays his pipe to charm the animals, like Pan. His mother, Mrs. Sowerby, is a plain-speaking down-to-earth Yorkshire woman, full of common sense and wisdom, who through Dickon and Martha helps the children, feeding Mary and Colin with both her words and wholesome food. At times I thought the language becomes over sentimental and a bit syrupy(I never thought that as a child). But there are descriptions that still appeal to me, such as this description of the roses in the garden:

And the roses – the roses! Rising out of the grass, tangled round the sundial, wreathing the tree trunks, and hanging from their branches, climbing up the walls and spreading over them with long garlands falling in cascades – they came alive day by day, hour by hour. Fair, fresh leaves and buds – and buds- tiny at first, but swelling and working Magic until they burst and uncurled into cups of scent delicately spilling themselves over their brims and filling the garden air.

Above all it is the power of Magic that is invoked in this book. The magic of nature, that makes plants and people grow and develop, the magic of the power of positive thinking and prayer, of the healing power of the mind, and of laughter and love. Sometimes it seemed too simplistic and yet at the same time I was swept along with the sentiments and enjoying the experience of re-reading this book.

A Good Hanging - Page 123 Meme

2008-04-09T16:30:00.001+01:00

I was tagged by Zetor for this meme - pick a book at least 123 pages long. Open that book to page 123.Find the fifth sentence and post the next three.

I picked this book by Ian Rankin, as it’s the next book I’ll be reading for the Celebrate the Author Challenge (it’s Rankin’s birthday in April). It’s a collection of twelve stories and this story, the 6th one in the book is the title story, “A Good Hanging”.

On page 123 the fifth complete sentence is:

A pencil lay on the typescript, evidence that Charles Collins was taking the critics’ view to heart himself and attempting to shorten the play as best he could.

The next three sentences are as follows:

Peter Collins’ room was much more to Rebus’s personal taste, although Holmes wrinkled his nose at the underwear underfoot, the contents of the hastily unpacked rucksack scattered over every surface. Beside the unmade bed, next to an overflowing ashtray, lay another copy of the play. Rebus flipped through it.

I've enjoyed the Rebus stories on TV, so I'm looking forward to reading the books.

If you haven't done this meme and would like to please consider yourself tagged.

Sunshine and Cats Please Today

2008-04-08T09:42:00.005+01:00

The snow has gone, so I've put a sunny picture back in the header. The cattle aren't back in the fields yet - I took this picture last year, but it is a sunny morning here today.

This is a non-book post and I'm off out for a walk in the sunshine (hopefully it'll last for a while). Meanwhile, here is a picture of Lucy I took this morning. She's sitting on the post at the bottom of the stairs - one of her favourite spots.

Below her on the stair post is this rat. The one she had previously fell to pieces, but she's not interested in this one.

She prefers this stratching post,which she has had since she was a kitten.

Consequences

2008-04-07T16:13:00.000+01:00

Penelope Lively’s Consequences follows the lives of Lorna, her daughter, Molly and her granddaughter, Ruth. I like Penelope Lively’s style of writing, richly emotional but still taut and concise. Although I think that it is more than a love story I think this quote from the book jacket is not a bad summary:

“An enthralling examination of interweaving love and history, Consequences pinpoints the moments when three women in very different times find love.”

It starts in 1935 when two young people, Lorna and Matt meet quite by chance in St James’s Park in London. They come from very different backgrounds but are instantly attracted to each other and despite opposition from Lorna’s parents they get married and move to a cottage in deepest Somerset. As the title indicates the predominant theme of this book is how events follow on from chance meetings and how our lives are changed because of the decisions we make. For some time now I’ve been interested in the Second World War period and although I wasn’t alive then it seems to me as though this book captures the atmosphere of that period. There is a nostalgic feel to the settings, looking back to how things were and how the war inevitably changed people’s lives and expectations.

Lorna and Matt had a daughter, Molly, then the war began and Matt was called up. I won’t say too much as I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t read it. It’s full of such quotable extracts, such as this in defining happiness Lorna realises that it is “another condition, of a different quality, a state of being that lifts you above ordinary existence, that pervades every moment, that confers immunity.”

The future is always the unknown: “ … you are always standing on the brink, in a place where you cannot see ahead, there is nothing certain except what lies behind. This should be terrifying, but somehow it is not.”

This message of hope pervades the book despite the tragedies and difficulties that happen. Life continues after the war, and the changes in society are reflected in the attitudes of people towards each other:

“This was a bizarre new society in which class barriers were not broken down but subtly eroded … You still placed a person by their voice … but other things mattered too. Confidence, efficiency, sang-froid; selfishness, greed, shirking.”

People no longer knew where they were and where they belonged: “This was a world divided into them and us, with many subtle and significant sub-divisions.”

Molly grew up in this society and having gone through university, took a job as a librarian “because someone had left a copy of the Evening Standard in the tube” advertising the job and she thought why not? Thus setting in motion another train of events. In this section I particularly liked the descriptions of the library and of books (I used to be a librarian). Here are just a few examples:

“Fiction is one strident lie – or rather, many competing lies; history is a long narrative of argument and reassessment; travel shouts of self-promotion; biography is just pushing a product. As for autobiography …”

“That is the function of books: they offer a point of view, they offer many conflicting points of view, they provoke thought, they provoke irritation and admiration and speculation. They take you out of yourself and put you down somewhere else from whence you never entirely return.”

“The surface repose of a library is a cynical deception.”

Molly became a confident, determined and self-sufficient character, finding it exhilarating to cope with the challenges in life. For her work is the determining factor, being a wage earner. Molly refused to marry James, Ruth’s father and Ruth enjoyed the James’ presence in her life as “a sort of benevolent patron on the fringes of everyday existence.” For Molly, as she contemplated her life and the consequences of the choices she had made, Ruth’s “emphatic presence seemed to make sense of chance, of happenstance.”

Ruth was also an independent character, whose marriage to Peter failed and their children alternated between them in their two flats. She reflected:

“Every conception is fortuitous, every birth. That said, Ruth always saw her own existence as perhaps peculiarly accidental, spun from the odd conjunction of two people whose meeting was an unlikely chance. … Only now, in mid-life – for that was where she was, after all – did she see this background, and her very presence, as a distinctly precarious event. This put you in your place, somehow.”

The book ends with her search the cottage in Somerset where Matt and Lorna lived. I loved the description of her journey to the cottage in such simple and direct language which perfectly conveys the scenery. Once she left the motorways and main roads she was into the countryside lanes:

“You burrowed into this landscape, she saw. The motorways rushed through it, and the A this and the B that, but as soon as you abandoned those dictatorial highways you had slipped off into another sphere. You were in the lanes, you were in narrow tunnels between high hedge banks, routes that also knew quite well what they were about and where they were going but that was their own immemorial business, and you were now in their domain. You went where they went and that was that.”

You feel as though you’ve travel through time and place in reading this book. Penelope Lively has a website with information about the other books she has written. I thought I’d read most of them but I see there are some I haven’t come across. More treasures to find and read!

Oh Yes - another Challenge - Soup's On!

2008-04-07T15:52:00.000+01:00

This Challenge is hosted by Ex Libris (Sharon). It runs from April 1, 2008 to March 31, 2009. Sharon writes: All you have to do is select six cookbooks to read (enough to give an overview of the book) and make at least one of the recipes. These can be any cookbooks of your choice - brand new ones, old stand-bys that you can't live (or cook) without, or even heirlooms. You do not have to decide on the cookbooks ahead of time (unless you want to, of course).

I love cooking, that's my reason for joining this challenge. I'm always buying and looking at cookbooks, and watching TV cookery programmes. I've only written a couple of posts on cooking, so this is a great way to write more. I'm not sure yet which books I'll be writing about between now and the end of March next year but it could be these:

The Ration Book Diet by Mike Brown, Carol Harris and C J Jackson, because I bought it a few months ago, scan read it and thought oh yes I must cook some of these recipes, but haven't done so yet. It's full of information about the Second World War years in Britain, photos and cartoons from the Forties as well as beautiful modern photos.

The Good Food magazine 101 Meals For Two. This is a great little book and I've made a few of the recipes, but lots more to try out.

How To Eat by Nigella Lawson. She's one of my favourite TV cooks and I love this book, even though it has no photos.

Great British Menu from the first TV show of that name. Extravagant ingredients, but fantastic food.

After Work, a WHSmith publication. Another favourite book with quick recipes that work.

The Country Kitchen by Jocasta Innes. I've had this book for years; it's full of information about cooking with cream, butter, game - trussing and plucking a pheasant, making raised pies, terrines and galantines and preserving food. I haven't ventured much yet out of this book, but I'd love to have a go.

I'm looking forward to reading all the other reviews!

The Sunday Salon in the Snow

2008-04-06T12:04:00.004+01:00

It's the Sunday Salon in the snow here today. The snow is melting now, but when I woke up this morning my world had turned white. So I've put a picture of the view from the window in the header. It's not a lot of snow, but enough to bother Lucy. She ventured outside and dashed back in.

She was at the top of the steps when I started to take the photo, but I wasn't quick enough to catch her.

This week I finished reading Consequences - more about that later - and I read The Secret Garden. I'm still reading Eat, Pray, Love. I thought I had to return it to the library because someone else had reserved it but when I took it back they let me renew it.

I'm now reading the Pray section and am really glad that I never decided to go to an Ashram. For some years I too practised Yoga. I was very keen and trained to be a teacher, so I'm very interested in this section of the book. Elizabeth Gilbert certainly had a hard time, adjusting to the ways of the Ashram and struggled with the meditation. The schedule sounds gruelling - the day begins at 3.00am and ends at 9.00pm. There are hours of meditation and contemplation;before breakfast there is an hour of meditation, twenty-minute chanting of the first morning hymn and then the Gurigita, an excerpt from a holy ancient Yogic scripture is chanted. This is 182 verses long in Sanscrit and takes an hour and half to perform. Elizabeth writes

"Over the few weeks that I've been here, my feelings about the Gurugita have shifted from simple dislike to solid dread. I've started skipping it and doing other things with my morning that I think are much better for my spiritual growth, like writing in my journal or taking a shower, or calling my sister back in Pennsylvania and seeing how her kids are doing."

This is one of the things I like about this book, she's down to earth and open about her feelings. It also gives a balanced view. When I taught Yoga I was rather shocked by some people's ideas and attitudes towards it. I was told by some Christians that by doing the Yoga postures you are worshipping "gods" or "evil spirits". I like what Elizabeth says:

"While some of these practices tend to look rather Hindu in their derivation, Yoga is not synonymous with Hinduism. True Yoga neither competes with nor precludes any other religion. You may use your Yoga - your disciplined practices of sacred union - to get closer to Krishna, Jesus, Mohammad, Budda or Yahweh."

Another quote:

"Yoga is about self-mastery and the dedicate effort to haul your attention away from your endless brooding over he past and your nonstop worrying about the future so that you can seek, instead, a place of eternal presence from which you may regard yourself and your surroundings with poise. Only from that point of even-mindedness will the true nature of the world (and yourself) be revealed to you."

Later today I'm hoping to read some more of Les Miserables but as I've started to read Revelation, C J Sansom's latest book, I may continue with that. I'd also like to start reading Oliver Twist because I was watching I'd Do Anything last night - the search for Nancy and Oliver for the West End show. I haven't read this and want to know how Dickens portrayed Nancy.

I don't think I'll manage all this but I'm always wanting to read more.

One last photo showing mysterious tracks round the bird feeder on the front lawn.

Not really mysterious - I think it was one of the two wood pigeons who regularly pay a visit.

Booking Through Thursday "Lit-Ra-Chur"

2008-04-03T08:55:00.003+01:00

Today's question from Booking Through Thursday is:

When somebody mentions “literature,” what’s the first thing you think of? (Dickens? Tolstoy? Shakespeare?)
Do you read “literature” (however you define it) for pleasure? Or is it something that you read only when you must?

The first thing I think of is of course books and reading. I don’t think of any particular author or period or type of book – I just think books! A more considered thought is more complex. I may be reminded of school and English Literature lessons. These were a mixture of pain and pleasure. Pain because sometimes I got so bored with analysis of the texts that I came to dislike them, particularly Shakespeare; pleasure because I really loved the stories and the way they were written, I just wanted to read more and more. I suppose that is the measure of “literature”. I used to hate those questions such as “define literature, culture etc, etc”; over-analysis can kill a book.

I also think of a course I took on “Literature in the Modern World”, which covered the twentieth century before 1990 and considered what comprises the ‘canon’, the novel, poetry and drama and ‘literary theory’. It was Literature in English, not English Literature and opened up a whole new world of reading to me, including Terry Eagleton’s writings on literary theory. In considering what is meant by ‘fine writing’ he wrote, “Value-judgements would certainly seem to have a lot to do with what is judged literature and what isn’t …”. My thoughts are who is making the value-judgement and why should we take any notice anyway? My English teacher at school once told me I should be less sceptical - sorry, I still am.

I have A Dictionary of Literary Terms by Martin Gray (I bought this for the course). This defines literature as

“A vague, all-inclusive term for poetry, novels, drama, short stories, prose: anything written, in fact, with an apparently artistic purpose, rather than to merely communicate information; or anything written and examined as if it had an artistic purpose.’ Literature’ also an evaluative word: to say that a novel not is ‘not literature’ is to imply that it is badly written, or has for some other reason failed to achieve the status of art.”

We’re back to the value-judgement again and there is much disagreement over what is accepted as being worthy of being read.

Anyway, I do enjoy reading books by Dickens, Tolstoy, and the rest, just so long as I don’t have to subject them to minute analysis and literary criticism. I prefer to watch Shakespeare’s plays rather than read them, in fact I prefer to watch any drama rather than reading a play, because after all they were written to be performed.

The Magician's Assistant by Ann Patchett

2008-04-02T17:36:00.007+01:00

I read this book way back in January. It’s the third book on the theme of illusion that I’ve read. I wrote about the other two The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster here and The Illusionist by Jennifer Johnston here. They’re all good reads, although quite different books in different styles.

The opening sentences of The Magician’s Assistant introduce the illusion: “Parsifal is dead. That is the end of the story” - it’s an illusion, because of course this is only the beginning of the story and Parsifal pervades the book. Parsifal was a magician and Sabine had been his assistant for twenty years. She and Parsifal had been married for less than a year when he died suddenly of an aneurysm, leaving her alone in their large house in Los Angeles, apart from a large white rabbit, called Rabbit, who was retired from the stage as he was too big to be pulled out of a hat. To her surprise she discovered that he wasn’t who she had believed him to be. He had told her he had left home when he was seventeen and that his family was dead. But his mother Kitty Fetters and sisters, Bertie and Kitty contacted her after his death. They knew he had become a magician as they had seen him on the Johnny Carson Show – indeed they watched a recording of it most nights, entranced by his fame. They had no idea of his life, that he was gay, or that he had married Sabine. When Kitty and Bertie visit Sabine and invite her back to their home in Alliance, Nebraska, the truth is gradually revealed.

Interspersed with the action are Sabine’s dream sequences with Phan, Parsifal’s lover. Sabine thinks of these as contact with Parsifal and Phan and learns about their lives at the same time as during the day she is learning about his past family life. There is an out-of-world feel to these sequences, calming Sabine’s turmoil and confusion, which I liked. There is a lot in this book about identity, what and who a person actually is; about how the world is in fact illusory; and the importance of family. Sabine’s family life as the only child of Jewish parents who adore her forms a contrast with Parsifal’s but even here all is not what it seems.

After Parsifal’s death Sabine is lost, lonely and inconsolable and it is through Parsifal’s family and in particular through Kitty his sister, who she sees as a representation of him that she begins to cope with her loss. The scenes in Alliance form a complete contrast to life in LA, where everything seems perfect. None of the Kitty’s family has had life easy, they all have problems. I found the sequences with Kitty’s sons some of the most realistic in the book; the two teenagers came to life for me. If I have a criticism of the book it is of the ending. It all seems a bit too tidy, a bit “arranged”. But I did enjoy it – it’s a moving story about love, and grief and family.

Reading Notes for April

2008-04-02T12:15:00.002+01:00

I’ve been sorting out my books – the fiction, that is. I had arranged it an a-z author order, but it had got rather out of hand as I haven’t got enough bookcases. They are double shelved and because it’s a bit difficult to get to the back whenever I bought a new book I’d tried to slot it in to the right place but it had all got higgledy-piggledy. So, I decided to separate the books I haven’t read yet and put them in a separate bookcase. I really shouldn’t buy any more books for a while, now I can actually see how many unread books I own. I'm planning to restrict my reading in April to these books - well that's my aim, but as I really like to read what I want when I want, this could all be changed.

The books listed below are all books that fit into various reading Challenges. For the Celebrate the Author Challenge I'm going to choose a book by Ian Rankin, whose birthday it is on 28 April, – I have four to choose from:

The Black Book
The Hanging Garden
Resurrection Men
A Good Hanging and Other Stories

For the Chunkster Challenge I’ve just started to read C J Sansom’s Revolution. It’s 546 pages long, so it easily meets the criteria of being 450 pages. I’ve only had this book a few days, but I’m bringing it forward over other to-be-read books, as I’m an avid fan of Sansom’s books.

For the Heart of the Child Challenge I’m reading The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson-Burnett. I still have the copy I had as a child, now yellowing and a bit battered, but still in one piece. In the description at the front of the book the editor writes: “Girls like it most, and between the ages of nine and fourteen – and, be warned, keep your copy carefully. You will want to go back and read it over and over again.”

I’m also reading Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. I suppose could add this in to the Chunkster Challenge, as it’s 1200 pages without counting the appendices. There’s a blog Introducing the Parisian Underworld where we can discuss the book and there’s no time limit on this!

For the Once Upon a Time Challenge I'd like to get on with reading Dante’s The Divine Comedy or at least The Descent into Hell.

Then there is Our Longest Days, real diaries from the Second World War period, that I’m itching to read. I have started that too.

It will be a miracle if I actually stick to any reading plan, but at least these books are all ones I already own. Now if I could stop myself going to the library and borrowing more books that would be good, but yesterday I returned two books and borrowed yet another one – at least it was only one.

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

2008-04-01T16:30:00.003+01:00

I’ve now finished the “Eat” section of this book, or in other words the section in Elizabeth Gilbert’s book about her stay in Italy. The book is growing on me, or maybe I’m becoming accustomed to her style of writing. I’ve already written about her comments on how Italians cheer themselves up after their football team has lost a match by eating cream puffs, but there a couple of other things caught my attention in this section.

The first is a reference to Dante – I’ve written several posts on Dante’s The Divine Comedy and Florence. Elizabeth goes to an Italian class to help her learn the language. She explains how for centuries there was no “Italian” language - Italians wrote and spoke in different local dialects – and it was only in the 16th century that a gathering of intellectuals decided that the official Italian language (in its written form at least) was the language used by Dante; the language in which he had published The Divine comedy in 1321; the language spoken by his fellow Florentines.

The other most interesting discovery I made in reading “Eat” is about the Augusteum – a big round ruin near the Ara Pacis, the Altar to Peace. I didn’t know its name before, nor its history. I first visited Rome in 1992. I had been doing an Open University course on Roman History and wanted to see various sites, including the Roman Forum, the Coliseum and the Ara Pacis. This large round ruin intrigued me; it’s such a contrast to the Ara Pacis, which is an enormous, gleaming white marble altar, showing the Emperor Augustus’ triumphal entry into Rome, consecrated in 9BC. The Museo dell'Ara Pacis website gives the history of the altar and details of its renovation.

The entrance to the ruin was gated and locked and all we could see were some wild cats – there are lots in Rome - and a lady who had come with some food for the cats. It looked a really mysterious and forbidding place and I wanted to know its history.

Elizabeth Gilbert explains that this is the Augusteum, which was originally a mausoleum built by the Emperor Augustus to house his remains and those of his family. It fell into ruins after the fall of the Roman Empire and his ashes were stolen. By the 12th century it had been turned into a fortress for the Colonna family, then later became a vineyard, a Renaissance garden, a bullring in the 18th century, a fireworks depository, then a concert hall. In the 1930s Mussolini restored it to its classical foundations and intended it to house his remains.

Elizabeth Gilbert doesn’t mention the Ara Pacis, but says that the Augusteum “is one of the quietest and loneliest place in Rome, buried deep in the ground. The city has grown up around it over centuries. (One inch a year is the general rule of thumb for the accumulation of time’s debris.) Traffic above the monument spins in a hectic circle, and nobody ever goes down there – from what I can tell – except to use the place as a public bathroom. But the building still exists, holding its Roman ground with dignity, waiting for its next incarnation.”

Yes, it was lonely went we went there (and it did smell, too). Both the Augusteum and the Ara Pacis were very quiet and with very few people around. We went back to Rome in 2003 and again both sites were very quiet, we were the only people there – a treat in such a crowded, busy city.

The Pooh Character Test

2008-04-01T14:10:00.000+01:00

I found this test on Emily's blog and couldn't resist doing it myself. I'm not sure I really match all Owl's characteristics. I'm not as confident as Owl in my own abilities, but I like to think I'm not a Bisy Backson type of person. Although I do like going out and seeing things I also like to stay at home and reflect on things. I don't really get enough exercise - but hopefully better weather is on the way and I'll be tempted into the great outdoors.

Your Score: Owl

You scored 16 Ego, 11 Anxiety, and 11 Agency!

"Correct me if I am wrong," he said, "but am I right in supposing that it is a very Blusterous day outside?"

"Very," said Piglet, who was quietly thawing his ears, and wishing that he was safely back in his own house.

"I thought so," said O-wl. "It was on just such a blusterous day as this that my Uncle Robert, a portrait of whom you see upon the wall on your right, Piglet, while returning in the late forenoon from a-- What's that?"

You scored as Owl!

ABOUT OWL: Owl is considered highly educated because he can spell his own name (WOL) and he can even spell Tuesday... although he doesn't always get it right. Owl is a good sort, really, although he can be a bit of a stuffed shirt, and he tends to overlook the smaller details in life - like the fact that his bellpull is actually someone's tail.

WHAT THIS SAYS ABOUT YOU: You are confident and you feel capable of dealing with whatever life throws at you. You know that you can handle just about everything... mostly because you know how to delegate the job of actually handling things to the people around you. You aren't one of those Bisy Backsons, who rush around trying to do everything at once. You prefer to stay at home and reflect on life, rather than go out and live it.

Sometimes, you know, you need to stop waiting for things to come to you and go out and get them. You need to go enjoy the weather, smell the fresh air, and pay attention to the little people in your life. They may not be as great as you... but maybe they could use your help.

Link: The Deep and Meaningful Winnie-The-Pooh Character Test written by wolfcaroling on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test
View My Profile(wolfcaroling)

The Sunday Salon - New Books Today

2008-03-30T17:10:00.000+01:00

Well, new to me at any rate. I've been out shopping - it still seems wrong that the shops are open on a Sunday, but every now and then I do go, despite feeling slightly guilty. Of course I had to go to the bookshop, have a cup of coffee and then just have a look at the books. Fatal, I came home with four.

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. I'm reading this along with Danielle. I borrowed a copy from the library but I'll only have to keep renewing it and I'm enjoying it, so I bought it. The copy in the shop was slightly damaged - so I got a discount, can't be bad.

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, because I enjoyed Half of a Yellow Sun (I wrote about it here). It was one of the 3 for 2 books and the marketing worked, because I then had to pick 2 more books.

I bought The Gathering by Anne Enright - the 2007 Booker Prize winner, because I've read mixed reveiws and wanted to see for myself.

And Owen Sheers' Resistance because it looks so interesting - a war story but this time an imagined history of what could have happened if D-Day had failed and the Nazis had invaded Britain.

And now I'm off to cook the dinner and hopefully read some more of Les Miserables in my new copy (I'm only up to page 164).

The Sunday Salon

2008-03-30T09:51:00.004+01:00

This is my first post for the Sunday Salon and I feel very much “the new girl”. I’m the 99th member so there are many experienced members and I’m feeling quite shy. I’ve read the notes on what to do so here goes.

This morning I read a few pages of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love. I’m not terrible impressed with it so far and I don’t think I’ll finish it as it’s a library book and someone else has reserved it and I have to return it next by Wednesday. I’m still in the “eating” part, which is in Italy. The first few chapters explain the background to Elizabeth Gilbert’s reasons for travelling and it is her depression and despair that I found hard going. Now she is in Italy it’s beginning to grab my attention and this morning I read her account of going to watch a football match between Lazio and Roma. Apparently Italian men go to a bakery after their team has lost a match and cheer themselves up by standing about leaning on their motorcycles, “talking about the game, looking macho as anything, and eating cream puffs.” I must remember to suggest this to my husband and son the next time their team, Manchester United, loses. Fortunately that’s not today because they beat Aston Villa 4 –0 yesterday. I hope the Italians will be eating cream puffs (and there will be no violence) on Tuesday when Manchester United are playing Roma in Rome.

What else am I reading? Yesterday I started to read Penelope Lively’s Consequences. I’ve yet to read one of her books and be disappointed and so far this is living up to my expectations. It starts in 1935 when two young people, Lorna and Matt meet quite by chance in St James’s Park in London. They come from very different backgrounds but are instantly attracted to each other and despite opposition from Lorna’s parents they get married. As the title indicates the predominant theme of this book is how events follow on from chance meetings and how our lives are changed because of the decisions we make. For some time now I’ve been interested in the Second World War period and from my reading of this book so far it sets the scene and captures the atmosphere of the pre-war and early war years. There is a nostalgic feel to the settings, looking back to how things were and how the war inevitably changed people’s lives and expectations.

This morning I’ve read some more. Lorna and Matt have had a daughter, Molly, the war began and Matt was called up. I won’t say too much as I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t read it. This book is just so good, I can’t praise it enough. It’s full of such quotable extracts, such as this in defining happiness Lorna realises that it is “another condition, of a different quality, a state of being that lifts you above ordinary existence, that pervades every moment, that confers immunity.”

Later in my reading this morning I came to the section when Molly having gone through university, takes a job as a librarian “because someone had left a copy of the Evening Standard in the tube” advertising the job and she thought why not? Thus setting in motion another train of events. But the bits that I particularly like in this section are the descriptions of the library and of books (I used to be a librarian). Here are just a few examples:

“Fiction is one strident lie – or rather, many competing lies; history is a long narrative of argument and reassessment; travel shouts of self-promotion; biography is just pushing a product. As for autobiography …”

“That is the function of books: they offer a point of view, they offer many conflicting points of view, they provoke thought, they provoke irritation and admiration and speculation. They take you out of yourself and put you down somewhere else from whence you never entirely return.”

“The surface repose of a library is a cynical deception.”

That’s all for now. More thoughts later on today.

LibraryThing Early Reviewers Group

2008-03-29T16:38:00.003Z

I've just added a new widget to the sidebar to the left but I'm putting it in this post as well because I like the image and I'm so pleased that there are now some books available to us in the UK. LibraryThing in conjunction with publishers provide advance copies of books, in exchange for reviews.

I didn't expect to be lucky enough to get a copy as there many more people applying for copies than are available. So I was so pleased when I had a message that I had snagged an Early Reviewers copy of Our Longest Days edited by Sandra Koa Wing - it arrived in the post yesterday.

It looks fascinating and fits in so well with my reading interests as it's full of extracts from diaries written during the Second World War. I'll be writing more about this book!

Dante’s Florence Week 5 Part Two

2008-03-29T14:50:00.002Z

Dante’s Exile from Florence

Dante entered politics in 1295 and in 1300 he became a Prior, one of the Governors of the City giving him great prestige. It was a dangerous time with fighting between the factions of Guelfs and Ghibellines. The Guelfs supported the Pope, opposing the Ghibellines who supported the Holy Roman Emperor. The political situation was very complicated and became more so when the Guelfs split into two opposing factions, known as the Whites and the Blacks. The Whites, including Dante, opposed the Pope wanting more control of their own affairs – Dante thought the Pope, Boniface VIII was corrupt and was too involved with temporal affairs. He wanted more independence for Florence and a split between the Church and the State. Dante attacked the Pope and the Church in The Divine Comedy, for example in Canto 19 Inferno he describes the punishment for simony, the crime of buying a position within the church and denounces Boniface as a simonist.

In 1302 Dante was accused of fraud and as he refused to pay the fine he was sentenced to death by burning and was banished from Florence. He was offered an amnesty in 1315, but the conditions were too humiliating for him to accept and he never returned to Florence. He refers to his exile in The Divine Comedy through a conversation in Canto 17 Paradiso XVII with his great-great grandfather Cacciaguida, with Cacciaguida forecasting Dante's exile from Florence:

“You will leave everything you love most dearly;
This is the arrow which is
loosed first
From the bow of exile.

You will learn how salt is the
taste
Of other people’s bread, how hard the way
Going up and down other
people’s stairs.”

Dante spent 19 years in exile. He championed writing in the vernacular and in 1304 he published De Vulgari Eloquentia(On Eloquence in the vernacular). He started to write The Divine Comedy in 1306/7 and finished it just before his death in 1321 in Ravenna. During, 1315 – 1316 whilst he was the guest of Can Grande della Scala in Verona he wrote part of Purgatorio. Below is Maria Spartali Stillman's painting of Dante in Verona, showing Dante surrounded by a group of admiring women.

In 1317 he was offered a home by Guido Novello da Polenta in Ravenna, where he completed Purgatorio and began Paradiso. Can Grande was a patron of the arts and sheltered exiles, giving Dante his own apartments and treating him very well. Dante dedicated Paradiso to Can Grande in gratitude.

Dante died on 14 September 1321and was buried in the Church of San Francesco in Ravenna, where there is a shrine containing his sarcophagus and a votive lamp.

Despite requests from Florence to return his body to the city, Dante’s tomb in the church of Santa Croce is empty.

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

2008-03-28T16:45:00.000Z

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 2007, Harper Perrenial 433 pages. Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2007.

This book is based on the Nigeria-Biafra War of 1967 –70 and I’m old enough to remember hearing about it at the time. Then I had little idea what it was all about – now I understand a bit more. Nigeria became a Republic in October 1960 and Half of a Yellow Sun begins in the early 1960s in Nsukka in the south eastern area where Ugwu becomes Odenigbo’s houseboy. The story centres on these two characters and Olanna, Odenigbo’s partner, her twin sister Kainene and her partner Richard. Odenigbo is a professor at the University and his house is the meeting place for academics who debate the political situation as it leads up to violence and the secession of Biafra as an independent state. The title of the book comes from the symbol on the Biafran flag, which was half of a yellow sun.

The novel moves forwards and backwards in time between the late and early1960s as the civil war proceeds. Focussing on the struggle between the north and the south, the Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa people, it brings home the horrors brought about by war, the ethnic, religious and racial divisions and the suffering that results. Ugwu at the start of the book is an ignorant young teenager from a poor village eager to learn but still steeped in the superstitions of his family – the old ways. By the end of the novel he has become a valued member of the family and is writing a history of his country. Richard, the white man in love with Kainene but not fully accepted into her world, is eager to be considered Biafran, but is still on the outside. He is in Nigeria studying African art – the Igbo-Ukwu roped pot - and is recruited into writing articles about the war for the outside world, but the story of the war is Ugwu’s to tell and not Richard’s. Olanna’s family is wealthy and even though they are Igbo, they cannot understand her relationship with Odenigbo who is committed to the Igbo cause and would prefer her to marry Madu, a major in the Biafran army. Once the war starts they are all drawn into the conflict, the situation spirals out of their control and they each react in differing ways.

The book explores the conflicts between nationalities, different cultures, different backgrounds and upbringing, between what is traditional and tribal and what is new. Although the violence and deprivations of the war are horrifying and form the dominant element in the story this is not just a war novel. It is also a novel about love and relationships, between parents and children as well as between men and women; about how people learn to adapt and cope with life.

I found the characters to be real, so much so that I could imagine I was there in the thick of things. I sympathised with Richard in his efforts to be accepted and suffered with Olanna when she was confronted with the horror of war and grieved over the plight of the refugees. It reminded me of Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart, which I read about 10 years or so ago and Adichie writes of his novels in an article at the end of her book:

“Achebe’s war fiction then, humane and pragmatic as it is, becomes a paean to the possibilities that Biafra held. The stories have an emotional power that accumulates in an unobtrusive way and stuns the reader at the end; there are sentences in them that will always move me to tears.”

She writes of her own work:

“If fiction is indeed the soul of history, then I was equally committed to the fiction and the history, equally true to the spirit of the time as well as to my artistic vision of it.”

How well she has succeeded. Half of a Yellow Sun is an emotional book without being sentimental, factual without being boring, and I was completely absorbed in it to the end.

Easter at England's Eden

2008-03-27T12:00:00.002Z

We spent the Easter holiday in Cornwall. Whilst many parts of Britain had snow over the Easter weekend it was sunny, but cold, at the Eden Project near St Austell. Actually we did see a very brief flurry of fine snow at one point on Saturday afternoon and it was very windy. We stayed with our son and his family at Carlyon Bay Hotel just outside St Austell overlooking the sea.

The Eden Project was first opened in 2001 and we’ve been meaning to go there ever since then. Their website says, “Eden is all about man's relationship with and dependence upon plants. Much of our food, our clothes, our shelter and our medicines come from the plant world. Without plants there would be no oxygen for us to breathe, no life on earth.”

It has been constructed in what was a clay pit and the view is most impressive as you approach the deep, steep-sided, flat-bottomed bowl containing the hugh domes. They are the biggest greenhouses in the world, called Biomes. From the entrance in the Visitor Centre we walked down towards the Biomes looking first at the Outdoor Biome following the winding path down the hillside passing areas planted with crops, and daffodils and spring bulbs. As it was Easter there was an Easter Egg hunt to follow with clues hidden throughout the site. We tried to follow the trail, but the clues were too hard for us adults, let alone the children, although we did solve a few. There is a giant bee, the magical land of Myth and Folklore, and a willow maze looking bare at this time of year.

As it is Eden I wasn’t surprised to find Eve there, but she wasn’t quite what I expected. She is a large reclining statue, her face made up of small mosaic mirrors and moss is just beginning to grow on her body. Eventually she will all be covered in moss – a green woman. I didn’t see Adam.

There is a grotesque piece of artwork – the WEEE Man, a reminder that the Project is an educational charity aiming to show the need for environmental awareness and sustainability. WEEE Man is a three-tonne, seven-metre tall robotic figure, made up of old washing machines, computer mice, TVs and a vast array of other electrical goods. WEEE stands for Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment. The sculpture is made up of the amount the average UK citizen will throw away in their lifetime – really horrific.

The Rainforest Biome is my favourite. It covers an area of 15,590 square metres (1.55 hectares), is 55 metres high, 100 metres wide and 200 metres long and it’s high enough to hold the Tower of London or eleven double-decker buses piled on top of one another. As we went in people were rapidly taking off coats and jumpers because of the heat. It is truly most impressive and it’s steamy, hot and humid. You can see what it is like living in Malaysia,

West Africa and South America as you walk through and up the biome passing waterfalls and tropical plants. I saw the biggest, smelliest flower in the world, the Titum Arum, although it had gone beyond its best, as it had flowered. By the time I took this photo my camera had steamed up!

The Mediterranean Biome was much cooler, but surprised me as there were displays of plants and scenes from South Africa and California, not just the Med.

As it is spring and in England, the main displays were of spring bulbs, being mainly tulips – such beautiful colours. I thought the best part of this section was the display of the Rites of Dionysus.

Dionysus was the Greek God of wine and its intoxicating power. I think these statues illustrate nature in its wild, untamed state, clearly capturing the frenzy induced by the music and wine. I liked the stark contrast between the displays of flowers and these sculptures standing on the bare earth.

There was an Ice Skating Rink, a “Simply Delicious Marquee” where the children decorated cupcakes, and a storytelling tent where we were entertained by the "Spice Man", with his tales of sailing the seas and the uses of spices in days gone by.

Then there is the “Core” shaped like a sunflower, which houses exhibitions, paintings and an enormous nutcracker.

The children had goes at turning the wheel of this massive metal structure. As the handle is turned a big steel ball is raised up to the top of the machine, where it is tipped down a chute, spiralling down to a hammer at the bottom, which then strikes the nut. It was mesmerising to watch.

The centrepiece of the Core is a giant 70 tonne granite sculpture of a seed made of silver-grey Cornish granite estimated to be 300 million years old.

Called “Seed” it was carved out of a boulder extracted from the De Lank Quarry, in Cornwall. There are 1,800 nodes on its surface in Fibonacci spirals, representing the extraordinary growth pattern found in sunflowers, pinecones and daisies. The Seed is four metres in height and three metres wide at its widest point. I wasn’t sure that I liked it – it’s so strange seeing a seed so large and solid; somehow it looked too sterile, but the age of the granite is awesome!

The Eden Project is a remarkable experience, well worth a visit. If we lived nearer I would like to go more often, spending just a few hours each visit rather than a whole day, which was exhausting, but most enjoyable and educational. I can't believe that I didn't buy any books from the Visitor Centre - that must be a first. There are a number of books listed on the Eden Project website, so I'll browse through these to see which ones I would like.

Cover-Up - Booking Through Thursday

2008-03-27T09:00:00.003Z

This week’s Booking Through Thursday question comes from Julie, who asks:
While acknowledging that we can’t judge books by their covers, how much does the design of a book affect your reading enjoyment? Hardcover vs. softcover? Trade paperback vs. mass market paperback? Font? Illustrations? Etc.?

I’d like to think that I don’t judge a book by its cover, but I’d be kidding myself. Once I’ve read a book its cover no longer has any influence over whether I enjoyed reading it or not. Once I’ve opened it I tend not to notice the cover. If I know what I’m looking for eg a specific title, or a book by a particular author then the cover doesn’t affect me at all. But it’s a different story when it comes to books I haven’t heard about before and then do find that I am repelled by some covers, indifferent to others and attracted by some. I don’t like those covers where you only see part of the body of, usually a woman, as though she has no head, or feet. I don’t like covers like those on modern publications of Jane Austen’s novels or ones with photos from the film or TV adaptations of a book, or chick lit covers.

I’d like to say that I judge a book by its content alone but I don’t like books that are printed in either a very small or a very large font. I don’t like it when there are large sections printed in italics, or a smaller font – the copy of Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner that I read was like that and I had to flip through the pages to see how much minute font I had to endure. I like the feel of a book in my hands, so smooth, clean paper is a bonus, but I'll still enjoy a book that's printed on cheap paper that's been suffering from too much sun and is falling to pieces.

I don’t mind hardback or paperback, although I get a bit irritated by both if they’re hard to hold open when I’m reading, or if they’re so tightly bound that you can’t see the words in the centre without practically forcing the book open. I'm not keen on those paperbacks that have covers that bend open once I’ve started to read the book. I don’t know the difference between a trade paperback and a mass-market paperback at all, so I can’t comment on that.

It looks as though there’s a lot that I don’t like when I think about it, but if I’m enjoying the content then its format doesn’t really bother me - I just love reading. I like the cover to indicate something about the content of the book and even when it doesn’t I do like scenes like this one on The Magician's Assistant. I must write about this book soon, I finished reading it weeks ago. Part of it is set in Nebraska, but not in a house like the one shown on this cover.

As for illustrations if I’m reading non-fiction then any illustrations - photos, sketches, maps amd plans are a must and I love seeing them – usually I look at them before reading any of the book. A novel is different, as I like to form my own pictures of the characters from the descriptions. But I do like to have maps and plans of the locations. Recently I've read some books set in places I don't know and I have to stop reading to look up the area such as Nigeria when I was reading Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I'll be writing about this book soon - it's an amazing and absorbing book.

C J Sansom’s Matthew Shardlake series of books are excellent in this respect – and in all others as well. I find it easier to visualise where the action takes place from studying the maps at the beginning of the books. His latest book is out now and I had a late Christmas present yesterday when Revelation was delivered to my door. Thanks D.

Here is the map

and here is a photo this beautiful, big, hardback copy that is shouting READ ME NOW!

Dante's The Divine Comedy

2008-03-26T17:35:00.001Z

Dante finished writing The Divine Comedy in 1321 shortly before his death. The subject of the final talk in my course on Dante’s Florence was The Divine Comedy, its sources, structure, an introduction to some of its characters, concluding with Dante’s legacy in art.

I don’t think that I’ve ever had such a long introduction to a literary work and I’m eager now to actually read The Divine Comedy. My copy is the Oxford World’s Classics publication. It is 741 pages long, including several introductory essays with plans and maps, and copious notes. I also have the much shorter The Descent Into Hell translated by Dorothy L Sayers. This is only 130 pages and contains extracts from the Inferno (the first part of The Divine Comedy).

Dante’s first title for this was ‘The Vision’. He wrote it in Italian, not Latin, so that it was accessible for everyone. It was recited and is basically a sermon, a sacred poem. He changed the title to ‘comedy’, which in the ancient tradition was a story, beginning as tragedy and moving to a happy ending. Boccaccio added ‘Divine’ to the title in the 14th century. It’s an epic, allegorical poem – and also an historical chronicle of Dante’s time packed with information on topics such as politics, theology, geography, the arts, and love.

It depicts three regions of the dead – Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise, a journey through the spiritual realms. There are 100 cantos, written in third rhyme – terza rima, invented by Dante, ie the first and third lines rhyme, with the second line indicating the next rhyme. This is an aid to memory and also helps to move the narrative forward. It’s packed with imagery, with multiple meanings and although it includes contemporary characters it’s amazingly modern. Florence is depicted as hell, with the Pope, Boniface VIII and clerics condemned because of the corrupt state of the church, although Dante describes meeting Christian theological thinkers in Paradise.

Dante used many sources, including the Bible, Greek mythology, Roman history, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Livy, legends, miracle and medieval morality plays and his own stories. The poem begins with an exciting episode at the gates to the underworld in a dark, confusing wood, symbolising doubt, sin and the sterility of the soul. Dante, the narrator, has lost the path and is guided by Virgil through Hell and Purgatory to Paradise, where he meets his beloved Beatrice, who guides him through Heaven. Paradiso is the place of perfect harmony ordained by God. Dante followed the Ptolemaic system of the Cosmos in which Earth is the centre of the universe. He placed Hell at the centre of the Earth, underneath Jerusalem, reached through nine different circles, containing sinners suffering terrible punishments and torture. Purgatory was somewhere in the southern hemisphere, ascending up to Paradise located in Heaven above the Earth.

There are about 600 characters in the whole poem, 250 from the classical era, 80 from the Bible and 250 from Dante’s own time. Dante admired Virgil, his guide through Hell and Purgatory. He describes him as “that fount of splendour”, symbolising human reason and wisdom. Amongst the many characters are Brunetto Latini, Dante’s mentor who took an active role in politics and the art of oratory, is found in Hell because of the sin of sodomy, which was considered as violence against nature; and Farinata degli Uberti, the leader of the Ghybelline party, also found in Hell as punishment for heresy because he was an Epicurean believing that the soul died with the body. He rises from the burning tomb of heretics to speak to Dante. The first mention of Florence is from Ciacco, guilty of the sin of gluttony, when he refers the bloodshed between the citizens of “the divided city”.

Other people mentioned are members of the ancient Donati family (Dante’s wife was Gemma Donati) – Dante’s friend Foresi Donati, Corso Donati, a thief being changed into a serpent and Piccarda Donati his sister, “a pearl on a white forehead”, who had belonged to the Order of Poor Clares and was forced to marry to forge a political alliance; the violent tempered Agenti who opposed Dante’s recall from exile; Gianni Schicchi (the source of Puccini’s opera – including the beautiful aria “O mio babbino caro”); and Count Ugolino, the tyrant who had switched allegiance and was left to starve in Pisa’s Tower of Famine – he was said to have eaten his sons and grandsons and for punishment in Hell was forced to chew on the head of Archbishop Ruggieri.

The Divine Comedy has been read and copied ever since with commentaries coming very quickly after Dante’s death. The first biography of Dante was written in about 1351 by Giovanni Boccaccio, based on oral history from Dante’s contemporaries. The poem was seen as a difficult, obscure work, gothic and heavy going in 14th century England, but Chaucer mentioned it in the Monk’s Tale in his Canterbury Tales. English translations were made from 1802 onwards by Henry Boyd and Henry Cary (promoted by Coleridge). It influenced amongst others John Milton, Shelley and Byron, Wordsworth and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

There are many examples of Dante’s legacy in art – here are just a few:

Giotto’s Last Judgment, in the Arena Chapel in Padua.
Frescos in the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella showing the tiered compartments of Hell and Cerberus the monster three throats, wings and the body of a beast guarding Hell and the Elect – Saints and Cardinals rising up from their tombs.
The Last Judgment of Fra Angelico.

The painting of the Madonna in Majesty by the Siennese painter Martini.
Botticelli’s scenes of Inferno commissioned to illustrate The Divine Comedy by the Medicis – 92 survive and are in the Vatican Library.

Drawn in pen and ink he intended to colour them all. The one shown below is of the City of Dis, the lower part of Hell, with winged monsters, and the Circle of Deceivers. Dante is shown in red and Virgil in blue.

Frescoes of the Last Judgment in Orvietto Cathedral in 1500 reflecting the doom and gloom of the times fearing the end of the world with images of the damned, a mass of contorted bodies, by Signorelli, a master of human anatomy – the Resurrection of the flesh showing skeletons and bodies emerging from their tombs.
Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel.
Gustave Dore’s illustrations of The Divine Comedy.

William Blake’s watercolour paintings of Inferno

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s translation of La Vita Nuova in 1848.
Christina Rossetti’s studies of Dante – she saw him as a figure of romance.
Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix 1863 – his portrait of Lizzie Siddell in a trance-like state. The white poppy because she was thought to have been poisoned with opium and the sundial pointing to 9 relating to the meeting of Dante and Beatrice when he was 9 years old. This is one of my favourite paintings.

Rodin’s Gates of Hell and The Thinker, also The Kiss, depicting Francesca de Rimini whom Dante meets in Canto 5 of the Inferno. Francesca had fallen in love with Paulo, her husband's younger brother. The legend goes that they were killed by Giovanni, her husband.

There are many, many more - see this Wikipedia link.

Oh No, Not Another Challenge!

2008-03-25T16:27:00.004Z

I really cannot resist this challenge - mainly because I like the title and the picture in the banner. The promise of a good story will always tempt me to open a book and start reading.

This is Carl's Once Upon a Time Challenge. It began on Friday, March 21st and runs to Friday, June 20th: Midsummer Night’s Eve. Joining this challenge means you are participating but not committing yourself to any specific number of books. I'm aiming to complete "Quest the First "
which is to read at least 5 books that fit somewhere within the Once Upon a Time II criteria of fantasy, or folklore, or fairy tales, or mythology…or your five books might be a combination from the four genres.

These books are on my to-be-read list already and fit into these categories:

Dante’s Descent into Hell, translated by Dorothy L Sayers
The Chrysalids by John Wyndham
The Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Star Wars by George Lucas
Helen of Troy by Margaret George

I was intrigued to read in this Wiki link that Dante's The Divine Comedy is categorised as Bangsian fantasy. I had never heard of this but according to Wikipedia it is named after John Kendrick Bangs, whose novels deal with the afterlives of various famous people. Whilst I do intend to read The Divine Comedy I doubt that I'll finish it all before 20 June, so the short version by Dorothy L Sayers seems a good choice for this challenge.

The other books are a mixture of science fiction, fantasy and mythology and I've owned them all for a while. Like other unread books I was keen to read them when I bought them. It is time to open them soon. I have actually read the Gormenghast books before, when I was at college, when I borrowed them from the library, but I haven't read the copies that I own, which are wrapped in sellaphane!

The End - Booking Through Thursday

2008-03-20T07:26:00.007Z

This week's question is:

You’ve just reached the end of a book . . . what do you do now? Savor and muse over the book? Dive right into the next one? Go take the dog for a walk, the kids to the park, before even thinking about the next book you’re going to read? What?

(Obviously, there can be more than one answer, here–a book with a cliff-hanger is going to engender different reactions than a serene, stand-alone, but you get the idea!)

I can't generalise here. It really all depends upon so many things. Sometimes the book I've just finished was so good that anything else is an anti-climax and I don't want or can't decide which book to read next, even though I have a long to-be-read list and piles of unread books. So then I pause and wait for the right book to appear.

I read on impulse sometimes. It may be a book I've picked up at the library, or a book recommended on someone's blog, or a friend has lent me. Sometimes it depends upon my frame of mind, and a book might or might not be right one just then. Sometimes I know just what to read and dive straight into it. Usually I have more than one book on the go anyway, so there's no decision to make and I carry on reading that and pick and choose another book to start.

If it's a book that's part of a series, then I'm impatient to get to the next one. I recently read the first two of Olivia Manning's books in The Balkan Trilogy, but didn't have the third. It's about two months ago that I finished the second and I was eager to read the third, but the library and bookshops didn't have it. So I ordered the complete trilogy in one volume. At last it arrived yesterday, but I'm not diving into the third book just yet - the time isn't right.

Robert Frost

2008-03-19T20:11:00.001Z

The Celebrate the Author Challenge is designed to "celebrate" author birthdays. My author for March is Robert Frost who was born on 26 March 1874 in San Francisco. He moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts and apart from three years when he lived in England, he spent the rest of his life in New England.

I have a small collection of Frost’s poems. It’s illustrated by American, English and French painters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There is a short introduction, which states, “The simple language, the vernacular style and the near-whimsy of some of the earlier poems tend to mask the fact that Frost’s poetry is deeper and tougher than it seems.”

Before I read any of this collection I knew just a few of his poems, such as The Road Not Taken, which ends:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less travelled by,
And that made all the difference.

To me this poem is about the choices we have to make in life. You look as far ahead as you can, trying to see what lies ahead if you make a certain choice, but you can’t know how things will turn out. There’s no way of changing back to the other choice once you’ve decided – the choice you make changes things forever.

I also like Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening:

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

This is seemingly such a simple poem with its easy rhyming scheme. The repetition of the rhyme in the final verse is hypnotic:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

There is a mystery as well - who is the traveller? His horse knows there is something different, if not odd about the wood. It’s a silent and somewhat spooky place on the “darkest night of the year”. There is a sense of loneliness and isolation of the traveller, where is he going and what has he promised?

Frost’s poems are not all about rural idylls; Out, Out is a powerful poem that tells of the brutal realities of life. The title refers to the brevity of life from Macbeth: “Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more." So there’s a hint right from the start that this is a tragic story. The scene is set – a noisy buzz saw against the backdrop of mountains in Vermont snarling and rattling, impersonal making dust as the wood is sawn. A young boy is cutting the wood, looking forward to his supper when he cuts his hand. It was as if the saw was alive as it

“Leaped out of his hand, or seemed to leap -
He must have given the hand. However it was,
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!”

The poem reflects the callousness of the family towards life, but also the practicalities of getting on with life as the boy dies:

“No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little - less – nothing!- and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the dead, turned to their affairs.

The boy’s hysteria and sorrow comes over through the rhythm and structure of the poem, with lines varying between 10 and 11 syllables creating an uneasy tension. It seems the tragedy could have been avoided, as the boy’s work could have ended half an hour earlier, adding to the pathos and highlighting the fragility of life.

I still haven’t read all the poems in this little book. I find that I have to read just one or two at a time, and then come back to them. The beauty of poetry is the way that so much meaning is condensed into such few words.

Daniel Isn’t Talking by Marti Leimbach

2008-03-17T10:30:00.005Z

We discussed Daniel Isn’t Talking last Wednesday evening at the book group. One of the others summed up my feelings when she said, “I was rather under whelmed by it”. I had very mixed feelings whilst reading. I was intrigued to know more about autism, and the book certainly made me a lot more knowledgeable, but I thought that some of the characters were two-dimensional and unconvincing.

Daniel is autistic, but at first Stephen his British father refuses to accept that there is anything wrong with him, whilst his American mother, Melanie, struggles to find out what is wrong with him and the best way of looking after him and helping him to talk, play and become as “normal” as possible.

I found it quite a disturbing read not just because of the difficulties and cruelties that autism carries with it, but also because of the way such illnesses are dealt with in our society. There is seemingly a stigma, autism is something that is not generally understood, and the causes are unknown, although there are various ideas circulating (eg the MMR vaccination). The book deals with loyalties, families and ways of coping with illness, health and ways of healing and there are many angry assaults on the education system and its ways of dealing with children who are different in one way or another. Daniel has an older sister, Emily, who is a happy, healthy, cheerful child with “a mop of blonde curls billowing around her face, smiling eyes, aquamarine.” Stephen insists she goes to a pre-school, whilst Melanie wants to keep her at home. Emily is not interested in school and wants to play, looking at children in the playground as though they are in prison. Stephen has his way and Emily goes to the pre-school and finds that what she likes best is going home.

It’s a book full of angst. One poignant scene that remains with me after reading the book is the scene in the supermarket where Daniel is having a tantrum, screaming, trying to hurl himself out of the trolley, grabbing biscuits when Melanie meets a woman who understands, is sympathetic and helpful. The other customers are watching, imagining, so Melanie thinks, that she is merely indulging a spoilt child. Next time I’m out shopping surrounded by screaming children I’ll remember this scene!

Melanie is paranoid in her antagonism towards special schools. The people who visited Melanie trying to enlist him at a school are described as “a horrible pair who came by with their clipboards and their raincoats, looking more like spies than anybody who should be near children. They regarded Daniel as one might a wild animal, admiring him from a safe distance as we did the tiger who paced his enclosure.” Well, this is a novel, but my experience is far from that (my daughter-in-law is a special needs teacher).

This book is a quick, easy read, although the subject is far from easy, and is good at portraying a mother desperately trying to help her autistic child. However, some of the other characters (Stephen, his parents, Veena, the cleaner and Larry, Melanie’s brother) come over as wooden stereotypes and I found the sub-plot of, the alternative play therapist, Andy as Melanie’s lover unconvincing. The blurb on the back cover says it’s “Powerful and moving, and also surprisingly funny. A love story in every sense.” Yes, it is powerful and moving, and also sad, but I didn’t find any humour and the love story that came over to me is that of a mother for her child.

Sunday Reading

2008-03-16T12:17:00.006Z

It’s wild wet and windy outside, so I’ve decided today is a day for reading, not gardening. I’ve started to read Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables and so far it’s looking good, although I’ve not got very far into it. I really like Monseigneur Bienvenue and this quote seems apt after my gardening post yesterday:

“ … he dug his garden or read or wrote, and for him both kinds of work bore the same name; both he called gardening. 'The spirit is a garden,’ he said.”

Danielle at A Work in Progress is reading this too, aiming to finish it in about two months. This means reading about 200 pages a week. I’ll have to see if I can manage that.

I think I’m going to give up on reading Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, even though I’ve read nearly half the book. It’s wordy and I’m getting bored with Lily Bart and her liking for luxury and her mixed up life, trying to find a husband who can afford to keep her in the custom she longs for. It’s not often I abandon a book and I may give it another go, but not today. I’m not in the mood for it; I think that’s my problem with it rather than the writing.

I’ve got some good books to look forward to; at least I hope they are. I had a trip to the library on Friday and picked up The Shipping News, by Annie Proulx (a Pulitzer Prize winner), Consequences by Penelope Lively (I’ve yet to read a book by her that I haven’t liked) and Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir by Hilary Mantel, which I read about on Table Talk’s blog. I’ve dipped into this and it looks intriguing. I like the openness and candour in her writing:

“So now I come to write a memoir I argue with myself over every word. Is my writing clear: or is it deceptively clear? I tell myself, just say how you came to sell a house with a ghost in it. But this story can only be told once and I need to get it right. Why does the act of writing generate so much anxiety? Margaret Atwood says, “The written word is so much like evidence – like something that can be used against you.” I used to think that autobiography was a form of weakness, and perhaps I still do. But I also think that, if you’re weak, it’s childish to pretend to be strong.”

I’ll be settling down this afternoon to a session with Les Miserables.

Our Cottage Garden

2008-03-15T16:35:00.000Z

This is what I would like our garden to look like.

This book, The Cottage Gardener’s Companion, paints an idyllic picture of the typical English Cottage Garden:

“… where there is a feeling of freedom and exuberance, leisure and opportunity to potter, to water, to contemplate. … Flowers, vegetables and fruit are mingled together in the epitome of the cottage garden, where bounty may be gathered at every season. The cottage gardener makes salads, apple jelly, herbal medicine, plum and damson jam from her garden; there is even something in midwinter when parsnips and turnips, brussels sprouts and leeks come into their own.”

Oh, if only that were so. This cottage garden has some of those things. There are fruit trees - a cherry tree, with bitter morello cherries that the birds love. I make pies and cherry sauce, if I can pick them before the birds eat them. There are two little espalier apple trees, which last summer produced a lot of fruit (more pies and crumble) and there is a plum tree that produced so much that it was rotting on the tree before I could pick them all.

There are some flowers – the primroses are doing really well, so well that I've put a photo of some of them on the blog header. There is a climbing rose that seems to be dying, maybe because of my efforts at pruning, despite reading “Pruning” in the Garden Guides series and any other books on pruning that I can find. I’m doing something wrong, but what I don’t know. I’ve managed to plant and grow a lovely camellia - that had an abundance of flowers last year and a fuchsia that was quite tall and spindly, but it did have some flowers. The other plant that does well, however I mangle it with my pruning is a potentilla, covered in yellow flowers for most of last summer. And the aubretia spreads itself all over the wall in the front garden whatever I do to it – it’s just starting to flower now.

We have a rambling honeysuckle growing up the fence, mingling in with a berberis, which has shiny red berries later in the year, privet and a rampant Russian vine, which threatens to swamp everything. There are violets and aquilegia which self-seed and appear in different places in the garden. There are other plants as well, shrubs and bushes that I occasionally prune back and trees – a flowering cherry tree, a pussy willow and a couple of conifers.

But the plant that grows really well in our garden is the bindweed – it gets everywhere. We have a good amount of ivy as well, growing up the fences and throttling whatever it can find. Just now it is beginning to pop up through the soil. I wish we could eradicate it completely!

I went out this morning to try to take control and did some pruning, whether I’ve killed more plants remains to be seen. I noticed that the daffodils and tulips are coming on nicely, the bluebells in the front garden are coming up well, and there is a new little holly that has planted itself in one of the borders. The rosemary bush looks strong and healthy; it grows vigorously and I always have to chop it back.

We like herbs and in the past have failed to grow basil – not enough sun here I suppose, even the basil I buy in a pot and keep on the kitchen windowsill doesn’t do very well! We had sage and mint in pots on the patio, but as they’ve got very straggly and thin we decided to start again and yesterday went to a garden centre where we bought some pots of thyme, sage, flat leaf parsley and mint. We also bought a rhubarb plant, as I do like it. I hope these will survive.

Playing Editor - Booking Through Thursday

2008-03-13T06:22:00.007Z

Suggested by John :

How about a chance to play editor-in-chief? Fill in the blanks:

__________ would have been a much better book if ______________________.

I can’t limit this to just one book.

The Brothers Karamazov would have been a much better book if Dostoyevsky hadn’t been such a pessimist. Of course it wouldn’t have been so powerful and intense but it would have been a lot happier and more joyful.

War and Peace would have been a much better book if it weren’t so long. Tolstoy could have reduced the battle scenes, or better still left them out all together.

Ulysses would have been a much better book if Joyce could have organised his sentences so that they read coherently, instead of being a stream of consciousness monologue. (I shouldn’t really comment, as I haven’t read the book!)

This is of course written with tongue in cheek. I love The Brothers K, even though they have such long names and it took me ages to read it and War and Peace is one of my favourite books - I wish I'd could have written it! Ulysses is still a closed book.

How to Cross the Road - Hanoi Style

2008-03-12T16:20:00.004Z

Carla and I left work last year. Whilst I’ve stayed at home she’s been travelling the world– she’s been to New York, Niagara, Chicago, Flagstaff, Yosemite, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Cook Island, New Zealand, Australia (Great Barrier Reef etc), Tasmania, Whitesunday Islands, Bangkok, Koh Tao – diving in the Gulf of Thailand, Cambodia, to mention just a few places. I’m sure I missed out loads. I’ve been seeing the world through Carla’s eyes and her blog.

At present she’s in Hanoi and her latest entry is about the road crossings there. She says that the only reason you go for the crossings is that you stand out as less of a target ,,, the mantra to remember is "keep the same pace, never stop (it confuses the drivers) and always imagine a big white forcefield around you… “

I’m never going to complain again about the traffic here after seeing this.

Dante's Florence Week 5 Part One

2008-03-12T09:45:00.001Z

By the end of the 13th century Florence was a bustling and prosperous city. We looked at a painting by Lord Leighton - Cimabue's Celebrated Madonna is carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence, 1853-1855. The Victorians had an intense interest in Dante. In this painting, which was bought by Queen Victoria, Cimabue’s painting of the Madonna, a hugh altarpiece is carried through the streets of Florence. Giotto, a pupil of Cimabue, is shown in white, with Dante on the far right.

In week 4 we had looked at the new city walls designed by Arnolfo Di Cambio. Di Cambio’s crowning achievement was, however, his design for a new cathedral. The old cathedral was considered to be too small and too coarse. As the population of the city increased the new cathedral was designed with a hugh interior space to accommodate the whole population. Dedicated to Santa Maria del Fiore, it was started in 1296 and took many years to complete. Old buildings were knocked down to make way for it, including the hospital and the old cathedral, dedicated to Santa Reparata.

It seems that Di Cambio originally planned a wooden dome, but this was replaced by Brunelleschi’s dome which was completed in 1436. We looked at a copy of his outline plan for the cathedral (the original of the drawing is in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo) and also at Poccetti’s drawing (c. 1587) of the façade of the Duomo, which shows the façade as it was before it was covered over in the 19th century by the current façade. This shows the mosaics, reliefs and statues designed by Di Cambio.

The illustration (copied from the course handout) is not very clear but does give an impression of what the façade was like. Only a few of the original sculptures have survived, including the ‘Madonna of the Glass Eyes’, the Annunciation to the Shepherds and a statue of Pope Boniface VIII, the luxury loving, warrior pope whom Dante opposed. these are now in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo.

I particularly like the story of Dante’s stone – the Sasso di Dante - where Dante is supposed to have sat and watched the cathedral being built. A plaque embedded in the wall of one of the houses opposite the cathedral was placed in memory of his special seat.

This was one of the places of pilgrimage during the 19th century for the nobility on the Grand Tour of Europe.

Under the shadow of a stately Pile,
The dome of Florence, pensive and alone,
Nor giving heed to aught that passed the while,
I stood, and gazed upon
a marble stone,
The laurelled Dante's favourite seat. …

From Wordsworth, Memorials of a tour in Italy, 1837 At Florence

Di Cambio also began the design of the Palazzo Vecchio, a very important building that housed the Priors, the governors of the city and is now the town hall and a museum. The crenulated Arnolfo Tower is characteristic of a fortified building. Uberti family buildings were demolished to make way for the Palazzo.

Dante's Exile in Week 5 Part Two

The Pulitzer Project

2008-03-11T10:03:00.006Z

I’ve decided to join the The Pulitzer Project. The beauty of this is that it’s a project not a challenge and I expect that it will take me a long time. The Pulitzer Prizes are awarded in 21 categories, but this project only relates to the Fiction Prize, which is awarded for distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life. It has been awarded since 1948 replacing the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel, which was awarded between 1918 and 1947. The 2008 Prizes will be announced on 7 April. Some years no awards were made but this is still a long list of books. So far I have only read:

1940 - The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
1972 - Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner
1988 – Beloved, Toni Morrison
1995 - The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields
1999 - The Hours, Michael Cunningham
2006 – March, Geraldine Brooks

Apart from Angle of Repose I read these books before I started writing my blog. I wrote about Angle of Repose here. I read The Grapes of Wrath whilst at school, so I may have to re-read this sometime. The rest I’ve read over the last two years apart from Beloved (which I loved), which I read about 10 years ago. I have a copy of The Color Purple by Alice Walker, so I think I’ll read that first and it will fit into the What’s In a Name? Challenge as a book with a colour in its title. I’m already reading Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, so that will be two books in that category.

Two Caravans

2008-03-10T16:39:00.003Z

Two Caravans by Marina Lewycka, published in hardback by Fig Tree Penguin Books in 2007, 310 pages (paperback published by Penguin 6 March 2008)

I read and enjoyed A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian in February 2007. When Two Caravans was first published I read somewhere that it wasn’t as good as her first book, which made me pause before reading it. It’s just as well I took no notice because I think it’s better and shows that you should make your own mind up about a book.

The book begins by describing a beautiful setting in the English countryside:

“ There is a field – a broad south-sloping field sitting astride a long hill that curves away into a secret leafy valley. It is sheltered by dense hedges of hawthorn and hazel threaded through with wild roses and evening-scented honeysuckle. In the mornings, a light breeze carries up over the Downs, just enough to kiss the air with the fresh salty tang of the English Channel. In fact so delightful; is the air that, sitting up here, you might think you were in paradise.”

From that delightful scene the book soon descends into the depths of hell, as the shocking conditions experienced by the migrant workers are revealed. The group of strawberry pickers - the Ukrainian miner’s son, Andriy, the Poles - voluptuous Yola and her religious niece, Marta, and guitar playing Tomasz; two Chinese girls, Emmanuel an orphan from Malawi looking for his sister and Vitaly from somewhere in Eastern Europe – are joined by Irina from Kiev. They’re all hoping to make some money and enjoy a better way of life than in their home countries and are doomed to disappointment, disillusion and danger. Not only are they exploited by their employers but also threatened by gangsters with guns.

The narrative moves between the characters and at first I had to concentrate on who was who, but I soon worked it out as each character has their own individual style. Accompanied by Dog, a stray who adopts them, they move from strawberry picking to catching fish, to waiting on tables, to the horrors of the chicken farm and slaughterhouse where the chickens are processed and packed for the supermarkets. The Chinese girls are packed off to Amsterdam and are not heard from again – their nightmare fate can only be a guess! Dog is a unique character, whose innermost thoughts/instincts are given throughout the book in capital letters – I AM DOG I RUN I RUN I SMELL EARTH AND WATER …” I suppose this could be considered irritating, but Dog soon came to life for me through such simple characterisation as he sees off danger and sniffs out food for himself and the humans.

I don’t know if I shall ever be able to look at a punnet of strawberries again without picturing how they were picked and remembering the pittance that the workers are paid. Nor can I possibly eat supermarket chicken again. The vision conjured up by this description of the supervisor in charge of packaging the chicken portions is just too much:

“She had a distasteful habit of spitting on her fingers as she reached for the chicken pieces coming down the line …”

Add to this the nightmare of catching and loading the chickens to take to the slaughterhouse, the brutal scenes in the slaughterhouse and the appalling working and living conditions of the migrant workers and I’m seriously thinking of never eating chicken again.

This book is not all doom and gloom, however, as there is a joy in how the characters manage to maintain their dignity, despite the dodgy dealings, abuse and hardships. And there is a love story as well. I also liked the brief cameo appearance at the care home of Nikolai, the author of the tractor history in Lewycka’s first book. He is still looking for a wife and proposing marriage to both the old ladies in the home and to Irina.

I can’t say that I found Two Caravans to be a funny or a comic book, although at times the scenes are reminiscent of slapstick and farce. But then I don’t find slapstick and farce funny either. Although the situations are dramatic and outside my sphere of knowledge and experience I found the story and the characters to be real and believable. It’s a touching, thought-provoking and moving book about topical issues. I’m really glad I read it.

Pets Please - Post No. 200

2008-03-09T16:05:00.005Z

I thought I’d write something different for this, my 200th post. I’ve been looking through some photos for pictures of our pets. These are just a few I found, bringing back lots of memories.

Suki was the first cat D and I had. D took this photo in the garden of our first house. We had another cat, Candy, soon after but at the moment I can’t find a photo of her, although I know there are some.

We had a series of cats later on and eventually we got a dog. This was a big thing for me as I had always been frightened of dogs as a child and was still very unsure about them. We got Zoe, a beautiful golden retriever, the softest dog you could ever imagine.

Then we got another dog, Ben a border collie/labrador cross. He was so small when we got him that he could run underneath Zoe's legs. Here he is fully grown, still a small dog. He had lots of health problems and died of diabetes. I had to give him an insulin injection every morning. Another amazing thing I never thought I'd do. He never complained.

Here they both are chasing a stick. They loved running.

After the dogs died we weren't going to have any more pets, but we soon decided we couldn't live without an animal in the house. So we got Lucy. Here she is as a kitten.

Stretching in the garden.

Then we added George, who had been D's dad's cat.

Finally, here is Lucy in the garden. She's 14 this month and still behaves like a kitten most of the time.

Reading Deadlines

2008-03-08T10:11:00.001Z

I’m now reading against deadlines. Something I don’t like doing at all and try to avoid. After all, I’m reading for pleasure, not to meet any targets. I thought I’d left that all behind when I left work, where everything had to be planned, approved, reviewed and justified. So why do I find myself this weekend with two books that have to be read by Wednesday and one by next Saturday? Of course in reality I don’t have to read any of them at all.

If I don’t though, one has to be returned to the library unread or pay a fine and think of the poor person who has reserved it waiting patiently (or not) to get the book. This is Marina Lewycka’s Two Caravans and I’ve had it checked out for a long time. My husband has read it and it made such an impression on him that I feel I have to read it. I’m part way through the book and this morning I have been reading about work at the chicken farm. The book is about the lives of immigrant workers, first of all picking strawberries and then working at a chicken farm supplying supermarkets. The blurb on the back of the book indicates it’s an outstandingly funny book and also that it’s “extremely dark”. Dark it certainly is!

For a long while we have known of the terrible conditions of battery hens and have only been buying free-range eggs, but every now and then we have bought supermarket chickens when we couldn’t get free range. A few years ago we saw a TV programme showing the awful state of these chickens and realised that the brown marks on their legs means they have been sitting in their own urine and we have not bought any since that time. Then we noticed that the ends of the legs are now cut off, so you can’t tell if they’re stained. So, it’s only free-range or no chicken for us, despite the extra cost. It's not just the conditions of the chickens, but also the appalling living and working conditions of the workers; there's an awful lot to think about in this book. I have to finish it this weekend.

The second book I must read is Daniel isn’t Talking by Marti Leimbach. My deadline is Wednesday evening when I’ll be going to the book group to discuss this book. So no let up with this book either or there’s not much point in going along and I want to go. I have started to read it and it’s also a book that tugs at your heartstrings. Melanie has two children. Emily is a beautiful little girl; bright, happy and active who loves playing with her toys, painting and all the other things young children enjoy. Daniel, however, is different; he is autistic. The story relates how Daniel is diagnosed, the reactions of his mother and father and the effect it has on their marriage. It’s not an easy read from an emotional viewpoint.

The third book is The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton and I’m reading this to join in the discussion on Saturday with Cornflower’s Book Group. I’ve borrowed this from the library and only collected it on Thursday. I have started it – well I’m up to page 18! It promises to be very interesting. From the back of the book I read:

“First published in 1905 The House of Mirth shocked the New York society it so deftly chronicles, portraying the moral, social and economic constraints on a spirited woman who dared to claim the privileges of marriage without assuming the responsibilities.”

There is an introduction by Nina Bawden, which I have managed not to read – I don’t want to have any more pre-conceived ideas about the book than I’ve already picked up from the back cover.

I’d better stop writing and get reading.

Dante's Florence Week 4

2008-03-07T13:35:00.001Z

Banking

Florence was a city of innovations. The Florin was first minted in 1252 and became a kind of medieval Euro. It was stamped with the symbols of the city – the lily, the secular symbol on one side with St John, the patron saint on the other side. Bills of Credit and the double entry system of book keeping were invented in Florence. The Bardi and Peruzzi families were the main banking families with agents right across Europe. Their money came from the textile industry – wool from as far away as the Cotswolds in England was imported and processed by the thousands of people employed by the Humiliati Order of monks. The Wool Guild was in the heart of the city with barn sheds for drying the wool, with loggia below so that the air could circulate. There was even a fortified wool factory further up the Arno.

The Guilds – Patrons of Art

The Bankers Guild was established in 1206, St Matthew being the Patron Saint of Bankers. Membership of a guild was a necessary qualification to take part in the government of the city and Dante was enrolled in the Guild of Apothecaries, which included artists, doctors, musicians and writers. He entered politics in 1295 and became the Superintendant of Roads and Planning. The Bargello housed the civic government and the head of police. It was built in 1255 before Dante was born, was the place of execution and is now the National Museum.

References in The Divine Comedy to finance and commerce

Dante’s audience had a mercantile background and his father was said to have been a notary/money lender. The question of trading for profit was a difficult issue as usury was considered to be a sin. Dante describes Hell in The Divine Comedy as being full of people who had profited from the corruption and abuses of the use of money. To avoid this wealthy families donated money to found chapels as a means of expiating their sins.

Art of the Period

There were also great innovations in art during this period, with a move away from the rigid hieratical Byzantine style to a more natural, expressive style - for example Cimabue’s Madonna is a huge work, showing angels at the sides of the throne still in the Byzantine style but showing the move away to more naturalism. Giotto’s Ognissanti Madonna of 1310 shows a more natural portrayal of the mother and child and there is a greater sense of mass and solidity with greater depth and perspective. The angels look as though they really are looking up at the Madonna and child

In The Divine Comedy Dante refers to artistic arrogance in his conversation in Purgatory with Oderiso, an illuminator from Gubbio. He talks of the transient nature of fame and the penalty of pride. Oderiso was supposedly friendly with Giotto and at that time Giotto was greatly praised and had taken precedence over Cimabue:

'Brother' he said, the sheets coloured by Franco
The Bolognese, are more brilliant than mine:
The honour is now all his, and mine is less.

Certainly I should not have been so polite
When I was alive, because of my great desire
To excel in this, my heart was engrossed with it.

The penalty of such pride is paid here;
And I should not be here yet, if it were not
That, while I could still sin, I turned to God.

O empty glory of human endeavour!
How little time the green remains on top,
Unless the age that follows is a dull one!

Cimabue thought he held the field
In painting, and now the cry is for Giotto,
So that the other's fame is now obscured."
Purgatorio XI 82-96

The Death of St Francis by Giotto in the Bardi Chapel, in the church of Sante Croce shows the move towards much greater realism in painting such as in the range of emotions shown on the monks’ faces as they surround St Francis on his bier.

Development of the city
Arnolfo Di Cambio(born 1240 –1250 died early 1300s)

Di Cambio was an architect, sculptor and painter. He trained in Sienna under Nicolo Pisano and worked on the marble pulpit in the Sienna Duomo. In 1284 he was called to Florence by the city officials to design the new city walls. The walls made from used materials from the old walls and the lopped towers (as a result of the height restrictions on the towers). When completed the walls were 5 ½ miles long, 7 feet thick and 47 feet high, with massive iron- studded gates (a few of these remain). The gates were closed every evening. The walls were of course for defence, but they also gave the city shape and a sense of belonging to the citizens; were a way of regulating taxes and tolls and were a symbol of the strength, power and prestige of Florence.

He brought both classical and gothic styles of architecture to Florence. He designed the loggia of Orsanmichele, then a corn-market; was involved in work on the Badia, and the design of the façade of Santa Croce is attributed to him.

More about Di Cambio, art, and Dante's exile in week 5.

Hero - Booking Through Thursday

2008-03-06T16:08:00.008Z

You should have seen this one coming … Who is your favorite Male lead character? And why?

Last week I opted for Elizabeth Bennet as one of my favourite female lead characters, so it’s no surprise that this week that one of my favourite male characters is Mr Darcy? Why? Because he is such a good match for Elizabeth and he is full of both pride and prejudice, but is capable of overcoming both in realising his love for her.

Other heroes are the fabulous Scarlet Pimpernel, because he is such a dashing hero, rescuing French aristos from the guillotine and always incognito.

Also Sydney Carton in Tale of Two Cities, seen to be a drunkard and useless but because of his unrequited love of Lucie he goes to the guillotine in place of her lover Charles Darnay. "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known".

Not such a nice, unselfish man as the others and I can’t explain why but I also like the Vicomte de Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses – such a bad man! I loved the film Dangerous Liaisons with Glenn Close and John Malkovitch.

A more modern hero, although one from Tudor England is Matthew Shardlake in C J Sansom’s books, Dissolution, Dark Fire and Sovereign. Shardlake is a hunchback lawyer who solves a series of murders – such a clever, resourceful man.

Reading in March

2008-03-05T06:45:00.007Z

This month I’ll be reading a selection of Robert Frost’s poems. I don’t read a lot of poetry but Frost is one of my favourite poets. I think that poetry is really better if you listen, rather than read it, or recite it out loud. Most memorably, some years ago I went to a poetry reading by Seamus Heaney who not only read his own poems but also some of Frost’s. I know some of the poems in this selection but would like to memorise some more as part of the Celebrate the Author Challenge, Frost’s birthday was 26 March.

I’m part way into Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Adichie, set in Nigeria in the 1960s and have just started to read Dante’s Divine Comedy. I would also like to read The Innocent Man by John Grisham. This is a move away from Grisham’s usual fiction into non-fiction about the wrongful conviction of Ron Williamson. I really should have started to read Daniel Isn’t Talking by Marti Leimbach, as it’s the next book up for discussion at my local reading group (next Wednesday). This is a novel about an autistic child based on the author’s experiences with her son. I think it may be a bit challenging, I know very little about autism.

Ambitiously, I’d also like to start reading these books - Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, D H Lawrence's Selected Stories and Barbara Euphan Todd's Miss Ranskill Comes Home. They’re all library books. I just hope I’ll be able to renew them! It would be good to have an extra brain and another pair of eyes, or only need to sleep every other night and then I’d stand more chance of reading all the books I’d love to read.

Red Pepper Soup

2008-03-04T16:10:00.000Z

I enjoy making and eating (or is it drinking?) soup. This is one of my favourites. It's very easy and quick to make and very tasty too.

My recipe is one I've adapted from The Soup Bible.The Soup Bible is a bautifully illustrated book, packed with over 200 recipes from all around the world. I'd never have thought of making soup from red peppers before.

Ingredients
For 2 servings

1 onion, chopped
2 red peppers, seeded and chopped. I use the long thin pointy ones that are mild and sweet - not at all hot.
Olive oil
1 garlic clove, crushed
1 ½ tablespoons tomato purée
1 pint vegetable stock
Juice of one lime
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Heat a little olive oil in a saucepan and soften the onion and peppers.
Add the garlic, tomato purée salt & pepper and stock.
Bring to the boil and then simmer, covered for about 10 minutes.
Cool slightly and then purée – I use a hand blender
Add the lime juice. Reheat.

The original recipe includes 1 small red chilli, sliced, but I like it without. Together with some wholemeal bread (I make it in a breadmaker) this makes a filling lunch.

"It is impossible to read too much" - Virginia Woolf

2008-03-04T12:35:00.002Z

Catching up with books I read in January and February

We’re already into March and I still haven’t got round to writing about all the books I’ve read so far. I’ve read 16 books in total. Looking back at 2007 I’d also read 16 books and that was when I was when I had a full-time job, so being retired hasn’t resulted in more time to read books!

These are the books I haven't written about:

The Man in the Picture: a Ghost Story, Susan Hill
This was a Christmas present. It’s a small book – in size and in length and I read it very quickly at the beginning of January. It starts with great promise of a sinister ghost story, set partly in Cambridge and partly in Venice. The narrator is having a meal with his old college professor one bitterly cold January evening, listening to a strange tale of a Venetian painting, of death and damnation. It’s really a novella and I was a bit disappointed that it was so short and although there is a good build up of atmosphere – dark places, a mysterious isolated country house and panic and terror in Venice - it didn’t send shivers down my spine.

I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
I don’t think I can do justice to this beautiful book in just a few words. Cassandra Mortmain is the narrator. She lives in a tumbledown castle miles from anywhere, with her family. There is her beautiful older sister, Rose, her once glamorous stepmother Topaz, her little brother Thomas and her eccentric father, who once wrote a novel. I love the opening of the book: “I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining board, which I have padded with our dog’s blanket and the tea-cosy.”

It’s written in such a seemingly simple style, but it captures so well the innocence and naivety of youth and hope for the future. It’s just, well, so English. I first read it as a teenager and it didn’t fail to live up to my memories of it. Definitely a book to re-read.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain
This is a book that somehow I have never read until now. From the back cover I learnt that this is Mark Twain’s most popular book and I suppose the story is well known, although I knew nothing of it. I was pleasantly surprised how much I enjoyed this book, from the episode of the whitewashed fence and the ordeal in the cave to the trial of Injun Joe. It’s an amusing tale with sombre undertones of the realities of adult life. A tale of superstitions, murder and revenge, starvation and slavery.

The Ropemaker, Peter Dickinson
I moved from one fantastic children’s book to another. This time by a modern author. This is truly a fantastic story of sorcerers, witches, magic and mystery. Put simplistically it’s a story about Tilja, Tahl and their respective grandmother and grandfather who are on a journey to save their homes from destruction. On a deeper level it’s about saving a way of life and relationships between people, about growing up, being rejected and feeling the responsibilities of power. If you like the tales of the power of magic and above all the mysteries of time – “the great rope of time” then you will like this book.

The Magician’s Assistant, Ann Patchett – I shall write a separate post on this book.

A God Divided, Christopher Catherwood I only just finished reading this a few days ago and I need to think about it before putting down my thoughts. It’s sub-titled “Understanding the differences between Islam, Christianity and Judaism”.

Outmoded Authors Challenge final thoughts

2008-03-02T17:26:00.003Z

I have really enjoyed the Outmoded Authors Challenge. The Challenge was to read however many books by however many authors you liked. I have read books that I wouldn't have read otherwise and have learnt about others from the reviews by other people. Thanks to Imani, who hosted this challenge.

My initial list is here.

I read:

Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott. I'd never read anything by Scott before and had an idea that his books would be difficult to read. I didn't find Ivanhoe difficult at all and enjoyed reading it. My thoughts on this book are here.

The Moon and Sixpence by W Somerset Maugham, another author whose work I'd never read before. I wrote about this here.

The Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning. I know nothing about Manning's books. I only managed to read two books in the trilogy - The Great Fortune and The Spoilt City. Friends and Heroes, the third book was listed in the library catalogue but when I tried to borrow it I found that it was no longer available because the branch library which holds it had been closed due to the library cost-saving cuts. I've been listening on Radio 4 to the trilogy so I now know what happens in Friends and Heroes, but I will read the book as soon as I can get a copy.

Sons and Lovers by D H Lawrence. I had previously read Women in Love and The Virgin and the Gypsy, but not Sons and Lovers. I loved it - see here. I also read The Man Who Died - see here.

The only book I started and didn't finish was As a Man Grows Older by Italo Svevo. I knew nothing about this author. The library has a copy of this book which I borrowed. I don't often abandon a book but soon after I started to read it I thought it was tedious and I took it back unread. I did read the Introduction after I'd decided not to read the book and was dismayed when I read that he had been encouraged by James Joyce in his writing. I think I'd like to read Ulysses sometime, but if it's anything like Svevo's book that will be another book I'll abandon.

I'm looking forward to joining in again when the second challenge starts later this year.

Heroine - Booking Through Thursday

2008-02-28T08:40:00.003Z

Who is your favorite female lead character? And why? (And yes, of course, you can name more than one . . . I always have trouble narrowing down these things to one name, why should I force you to?)

Thursday has come round very quickly - it's Booking Through Thursday again.

My immediate response to this question was Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, for her quick wittedness, good sense and spirit, then Jo in Little Women because of her independence and intelligence and Cousin Helen in What Katy Did as she was such a good person. But these are all characters from books I read a long time ago; there must be some more modern female characters that I like.

Again, one that came to my mind quickly is Lyra in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, for her courage and determination. Then there is Grace in Margaret Atwood's Amazing Grace, aptly named as I think she is amazing and enigmatic and like the other female characters I like she is full of courage in her desperate situation. Susan Ward in Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner is another strong female character; and Astrid in Astrid and Veronika by Linda Olsson - she is reclusive and an introvert and also a strong, determined woman.

It seems I like strong, determined women with a mind of their own and able to cope with difficult situations. So why is Elizabeth Bennet such a favourite, after all she didn't have to cope with serious illness, or live in poverty, or deal with manipulative, domineering, homicidal men, or make a home in the American west? I think maybe it's because I see her through rose-coloured glasses and because she is the first female character that caught my imagination when I first read Pride and Prejudice, possibly the first adult book I read.

Dante’s Florence - Week 3

2008-02-27T16:17:00.004Z

During week 3 we looked at the expansion of Florence as more people came into the city. In Dante’s day there were about 45 towers, or 90 or more, depending upon the source you check and today there are about 20 still standing, showing the progression from the early plain and simple tower into the grander palaces, with more and bigger windows, columns, loggias and decorated with the families’ coats of arms.

We looked at slides of a number of towers showing the development from defensive, military type towers to house towers and palaces.

La Castagna - The Chestnut Tower (also known as Dante’s tower), across from Dante’s House is an example of a plain, simple military tower, used in Dante’s time by an order of priors who voted on decisions by placing a chestnut in a box - hence the name. The holes are where there were planks joining the tower to neighbouring houses and the windows decrease in size higher up the tower.

An example of a tower that existed during Dante’s day is the medieval Mannelli Tower, located at one end of Ponte Vecchio. This was built to defend the bridge and shows the development of the design from the simple cube, having more windows (in pairs) and decorated with lions’ heads. It’s interesting because when the Vasari Corridor was added to the bridge at the end of the 16th century to enable the Grand Duke to move freely from one side of the bridge to the other, the Mannelli family refused to demolish it to make way for the Corridor. So the Corridor had to be built around the Tower, thus bypassing it.

We also looked at the cylindrical Pagliazza Byzantine Tower that was a prison in Dante’s day and is now part of the Hotel Brunelleschi, the Buondelmonte Tower, and the Alberti Tower.

As the city prospered new city walls were built bringing the churches outside the original walls within the city boundaries. By the end of the 13th century the population had grown to approximately 90,000 and was second only in size to Paris. Its wealth came from textiles and banking, with an emerging merchant class coming into the city for employment. This also brought social problems and the mendicant orders – travelling preachers from Umbria and Emilia who wanted to enrich the people’s spiritual life. These were different from the monastic orders, reaching out to people. Dante’s writing forms a parallel as he wrote in the vernacular making his work accessible to all.

The Church of San Miniato on the opposite side of the Arno was in a wild and woody setting when Dante knew it. In the Divine Comedy he likens the entrance to Purgatory to the ascent to the church. It is an ancient church from the 11th century with a 13th century Tuscan Romanesque style façade similar to that of the Baptistery – green and white marble. Inside there is a beautiful 13th century gold and black mosaic in the apse in the Byzantine style, with the palm symbolising the Resurrection accompanied by the symbols for the four Evangelists.

Illustrations (except for the Chestnut Tower) are from Wikipedia.

To follow: Banking, Guilds and Art of the Period.

Hearts and Minds by Rosy Thornton

2008-02-26T17:07:00.004Z

I really like books that grab my attention from the start, have believable characters, a good story and are thought provoking. Hearts and Minds meets all these criteria. From the first page I became involved in the world of St Radegund’s College, Cambridge as Dr Martha Pearce, the Senior Tutor working against deadlines, wrestles with writing an article, has difficulty refocusing her eyes from the computer screen to look at her watch and is not relishing the prospect of confronting a delegation of students angry at the proposed rent increases. As I read further it was obvious that this is a book to be read slowly and relished.

For one thing it is full of details about how the university college functions, how the staff and students inter-relate, and the idiosyncrasies and bureaucracy of academia. For another I didn’t want it to end, so I didn’t read through at breakneck speed in my usual way, but rationed myself and took it slowly. It may look from the book jacket that it is a light and fluffy love story (well there is a love story in there), but it is much more than that, posing moral dilemmas that are not limited to the academic world. I’m not sure I would have picked up this book just from its cover, so I’m really pleased that Rosy Thornton, who is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, sent me a copy to read.

St Radegund's College, an all-female college has just broken with 160 years of tradition by appointing former BBC executive James Rycarte as its new Head of House as successor to the former Mistress, the much-loved Dame Emily. The problems facing James seem to mount as, in addition to the rent strike by the students, he has to contend with opposition from some of the Fellows to his headship. There is the thorny question of his title – should he be called ‘Master’ which has “unfortunate resonances” in a women’s’ college or some other title such as ‘President’ or ‘Provost’ or ‘Warden’; for a while he goes by the title ‘Mistress’ before settling for ‘Master’. The library is sinking into the Cambridge fen mud and there isn’t enough money in the building contingency fund to pay for the remedial work; and Martha’s post of Senior Tutor is coming to the end of its period of office, the only suitable candidate being Dr Ros Clarke, who is leading the opposition to James as Head of House.

The perfect solution appears when Luigi Alvau, an old friend offers James a large donation. This would cover the costs of repairing the library and enable the college to set up scholarships for students who would otherwise not be able to afford a place. The sting in the tail is that Alvau’s daughter is applying for a place at the college. James with Martha’s support gradually wins over some of the Fellows. Martha meanwhile has her own problems. Not only is she faced with the problem of continuing her career, she has a depressed teenage daughter who refuses to go to school and spends her days in bed and a husband who seemingly exists on writing one or two poems in Italian every now and then, spending much of his time “thinking”. The only comfort she gets at home is from her ginger tomcat Maynard. Through Martha’s situation we are presented with the classic situation of how to balance work and home, with the added complications of difficult mother/daughter relationships between Martha and her daughter and Martha and her own mother.

Relationships are a key theme in the book, as James works to establish his relationships with the staff, the difficulties of maintaining a long-distance relationship with his son and his increasing reliance on Martha. Then there are the students and their relationships with each other and the Dean. How James survives in a “woman’s world” provides much scope for gently poking fun - for example I loved the tale of the SCR curtains, agreed upon by the Pictures, Plate and Furniture Sub-Committee and James's amazement that this is discussed by the entire academic staff at the annual meeting of the Governing Body. Opinion is divided between a traditional William Morris print and a more geometric Mondrian-style pattern.

More seriously the book raises questions, such as should the college compromise its integrity and take a donation when it cannot be sure of its origins? When its origins could be ill-gotton gains from bribery and corruption? Should the library be left to sink? And what about the question of donations from parents – are they evidence of bribery for a place or a genuine means of raising funds? Should students be penalised if they can’t afford their education? Or indeed should students be denied a place if their parents make donations? I was intrigued to read on and see how or if these questions were resolved?

There are echoes of C P Snow's novels, that I read and enjoyed many years ago, particularly The Masters in the Strangers and Brothers series and I noticed in the acknowledgements that the book developed from a joke about Snow. This is an intelligent and witty novel which kept me greatly entertained and gave me food for thought. I do hope there will be more books from Dr Thornton.

Hearts and Minds by Rosy Thornton, published by Headline Review, 2007, hardback, 341 pages.

Glimpses of Edward Gibbon at Sheffield Place (Sheffield Park Garden, East Sussex)

2008-02-24T17:15:00.000Z

Each day during this last week I’ve been reading one of Virginia Woolf’s essays from the collection in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. Each one has provided some fascinating glimpses into the lives of a number of writers including Edward Gibbon (1737 - 1794), about whom I know very little. In fact before I read her two essays "The Historian and ‘The Gibbon’" and "Reflections at Sheffield Place" all I knew was that Gibbon had written The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

I didn’t know about his connection to Sheffield Place and was interested when I realised that this is now Sheffield Park in Sussex. Although the house is privately owned, the National Trust owns Sheffield Park Garden. I visited it several years ago when I had no inkling that Gibbon had also visited it some 300 years earlier. The garden was originally designed by 'Capability' Brown for John Holroyd (who later became Lord Sheffield) in about 1775. So, Gibbon who was a great friend of Lord Sheffield would have seen the garden when he stayed with Lord Sheffield, but I doubt that he would have walked round very much of it as, according Maria, Sheffield’s daughter, Gibbon was "a mortal enemy to any person taking a walk." To her he was a figure of fun "waddling across the room", but she admitted that he was “the most delightful of talkers” and she was genuinely fond of him.

Woolf in her essay Reflections at Sheffield Park ponders whether Gibbon had paused in front of the “great ponds … bordered with red, white and purple reflections, for rhododendrons are massed upon the banks and when the wind passes over the real flowers the water flowers shake and break into each other.” I wish I had known that when I visited. I remember how beautiful Sheffield Park Garden was with its colourful displays of flowers and trees surrounding the lakes; I could have stood there imagining that maybe Gibbon had stood on the same spot and seen a similar display! The lakes, cascades and waterfalls make this one of the most picturesque gardens I've visited. I can't find the photos we took when we were there, so this photo is from Wikipedia, showing one of the lakes. The National Trust website has a few photos showing the Garden at different times of the year.

Woolf’s description of Gibbon’s appearance as well as his character caught my imagination and brought him to life. He was fat and ugly, talked incessantly, was sickly and had none of the advantages of birth. She describes his appearance as “ridiculous – prodigiously fat, enormously top-heavy, precariously balanced upon little feet upon which he spun round with astonishing alacrity.”

Gibbon apparently abandoned his purple language and wrote racy colloquial prose to Sheffield and was the only person who could restrain Sheffield’s extravagance. The contrasting characters of his eccentric Aunt Hester and his Aunt Kitty who brought him up after his mother died show the complexity of his nature. Woolf wrote that Aunt Hester’s view was that he was “a worldling, wallowing in the vanities of the flesh, scoffing at the holiness of faith.” Aunty Kitty on the other hand, thought he was a prodigy and was intensely proud of him.

Virginia Woolf’s essays are brief but give enough facts and a general impression of how Gibbon grew up and became a historian to make me keen to find out more. Gibbon did of course write in a very ornate, ironic and elaborate style, but Woolf considers reading it is like being “mounted on a celestial rocking-horse”, which then becomes a “winged steed; we are sweeping in wide circles through the air and below us Europe unfolds; the ages pass; a miracle has taken place.”

I still have essays on Coleridge, Shelley, Henry James, George Moore and E M Forster to read in this little book – such a wide sweep of literature yet to explore.

Sunday Scenes

2008-02-24T14:07:00.001Z

OutsideI looked out of the window first thing this morning and saw these four pheasants. One was motionless in the middle of the field watching the other three as they walked in procession along the boundary fence. I grabbed my camera, and this is the best shot I could get before they disappeared beyond my view. I'm sorry that they don't show up very well.

Later in the morning D said he wondered what people were looking at opposite our window (we get quite a few hikers walking by at the weekend) and then realised it was this cat sitting staring at the field. The pheasants were long gone, but the hedge is a haven for mice and voles, as well as birds and the cats are always on patrol, but we've never seen one sitting on top of the hedge before.

Inside

I decided it was about time I sorted out the pile of bedside books, which were in piles on the floor. Some of these I've read, some I've started and others are ones I want to read. Sometimes I can't decide what to read which is why there are so many in these piles - 19 books! I am only actually reading Hearts and Minds at the moment, and Virginia Woolf's book of Essays, and Half of a Yellow Sun, but they are downstairs.

From left to right they are:

Dead Language, by Peter Rushforth
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
Author, Author by David Lodge
Mysterious Wales by Chris Barber
The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs
W. Somerset Maugham Collection
Miss Ranskill Comes Home by Barbara Euphan Todd
The Genealogist’s Internet by Peter Christian
The Last Town on Earth by Thomas Mullen
The Death of Dalziel by Reginald Hill
Hearts and Minds by Rosy Thornton
Florence and Tuscany a Dorling Kindersley travel guide
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber
Back from the Brink, autobiography of Paul McGrath
The Innocent Man by John Grisham
Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe
The Sound of Paper by Julia Cameron
The Man in the Picture by Susan Hill

The Illusionist by Jennifer Johnston

2008-02-22T15:32:00.002Z

The Illusionist is the third book I’ve read recently on the theme of illusions. The Magician’s Assistant by Anne Patchett was the first followed by Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions. Of these three I found The Illusionist the most satisfying. Jennifer Johnston is a new writer to me, but from the biographical details in the book I see that she has won many awards – the Whitbread Prize in 1979, the Evening Standard Best first Novel Award in 1972 and was short listed for the Booker Prize in 1977. I’m sorry I haven’t come across her books before, but I’ll be looking out for them from now on.

Once I started this I stopped reading the other books I have on the go and read this through in about two sittings. I wanted to find out what happened and why. Set in Ireland and England, it starts with Stella, looking back on her life after the death of her estranged husband, Martyn. Thirty years earlier they had met on a train when he had taken the book she was reading out of her hands and asked if she would like to play cards. Now if a stranger had done that to me I wouldn’t have been too pleased but Stella is charmed by him, and after a very short time they are married, against her parents’ advice. Martyn has a full time job but practices magic tricks, although he corrects her description of him as a conjuror – he is an Illusionist. However, it’s not long before she begins to have misgivings, particularly when he won’t tell her anything about his background or his job or what is in the locked the room where he is devising an extraordinary new trick, with the help of two mysterious men.

The situation gets worse as Stella is manipulated and controlled by Martyn, so much that she gives up her own job and they move with their daughter, Robin to a large house in the countryside. Eventually, as things become so bad and Robin is alienated from her mother, Stella has to take action.

There are various themes running through the book; the nature of love and trust, how much you can trust or know another person, what is real or illusory, and above all about preserving one’s integrity in relationships between husband/wife and mother /daughter. It’s so easy to read this book as the words just flow across the pages, bringing to my mind vivid pictures of the countryside:

“Out beyond Clifden the world seems to end: hills, islands, clouds drift together in the hugh ocean of the sky. Sometimes the sun overwhelms both the sea and the sky with its glitter, sometimes pillars of rain move across the emptiness, then the colour, the texture of the land and sea change as the rain falls, from blue to grey, sometimes to black. Other times a shawl of mist hides mountains, sea and sky.”

The characters also came alive in my mind and I began to dislike Martyn more and more as the book progressed and I found myself wanting to support and encourage Stella in her struggle to survive. There is so much in this book that I liked and here is one example indicating the themes explored within the story:

“Some words lurk in the darkness of your mind, like young men lurk in the shadows, waiting to damage, maim, or merely frighten unsuspecting walkers once the light has gone.

Words can be like missiles or rose or travellers to another world. You can play delightful games with them, that will make you and others smile, feel light-hearted, or you can kill; you can hide the truth or manifest it.”

Format - Booking Through Thursday

2008-02-21T07:24:00.003Z

Booking Through Thursday's question this week is - All other things (like price and storage space) being equal, given a choice in a perfect world, would you rather have paperbacks in your library? Or hardcovers? And why?

In a perfect world I’d have both.

I like reading hardbacks (hardcovers) although their weight is often a problem if they are long books, both in carrying them home from the library and also when reading, particularly when reading in bed. These days some hardbacks are just as liable to fall apart as paperbacks, but on the whole I do think that last longer. Some paperbacks have those covers that curl open once you start reading and some are so tightly bound that you have to break the spine to keep the book open whilst you read it. But a paperback is much easier to carry around and I like to take a book with me just in case there’s an opportunity to read.

Eating, Sleeping and Living with Books

2008-02-18T21:37:00.006Z

Books, Baguettes and Bedbugs: the Left Bank World of Shakespeare & Co. by Jeremy Mercer (Phoenix 2006 paperback 260 pages).

I read about this book on Ann’s Blog and was intrigued enough to read it for myself. It’s a remarkable memoir of the author’s refuge at the Paris bookshop, Shakespeare & Co. on the banks of the River Seine opposite Notre Dame. Jeremy Mercer, a Canadian crime reporter, packed his bags and headed for Paris after receiving a death threat. He arrived during the last days of 1999 and shortly afterwards found his way to Shakespeare & Co, where he was amazed to find not only is it a bookshop but also a place providing beds for a number of writers. The owner George Whitman, then 86 years old, had been inviting writers to stay in the shop since he opened it in 1951, provided they helped in the shop and read a book a day, hardly an onerous task.

Jeremy recounts how George made him welcome, how he found ways to exist on very little money, with meals from George, Sunday morning pancake breakfasts, morning ablutions at the Café Panis and baguettes (“with the occasional speck of blue-green mold on the bread”) from the Sandwich Queen. Jeremy finds friends amongst the other residents and tells of their story-telling sessions on the banks of the Seine, and other escapades, including a trip to Ireland with Simon, an English poet and long time resident at Shakespeare & Co. As the future of the shop was called into question Jeremy helps George produce a booklet on the history of Shakespeare & Co and succeeds in tracking down George’s daughter Sylvia, whom he hoped would carry on the shop in the future.

It’s full of fascinating characters - the many writers who have been connected with it including Henry Miller, Anäis Nin, Lawrence Durrell and Alan Ginsberg; the individuals living in the shop; and not forgetting perhaps the most remarkable character of all, George himself. George’s generosity is in line with the original occupants of the building, built on the foundations of a 16th century monastery. He “compares himself to the monks who used to live on the same spot, a frere lampier who keeps a light on to welcome strangers and cares for old books and lost folk with semisacred devotion.” However, as the residents of the shop change Jeremy eventually finds that it felt “strange and dislocating” when he saw new people “amok among the books” and he decided that it was time to move on.

From the website I learned that George has retired but Shakespeare & Co is still “a wonderland of books” and has a full programme of forthcoming events. The website also has a tour of the shop, showing interior and exterior views and giving details of the book readings and other events held at the shop. I would love to visit it one day.

The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster

2008-02-16T16:42:00.005Z

My Celebrate the Author Challenge book for February was going to be one by Amy Tan or Alice Walker, who have birthdays in February. However, I was reading The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster, whose birthday is also in February, so I changed my list. That’s a good thing about this challenge – I don’t have to stick with the books I originally thought I was going to read. Somehow there is an obstacle in my mind about challenges. I love the idea of them and deciding what to read but when it gets to the time I’m “supposed” to read a book for some strange reason I don’t want to read it. After all I’m reading for pleasure and I like to read as and when the fancy takes me – not to a fixed programme.

From the title The Book of Illusions I expected to be deceived, that people and events would not be as they seemed and I was not disappointed. This book is full of illusions. It tells the stories of two men, David Zimmer, a professor whose wife and two sons were killed in a plane crash and Hector Mann, a silent movie star who disappeared mysteriously in 1929. David is plunged into depression and “lived in a blur of alcoholic grief and self-pity” until he watched a clip from one of Hector’s films. It made him laugh. He became obsessed with Hector, the man in the white tropical suit, with a thin black mustache, which Hector used as an “instrument of communication”, speaking a “language without words, its wiggles and flutters are as clear and comprehensible as a message tapped out in Morse code. … the mustache monologues.” In typical silent movie style Hector with his slicked-back hair, thin and greasy little mustache and white suit is the target and focal point of every mishap.

David takes leave of absence from the university and studies Hector’s films, eventually writing a book about him, intrigued by his disappearance. Then he receives a letter from Hector’s wife, in which she reveals that Hector is alive and wants to meet David before he dies. He asks for proof that Hector is indeed alive. The rest of the novel reveals what happened to Hector and why he disappeared, in a series of melodramatic incidents. It’s a tense tale as David accompanied by Alma, directed by Hector to persuade David to visit him, rushes to the Blue Stone ranch in New Mexico, where he finds Hector on his deathbed, guarded by Frieda his wife who seems to resent David’s presence.

There are stories within stories; subterfuge, crime, shootings, issues of identity, love, death, disguises and deception abound in this book. A few quotes give the flavour:

“The world was an illusion that had to be re-invented every day.”

“I was writing about things I couldn’t see any more, and I had to present them in purely visual terms. The whole experience was like a hallucination.”

“The world was full of holes … once on the other side of one of those holes, you were free of yourself, free of your life, free of your death, free of everything that belonged to you.”

“Life was a fever dream … reality was a groundless world of figments and hallucinations, a place where everything you imagined became true.”

“If I never saw the moon, then the moon was never there.”

Truly a book of illusions – about films that are in themselves illusions, the illusion that we can know another person, that there is a future, illusions about love, and identity – it moves in and out of reality. There are many layers to this novel; it’s a detective story with gothic overtones, a love story and a novel about the passing of the 20th century, ending as the last weeks of the century approach, that century which “no one in his right mind will be sorry to see end.” It’s a circular story as well, ending with the hope that it “will start all over again.”

Booking Through Thursday - After the Honeymoon

2008-02-14T09:35:00.002Z

Here’s something for Valentine’s Day.
Have you ever fallen out of love with a favorite author? Was the last book you read by the author so bad, you broke up with them and haven’t read their work since? Could they ever lure you back?

This question has made me think, once more, about just who are my favourite authors and why they are favourites. They are favourites because most importantly I enjoy their books, then because I like the way they write and I like what they write about; they are authors whose books live in my memory (for a while at least) and make me think. To qualify as a favourite author I have to have read more than one of their books.

I can't say that I have "fallen out of love" with a favourite author. I may think one book is better than another or I may enjoy one more than the next but I can't think of a book that was so bad it would stop me from reading their work. This week I've read various comments about the lack of "authority" of book bloggers to express their opinions and not post negative reviews if they don't like a book. But reading is a very subjective matter. Other people may, and do, think differently and come to a book with different expectations. What one person likes is not necessarily the same for everyone and it's useless to think otherwise. I like to know what other people have read and what they thought about it.

Coming to a new (to me) author I have found that I the first book may appeal to me, but the next won't and then I may not pick up a third. I'm thinking here of Maeve Binchy. I've only read one - Nights of Rain and Stars. I enjoyed it, easy to read (I was in the mood for a fast read), interesting story, believable characters, etc etc. This is not a well-thought out review of this book just memories of a book I read at the beginning of 2007. It was good enough for me to want to read more of her books, so I bought Whitethorn Woods. I started it - put it down - started it again - put it down and haven't picked it up again. The reason being that it seems disjointed, trite and well - boring. Maybe I'll read it sometime but life is just too short to carry on reading a book that I'm not enjoying.

Courtly Love in Florence

2008-02-13T16:20:00.002Z

Last week on my course on Dante’s Florence we looked at the development of the city, and the concept of ‘courtly love’ in relation to Dante’s La Vita Nuova (New Life).

Today we know Florence as a Renaissance city and there is little left of the medieval city that Dante knew. Originally a Roman city, by the end of the 13th century it was an expanding wealthy city bounded by its 12th century walls.

The earliest view of Florence is in the fresco of the Madonna of Mercy 1342, now in the Museo del Bigallo. It shows the city walls, towers, and the Cathedral, which was much smaller then and its dome had not been added. The Campanile was not yet built and the most prominent building was the Baptistery. The churches and religious establishments now within the city were outside the medieval walls, for example Santa Trinita, Santa Maria Novella, Santa Croce (containing the tombs of Michelangelo and Galileo and a monument to Dante who died in exile in Ravenna in 1321),

The River Arno runs through Florence, crossed by four bridges, including the Ponte Vecchio, built in 1345 after Dante’s death. It replaced a 12th century bridge that had been destroyed by floods in 1333. Floods have been a perennial problem, the worst one being that in 1966, when many buildings and works of art were damaged. The Ponte Vecchio was the only bridge in the city that survived the bombing during the Second World War.

Although Dante referred to the river in The Divine Comedy as the “cursed and unlucky ditch” as it was used as a rubbish tip, it has always been important to the city as the means of transporting goods and also for the textile industry. Wool was washed in the river and as it was used by tanners and purse makers in Dante’s day it must have been a very smelly place. Well known now for its shops there have always been shops on the bridge – butchers in the 15th century, then goldsmiths from the 16th century onwards.

Other prominent features of the city were the towers, as in other Italian towns (most notably San Gimignano). These were built from the 11th century onwards, with an average height of 225 feet. There were two types, defence and tower houses. I can’t imagine living in one, the only means of getting up to the rooms was by trap doors and ladders – I find it hard just getting into our loft! Representations of the towers can be seen in Cimabue’s Santa Trinita Madonna, now in the Uffizi Gallery, showing the Madonna and Child seated on a hugh throne surrounded by saints and angels and towers.

Set against the backdrop of this medieval city Dante theologised the concept of ‘courtly love’. This concept had originated with the troubadours in France and had developed as poets paid homage to and idolised married women from afar. In Dante’s case he fell in love at first sight with Beatrice Portinari when he was nine. Later they were both married (to other people) but he continued to put Beatrice on a pedestal, regarding her as a miraculous being. His love was unrequited and she died when she was 24, leaving Dante in despair. He wrote La Vita Nuova (1294) after her death in which he expressed, in a series of sonnets, his love and passion for her and his despair and grief at her death.

Mr Blossom's Shop by Barbara Euphan Todd

2008-02-11T14:58:00.000Z

When I read about the Heart of a Child Challenge I immediately thought of several books that I still had, Mr Blossom’s Shop being one of them. I remembered reading it as a child and hadn’t given it away because it was a prize from Sunday School for attendance. When I was a child every Christmas we were encouraged by the Sunday School to give books and toys for the ‘poor children’ whose parents couldn’t afford to buy them Christmas presents. I always found it difficult to give away books, and would look for excuses to hold on to them! I've included photos of the illustations in the book, which I particularly like now. I'd coloured them in my book as I had a book that used to belong to my mother when she was a child in which she had coloured the pictures, so I knew she couldn't tell me off. I don't think I coloured in any other books after that.

I was eight when I was given this book and I remember thinking it was a bit young for me (how ungrateful) but it has stuck in my mind so it can’t have been too bad. Mr Blossom’s shop was of course not your everyday, ordinary village shop but was stocked full of the most surprising and magical things. There was the Sally Lunn bun that turned into Miss Sally Lunn, a plump little old lady with “black curranty eyes set deeply in to her shiny brown face, and she wore a stiff little bonnet, as prim and neatly goffered as though it were made out of pie-crust.” I can’t believe I knew what “goffered” means when I was eight or if I did I’ve forgotten because I had to look it up. “ To goffer” is to make wavy or to crimp, so it’s a good image for a frilled bonnet or a crimped piecrust.

There were snapdragon seeds that produced real live little dragons that eat plants and candytuft seeds that come up as tiny cherry pies with sugary crusts and “tufts and tufts of the most delicious mauve and white sugar-candy”.

One of my favourite stories is “Sand-Shoes”, which I used to call pumps when I was a child. They are canvas shoes with rubber soles (also known as plimsolls). The sand-shoes Jennifer’s god mother bought her were very special shoes, “as light as leaves” that carried her out of her garden and then she “found that she was running on air. Her shoes never touched the ground.” They carried her to the seaside. Unlike the shoes in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Red Shoes, the sand-shoes returned Jennifer home unharmed, the only signs being her sandy feet and tiny shells that fell out of the shoes. I did like The Red Shoes as a child, even though Karen is forced to dance without stopping when she puts on shoes and the ending is just horrible.

Helping Mr Blossom in his shop was Mrs Macgillicuddy who was a nice witch, complete with cauldron and broomstick. She is the source of the magic pills and potions, “the magic headache powders, and the everlasting ball of string, and the pencil that added up sums by itself, and many other strange things that only witches know the ways of.”

I enjoyed my journey into the past reading this book. I’d read on Tara’s blog of an adult book by Barbara Euphan Todd and when I found this was in the library I was lucky enough to find it on the shelves recently. So now I’ll see if I enjoy Miss Ranskill Comes Home.

Until I started to write this post I knew nothing about Barbara Euphan Todd. She was born in 1890, worked as a VAD (volunteers who ran military hospitals) during the First World War and began writing at first for magazines such as Punch and the Spectator. Her first book, Worzel Gummidge was published in 1936, followed by nine others. She died in 1976 as plans were being made to televise her Worzel Gummidge books. So, what a pity she never saw Jon Pertwee (Doctor Who) as Worzel.

Olivia Manning - The Balkan Trilogy

2008-02-10T15:31:00.000Z

I have just discovered that The Balkan Trilogy is being broadcast on BBC Radio 4 as Fortunes of War. Today was the third in a series of three programmes, two programmes allotted to each book in the trilogy. It seems that Olivia Manning is no longer an outmoded author. The dramatisation is good, with Joanna Lumley taking the part of Harriet, looking back on events and Honeysuckle Weeks as young Harriet. Both are just right for the part.

I’ve read the first two books The Great Fortune and The Spoilt City, but not yet read the third book Friends and Heroes. I am waiting for it to be delivered, so in the meantime this is just perfect. I’ll be able to listen to it in the next two episodes before I get to the book.

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An Armful of Books

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Just The Right Book II

After Work Cookbook

Just the Right Book?

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Oscar Wilde

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The Secret Garden

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Booking Through Thursday "Lit-Ra-Chur"

The Magician's Assistant by Ann Patchett

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Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

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Easter at England's Eden

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Dante's The Divine Comedy

Oh No, Not Another Challenge!

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Robert Frost

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Our Cottage Garden

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Dante's Florence Week 5 Part One

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Two Caravans

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