Cornflower Books

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die - Mr. C. writes:

 

    If the reward of learning is to be a better person, do we mean "better than we were" or "better than other people"? This rather uncomfortable reflection occurred to me as I came to the end of the updated edition of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (edited by Peter Boxall), having carefully kept a score of those I'd already read. (The answer is that on this book's criteria I'm not half- or even quarter-educated, barely an eighth - and a fair number of those I have read were put into my hands by the Cornflower Book Group*). I could of course argue that such books exist to satisfy an entirely innocent desire for guidance in a world of proliferating choices; but there are less innocent desires where the ambition for broader experience and self-realisation shades into a competitive urge to get ahead of the pack by using measurable achievement as a badge of superiority. When I was a young man I had a young man's appetites and energies, but part of growing up (or, as my children put it, growing old) is the three-stage recognition that, first, you can't read every good book in the world, second, that the difference between what you know and all there is to be known is infinitely bigger than the difference between what you know and nothing, third, even if this is true, it is still right to read and do new and interesting things.

    So on balance I think such lists can be helpful, but I suppose it's inevitable that they will all have their flaws. This one, although notionally devoted to the novel, has managed to sneak in some of the pet works of some faction on the editorial team, works which may be great books but which certainly aren't novels (e.g Thoreau's Walden, Swift's A Modest Proposal, Jung Chang's Wild Swans, Michael Herr's Dispatches). Although there is a valiant effort to represent a diverse range of cultures, works originally written in English strongly predominate. There is an equally strong bias towards the present day: I find it hard to accept that there have been almost exactly as many truly outstanding works of prose fiction published since the year 2000 as there were in all of the centuries before the year 1800.

    I've been to restaurants with encyclopedic wine-lists, knowing I'm only going to sample a small fraction of the vintages on offer even if I come back regularly, but I rely to some extent on the descriptions to guide my choice. I prefer robust, complex reds and rich aromatic whites, so I steer away from words like 'fresh' and 'astringent' and towards words like 'deep' and 'powerful'. So it is with books like this; I now know for example that I'm much more likely to enjoy Peter Esterhazy's Celestial Harmonies than Michel Houllebecq's The Elementary Particles, and that avoidance of wasting time is in the end perhaps the most powerful recommendation for the book.

*(Edited to add: will anyone hazard a guess at which 14 CBG books are included? If you scroll down the right hand sidebar you'll see listed there all that we've read to date.)

A good guide to good books

 

    A few years ago I took out a subscription to The Good Book Guide, and that was money well spent because countless issues later I still find an enormous amount of good reading featured within its pages, and its reviews have led me to many excellent books. Some time later, I got the opportunity to write for the Guide; I continue to do so every month and I recently filed my 250th. review for the magazine. 

 

   

    As a reader, though, what I love about it is not just the range of books covered in every issue, although that is pleasingly wide, but the clear and concise nature of the reviews; they do what I try to do here, that is get to the heart of a book - its subject matter and what makes it worth reading - in just a few sentences. Tell me succinctly what a book is about and what's good about it, and I'll just as quickly decide whether it's one I want to read; it's that sort of essential summary I want from any literary publication, and the Guide, which in addition includes book extracts, author interviews and editor's choice features, provides it in stylish form.

 

    The Guide has recently launched a new website and has taken to social media with both a Facebook page and a Twitter account. Do have a look, 'like' and follow should you wish to, and perhaps consider subscribing because even in these days of multitudinous book blogs and websites, The Good Book Guide is a very good guide to good books.

Out now ...

    ....The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe, one of my top favourite books of the year, as you'll see here.

Serendipities in bookstores

 

    "There are all kinds of serendipities in bookstores, starting with -

Alphabetical: while looking for one novel, you might remember that you'd always meant to read something by another author whose last name shared the same first two letters.

Visual: the shiny jacket on this book might catch your eye.

Accidental: superstitiously, I almost always feel the need to buy any book that I knock over.

Prompted: both Mom and I gave very serious consideration to any book placed in the "staff recommends" section, particularly if it sported a yellow stickie (a.k.a. Post-it note) or a handwritten shelf talker - a bookstore neologism I love, because it conjures such a vivid image of a shelf talking to you, or of a person who talks to shelves."

   

    That's another lovely passage from Will Schwalbe's The End of Your Life Book Club, and I applaud Will's 'creative justification' for buying books! The joy of browsing is in those happy discoveries and chance finds, and Will goes on to say that on the bookshop visit he's talking about there he bought Josephine Tey's Brat Farrar - a 'staff favourite' - and a volume of W. Somerset Maugham's short stories which he had knocked off a shelf.

    There's clearly mileage (albeit with extra expense) in cultivating a degree of clumsiness in bookshops: "Oh dear, I seem to have caused the complete works of X to fall to the floor, taking with them numerous surrounding volumes by other great writers I've always wanted to read. I shall certainly have to buy them all now ..."

    Do you have any bookshop rules, rituals or superstitions? Any serendipitous discoveries?

Good lines: the physicality of books

From The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe (full post on it here).

The End of Your Life Book Club

   

    Earlier this week I had the great pleasure of talking to Will Schwalbe about his moving and uplifting memoir The End of Your Life Book Club. Will in person is as warm, friendly and interesting as his book suggests, and our conversation ranged from favourite reads and funny anecdotes to personal reflections and universal observations - it was a chat full of laughter and much food for thought.

    As I wrote the other day, Will's book is about the importance of books as manuals for life, of reading as comfort and joy, as a means of understanding others and sharing experiences. As he recounts the last two years of his mother's life, the books they read and discussed through so many hours spent in hospital waiting rooms and during chemotherapy sessions provide a counterpoint to the very living - and dying - mother and son were doing.

 

    Will's mother Mary Anne Schwalbe was an impressive lady. In a working life which took her from being director of admissions at Harvard and Radcliffe to founding director of the Women's Refugee Commission and other important positions besides, she focused on doing and on making a difference, both by means of her career but also through many selfless (often anonymous), private acts of kindness and generosity which touched and changed lives in big ways and small. She comes across as a wise person and a thoughtful one, practical and punctilious, courageous and conscientious, a good listener and an empathic friend to all; in her approach to an illness she knew would eventually end her life she was remarkably sanguine - stoic, uncomplaining, positive and prepared.

    As Will talks of the ups and downs of his mother's last two years - and let me stress that this is a beautifully balanced and emotionally sensitive account, never maudlin or sentimental - so he shows us the books they used as "ballast", or as a life raft in unpredictable and often heavy seas. Whether they are laughing at the humour of Alan Bennett and P.G. Wodehouse, admiring the humanity and elegance of Alexander McCall Smith, discussing the issue of violence against women through Stieg Larsson's novels or literacy in Afghanistan (a cause very close to Mary Anne's heart) with reference to Khaled Hosseini, Will and his mother connect through books and, crucially, confront on the page subjects they might have tended to avoid off it.

    Whether you read this for the lovely bookish chat (there is a list of all the books and writers mentioned in the memoir at the end), for Will's thoughts and observations on so many aspects of reading, or whether you pick it up because you're interested in how to live well - Mary Anne had that gift even in extremis - I can't recommend this book too highly.

    Mary Anne Schwalbe died three years ago today. Will feels that his mother lives on through the books she loved and admired, the ones which will forever be a point of affinity or link back to her; he's too modest to say that she is a vibrant, inspiring presence on the pages of his own book, but she is.

    I'll leave the last word to him: "We're all in the end-of-our-life book club, whether we acknowledge it or not; each book we read may well be the last, each conversation the final one ... Books can be how we get closer to one another, and stay close, even in the case of a mother and son who were very close to each other to begin with, and even after one of them has died."

Book of the day no. 2 - The End of Your Life Book Club

    When one day in 2007 Will Schwalbe happened to ask his mother what she was reading, her reply - "an extraordinary book, Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner" - was the start of something.

    Mary Anne was in the waiting room of the outpatient department at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre, there to begin treatment for the pancreatic cancer which would end her life, and Will's question sparked an ongoing conversation about books which would amount to their own private book club and which would sustain them over the coming two years. As they swapped titles and shared recommendations, discussing a wide range from classic to popular, poetry to mysteries, the fantastic to the spiritual, Will and Mary Anne are reminded of "the power of books to comfort us, astonish us, teach us, and tell us what we need to do with our lives and in the world."

    Will Schwalbe tells his and his mother's story in The End of Your Life Book Club. I began it this morning and very early on I started to feel exactly as Will did about Crossing to Safety: " ... at about page twenty or so the magical thing occurred that happens with the very best books - I became absorbed and obsessed and entered the 'Can't you see I'm reading?' mode."

    I wouldn't dream of putting it down*.

(Book of the day no.1 is here.)

*Edited to add: there is now a full post on The End of Your Life Book Club here.

View halloo

   

    Spoiler alert! If after seeing Simon's hilarious post on the opening of Mary Webb's novel Gone To Earth you're burning to read the book, click away now because the story's ending is given below.

    Simon's piece prompted me to look up the author in John Sutherland's book (which I was talking about yesterday), and here's the part of her entry which refers to it:

    "[The Golden Arrow*] was followed up promptly by another Shropshire saga, Gone to Earth (1917), in which Webb hit her grim groove. It was well reviewed. Amazingly. Rebecca West chose it as her book of the year - something one can only ascribe to a critical neurosis triggered by the war (going badly for the Allies in 1917) and her disastrous affair with H.G. Wells .... The novel's heroine, Hazel Woodus, is one of Webb's hallmark children of nature, a denizen of the woods, hills and streams - with something of the witch (as her mother was) about her. She carries with her a fragrance of 'morning air' and her soulmate is a pet fox, 'Foxy'. Her father makes coffins - ominously. Ominous too is the opening paragraph [as Simon quotes].

    ... Delectable Hazel catches the eye of the local squire, a hunting man, Jack Reddin. One glimpses, as in a distorting mirror, reflections of Tess of the d'Urbervilles. To cut a long story short (which Webb doesn't), Hazel has to choose between two legs or four. The novel ends with him leading a hunt (tally ho!) in which, to save Foxy, Hazel scoops the beast in her arms and plunges down a mine shaft. Liebestod."

*Sutherland goes on to tell us that in 1928 "a smart young journalist on the Evening Standard, Stella Gibbons, was given the job of editing The Golden Arrow for serialisation in the paper. The result four years later was the witty spoof, Cold Comfort Farm ..."

    I knew, of course, that the terrifically funny Cold Comfort Farm was a parody of, amongst others, Mary Webb's work, but not that Stella Gibbons had had a professional connection with the earlier book.

Literary lives and books laid bare

 

    Back to the Book Festival today to hear Professor John Sutherland talking about fiction with reference to the personalities and predilections of those who create it, all brought together in his massive new book Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives, and John Crace, the writer behind The Guardian Digested Read column and author of Brideshead Abbreviated: The Digested Read of the Twentieth Century.

    

    This was such an entertaining hour, and John Sutherland alone would enthuse even a reluctant reader, I feel, but he, along with "the young John" delighted what must have been a very well-read audience. He began by telling us that although he taught literature for forty years, he really only read books at two periods of his life - when he was very young, and since retiring. Growing up in Edinburgh in the 1940s and '50s, he described the books he discovered in those dark post-war days as a passport to another world, and now much later in life he calls fiction "a fantasy factory", food for the imagination, and it is from that passion that his Lives has sprung.

     Leaving behind the academic world which requires the reader to "keep their eyes on the page", he is now free to indulge his interest in literary curiosities, puzzles, irrelevancies and details, and he is recapturing some of the magic which fiction has always had for him, responding to a book as an agent, not a passive receiver, and following the trails laid by books themselves or by events great and small in their writers' lives.

     Being in Edinburgh on this very rainy day, he was reminded of the circumstances which led Robert Louis Stevenson (a local) to write Treasure Island. In 1880, the Edinburgh summer was marked by weather which was bad by even Scottish standards, and RLS, whose health was poor, was advised to move up to Deeside for better air. There was no respite from the rain there either, and Louis's young stepson Sam was forced to occupy himself indoors. He had a set of watercolours and a room he called his 'studio', and based on the tales of derring-do and boys' own adventures that he'd been reading, he set about painting a treasure map, his artwork the prompt for Louis to start telling him stories based around it, the opening of Treasure Island thus being drafted one evening at the fireside. Had the sun shone that summer, says Prof. Sutherland, we would not have that book!

   

    John Sutherland then introduced John Crace, describing his digested reads as the equivalent of "turning a cow into an Oxo cube", and paying tribute to how carefully he reads the texts he parodies, coming up with an end product which is "both itself and something else ... not so much a hatchet job, more dissection with a surgeon's scalpel", and providing an example of deflation in a world of literary hype. We were treated to a reading of two of his columns, his deconstruction of David Copperfield, marking Dickens' bicentenary, and Antonia Fraser's Must You Go?: My Life with Harold Pinter which he read in a suitably high-pitched voice; both had the audience in stitches.

   

    John Sutherland then took up the Dickens theme with a discussion of the debate over the events of Dickens' death: did he die at Gads Hill Place, as the first authorised biography says, or was it at Ellen Ternan's house with his body later returned to the family home? Did he lead a double life, was he a cruel husband, or was he a decent man who helped a woman in difficulty? Versions of his life abound, and successive biographical works - most recently The Great Charles Dickens Scandal by Michael Slater - present evidence for both theories.

    In answer to a question from a member of the audience, the two Johns talked briefly about defining 'the classics'. John Sutherland quoted the late Frank Kermode: "Old books which people still read; books which cross boundaries," and felt the term 'modern classic' was a contradiction in terms. John Crace noted that the later one goes in time, the more arbitrary the benchmark seems. He cited Salman Rushdie's 1981 Booker Prize winner Midnight's Children and said he had done a straw poll on the book canvassing 40 members of staff at his newspaper. 30 had not read it, four had tried and given up, four had finished and hated it, and only two loved it - perhaps not a scientific study, but an interesting result nonetheless for a novel which has apparently achieved 'modern classic' status.

    An hour was too short a time to fully savour all that "The Two Johnnies" - as they are sometimes called - had to say about books and writers. I could have listened to them all afternoon.

My thanks to the very kind Phyllis of The Edinburgh Reporter for the great photographs of our two speakers.

What Dickens did

    I've referred here before to the book The Pleasure of Reading, edited by Antonia Fraser. When I picked it up this evening for an idle browse, it happened to fall open at Germaine Greer's piece, an essay in which she describes how as a child she became a compulsive reader, "gobbling up one book so that I could gobble up another." Her reading was then a displacement activity, she says, and a book her "fantasy interlocutor", her friend.

    She read on indiscriminately, "gorging on print, reading rubbish with the same appetite as I read the best", and then she brought home a badly foxed copy of Bleak House (chosen for its length), and read:

'London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes - gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foothold at street corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since day broke ...'

 

    "By the time I finished that first paragraph I was reading in a different way, letting the phrases swing me along, bouncing through arcs of history, spinning as a hawk's eye to a point of view at once lofty and minute. The rhythm of the writing imposed itself on the rush of my compulsion. I knew that this was an appetite that would not sicken. I would be reading this book for the rest of my life. Dickens had rescued me ... I knew real pleasure at last."

    That's quite a reaction, quite an effect, and not one I can say I've ever experienced (but then ... I've never read Dickens!!!).

 

Illustration from The Pleasure of Reading by Katie Lester.

Tol-keen

 

 

    I was browsing the other evening at Juxtabook's online shop C.L. Hawley Books when I spotted and quickly snapped up The Pleasure of Reading, edited by Antonia Fraser, a collection of pieces by forty authors revealing their reading, literary loves and favourite books from childhood onwards. Each essay is accompanied by specially commissioned illustrations (forty illustrators!), and with a range of contributors from Catherine Cookson to Janette Winterson, Tom Stoppard to Roger McGough, there's a wealth of material here for dipping into in an idle hour.

  

    Reading A.S. Byatt's contribution just now, I saw that she lists Tolkien's The Lord of The Rings among her favourites "for reading when very ill or depressed: it is compelling narrative and there is no sex and no real moral problems to agitate the mind". In the body of her piece she says,

    "I agree wholly with Tolkien and Auden in their dispute with Alan Garner about how to write about magical and alien worlds for children. The little groups of wandering Susans and Johns and Erics in their pyjamas and school sandals ruined many good imaginary landscapes and cosmic battles for me. I am too old to have read Tolkien as a child, but the child in me read and reads him as an adult in moments of depression, as I read Dumas and Asgard and the Gods [and see also Ragnarok, of course], to live in narrative."

 

    I wondered who else among the authors was keen on Tolkien, and I found this by Ruth Rendell:

    "Two years after The Hobbit was published I read it for the first time. Twenty years later I read it again and experienced just the same feeling of delight and happiness and a quite breathless pleasure. That first time, when I was nine, was also the first time I remember feeling this. It is a sensation known to all lovers of fiction and comes at about page two, when you know it's not only going to be good, but immensely satisfying, enthralling, not to be put down without resentment, drawing inexorably to a conclusion of power and dramatic soundness." [Lovely!]

 

    Then I came to Alan Hollinghurst -

"Tolkien, of course, was a laboriously unamusing and I now think bad writer; but he was my obsession between the ages of twelve and fourteen. I took a poor view of The Hobbit but read The Lord of the Rings six times in successsion ... I remain aware of the deep feelings it nurtured in me - feelings about place in particular. All its most potent and plausible geography is English, and it conspired with the places where I had grown up ... to charge all those landscapes with a heroic, elegiac air. Doubtless I could have got this from other writers too; but as it happened I got it from the derivative fustian of Tolkien, and I feel it keenly still."    

    Solace, delight and depth of feeling, the authors I've quoted got much from Tolkien. Were you one of those who read his work voraciously as a youngster, and if so, have you gone back to him in adult life? My answer would be 'yes' and 'no' - though maybe I should revisit him - how about you?

All pace slackened to a page's turn

 

    Anne Scott's 18 Bookshops is one of those rare books that is both personal and universal - it speaks of one woman's experience, but in a way that so many lovers of books and bookshops will identify with, and on the transformative possibilities of books and the places in which they are found it will perhaps make the reader see their own encounters in a new light.

    This is a thoughtful work, one of quiet passion and a poet's sensibility. Handsomely designed, though the lack of page numbers means noting and revisiting a reference is a slower business than usual - but then see this post's title which is itself a lovely line from the book - it's a collection of word-portraits of 18 unique shops; some are well known to the author and have particular meaning for her at different times in her reading life, while others earn their place through their importance to literary history. To illustrate that eclecticism, there is the Covent Garden shop at which Boswell met Johnson, the sixteenth century Edinburgh shop, Chepman & Myllar, in which the first printed books in Scotland were produced, and on to the present day, Leakey's in Inverness, formerly St. Mary's Gaelic Church, where in a place in which the language once spoken and sung had 28 separate words for poem, the author finds the copy of Eliot's Little Gidding which she had been seeking; "Sometimes, as here," she says, "a Bookshop may be defined forever in a life by a single found book."

    From the island of Iona to New York City, from small shops in small towns and the quaint and the curious to large city booksellers and establishments which launched major careers, this encapsulates the author's observation that "... bookshops are immeasurably strange and that the mind reading next to mine inhabits a separate earth", and for everyone who has ever seen a bookshop as the gateway to so many other worlds, this beautiful book on the character of such places and their significance to those who are drawn to them must have a place on the shelves.

Books for writers

   To add to our small collection of posts aimed at anyone who writes, I thought a few books for writers might be worth a look. I haven't read (or even got) any of these, so I can't speak from experience, but having seen them warmly recommended in various trustworthy quarters, I thought I'd mention them and ask you to suggest any others you know to be good.

The Five-minute Writer: Exercise and Inspiration in Creative Writing in Five Minutes a Day by Margret Geraghty aims to tone and train the creative muscles in short, sharp bursts.

The 3 A.M. Epiphany: Uncommon Writing Exercises That Transform Your Fiction by Brian Kiteley offers "unusual" exercises to help make creative breakthroughs.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King, part writing autobiography, part "tough love lessons for aspiring novelists"!

The Weekend Novelist: A Dynamic 52-week Programme to Help You Produce a Finished Novel ...One Weekend at a Time by Robert J. Ray and Bret Norris provides an action plan to take you through a complete first draft.

A Novel in a Year: A Novelist's Guide to Being a Novelist by Louise Doughty is the collection of her weekly columns which appeared in The Daily Telegraph a few years ago, and which took those who followed the exercises from initial ideas to body of raw material. Coincidentally, the latest addition to my TBR pile is The Coward's Tale by Vanessa Gebbie, an extract of which won the Telegraph's 'Novel in a Year' competition - the proof of the pudding?

Finally, if you fancy trying your hand at writing crime fiction, this picture might amuse you!

Good lines: on editing

 

    "If editing has become a luxury in today's world, because of the accelerated pace of publishing and the pressures on editors to spend their time acquiring, it is no less important in the life of a book. No matter what anyone may ascertain about an editor's abilities, it is finally the writer who knows whether the editor has a gift for language, an understanding of structure, a grasp of the dynamics of plot, pacing, tension, and resolution. Only the writer knows if his editor edits. The best editor is a sensitive reader who is thinking with a pencil in her hand, questioning word choice, syntax, and tense. An editor is someone who probes the writer with insightful questions, who smooths transitions or suggests them where none exist. A good editor knows when the three pages at the beginning of a chapter are throat-clearing. Start here, she'll mark in the margin. This is where your book begins. And she'll know when you should stop, spare your reader being hit over the head as if your point were a two-by-four."

From The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers by Betsy Lerner.

    If you're interested - as I am - in the subject of editing, do read the article The Art of Editing, the Paris Review interview with editor Robert Gottlieb, from which the following extracts are taken:

    "Editing is simply the application of the common sense of any good reader. That’s why, to be an editor, you have to be a reader. It’s the number one qualification. Because you could have all the editorial tools, but if you’re not a responsive reader you won’t sense where the problems lie. I am a reader. My life is reading. In fact, I was about forty years old when I had an amazing revelation - this is going to sound dumb—it suddenly came to me that not every person in the world assumed, without thinking about it, that reading was the most important thing in life. I hadn’t known that. I hadn’t even known that I had thought it, it was so basic to me."

    "What is it that impels this act of editing? I know that in my case it’s not merely about words. Whatever I look at, whatever I encounter, I want it to be good - whether it’s what you’re wearing, or how the restaurant has laid the table, or what’s going on on stage, or what the president said last night, or how two people are talking to each other at a bus stop. I don’t want to interfere with it or control it, exactly - I want it to work, I want it to be happy, I want it to come out right."   

                                                ~~~~~

See also: Points to Ponder

              Arts and Crafts

              A Critique of Pure Reason 

Arrivals

 

     A quick introduction to some new arrivals, and we'll begin with Sort Of Books' new edition of Maria Edgeworth's Patronage: A Novel in Four Parts, first published in 1814, which will be out early next month.

    This was one of the most eagerly anticipated novels of Jane Austen's day and it sold out within hours of publication; it also earned its author the highest advance of its time: £2,000! An entertaining page-turner, it's "a bright and mischievous critique of the way young men [in Regency England] gained careers and young women gained husbands."

 

    Next, a book I've had my eye on since it was released a couple of months ago, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman. Here's the gist: "In her endlessly giving, funny and thoughtful book, Elif Batuman travels through California, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Hungary and Russia itself, finding everywhere echoes of the lives and work of the great Russian writers. And proving on her way that writing about writing can be as beautiful, truthful and engaging as the best novel - and that a life filled with books can be stranger than a Gogol short story."

 

    Lastly today, The House in France: A Memoir by Gully Wells, which is to be serialised on BBC Radio 4 as Book of the Week from 27th. June.

    "In 2009, six years after her mother's death, Gully Wells returns to La Migoua, the house in Provence which belonged to her mother - the glamorous, funny, unpredictable and furiously rude American journalist, Dee Wells. Surrounded by the clutter of decades, Gully is taken back to her childhood, to her mother, her adored stepfather - the celebrated, brilliant, womanising Oxford philosopher, A.J. Ayer - and to the rich memories that the house evokes. [...] Unsentimental and gloriously witty, The House in France is a vivid and moving love letter to a beloved mother, and a celebration of family, of growing up and of the spirit of a cherished house."

Good lines: Wodehouse on the literary life

 

    "Bingo sat down and wrote a story about a little girl called Gwendoline and her cat Tibby. The idea being, of course, to publish it in Wee Tots and clean up.

    It was no easy task. Until he started on it he had no notion what blood, sweat and tears are demanded from the poor sap who takes a pop at the literary life, and a new admiration for Mrs Bingo awoke in him. Mrs Bingo, he knew, did her three thousand words a day without ricking a muscle, and to complete this Tibby number, though it ran only to about fifteen hundred, took him over a week, during which period he on several occasions as near as a toucher went off his onion."

From 'The Word in Season' in A Few Quick Ones.

    "One of those ghastly literary lunches. I don't know why I go to them ... This one was to honour Emma Lucille Agee who wrote that dirty novel that's been selling millions in America ... The Agee woman told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required ..."

From The Girl in Blue.

As found in Wodehouse Nuggets: An Anthology edited by Richard Usborne, a collection of nearly two thousand "nifty one-liners ... celebrating Wodehouse's inimitable style".

A glimpse of writers' houses

    When I saw the book Writers' Houses mentioned on Eggs on the Roof the other day - and thanks to Oxslip for recommending that lovely site in the first place - I bought a copy sharpish (though I see there are fewer available now and prices are high). It's the sort of book I can't resist, full of fabulous photographs of interiors, and some exteriors, too, rooms full of sunshine or pools of lamplight, books everywhere, desks and treasured possessions, all as though the writers themselves are about to step into the picture at any moment.

    There is Karen Blixen's Danish family home, full of the flowers she loved to arrange, Lawrence Durrell's French house, familiar from some of his writings, Vita Sackville-West's Sissinghurst, Virginia Woolf's Monk's House, and many more, all discovered by author Francesca Premoli-Droulers and photographer Erica Lennard as they travelled across Europe and the United States in search of the 'spirit of place' or genius loci which influenced those whose houses they visited.

    If you click on the picture to enlarge it you'll see, from the top row, left to right:

- the work table in the glassed-in veranda in his house in Sommières near Nîmes at which Lawrence Durrell would make an early start each day

- Vita Sackville-West's writing room cum library in the tower at Sissinghurst

- the "lighthouse", or study of Jean Giono in Manosque, Provence

- the work shed at the Boat House, Laugharne, home to Dylan Thomas

- Karen Blixen's desk at Rungstedlund in Denmark, with the typewriter she brought back from Africa

- Mark Twain's conservatory in Hartford, Connecticut

- the green sitting-room at Virginia Woolf's Monk's House in Rodmell, Suffolk, its table and chairs decorated by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant

- W.B. Yeats's Thoor Ballylee in Galway, Ireland

- the drawing-room at Marbacka, an estate in western Sweden which was home to Selma Lagerlöf.

For readers and writers

-  Over on Cornflower the post today is on a cookery book with a difference: what you get if you gather fifty authors, ask them about how they work, who influenced them, what they like to read and what part food plays in their books. If you haven't already seen it, do pop across and take a look at Table of Contents.

-  From bestselling writers to those yet to get into print: aspiring authors may like to know about the forthcoming London Book Fair Masterclass (9th. April). This 'how to get published' event features big name novelists Peter James and Lesley Pearse, agent Luigi Bonomi and publisher Jon Wood (Orion Books), so if you're a writer who is hoping to get that first break and you're looking for a steer in the right direction, get your ticket here.

- There are literary festivals, and then there's Laugharne! The village made famous by Dylan Thomas now has its own festival of literature and more besides: the Laugharne Weekend, on this year from 15th. to 17th. April, full details and tickets here. Notable names representing the poetry side of things include Carol Ann Duffy and Owen Sheers, but getting back to Dylan Thomas himself, if you want to know what life in Laugharne was like for him and his family, you might read his daughter Aeronwy's memoir My Father's Places (more on it here).

For every season there is a book

 

     "The author of Ecclesiastes and Pete Seeger have taught us that for everything there is a season; likewise, I might add, for every season there is a book. But readers have learned that not just any book is suited to any occasion. Pity the soul who finds itself with the wrong book in the wrong place, like poor Roald Amundsen, discoverer of the South Pole, whose book bag sank under the ice, so that he was constrained to read, night after freezing night, the only surviving volume: Dr. John Gauden's indigestible Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in His Solitudes and Sufferings. Readers know that there are books for reading after lovemaking and books for waiting in the airport lounge, books for the breakfast table and books for the bathroom, books for sleepless nights at home and books for sleepless days in the hospital. No one, not even the best of readers, can fully explain why certain books are right for certain occasions and why others are not. In some ineffable way, like human beings, occasions and books mysteriously agree or clash with one another."

From A Reader on Reading by Alberto Manguel.

    I wonder why Amundsen had that Portraiture book with him in the first place, and what do modern polar explorers take to read when the going gets tough? Which books might sustain one in extremis? It's no wonder, though, that there are books for times and places and circumstances, because by nature of their own character and personality, their emotional pitch and their pace or relative stillness, books will suit the mood and the moment (or not) just as people do. They too are companions of our joys and sorrows.

Books about books

 

    A couple of weeks ago I was asking all you very well-read souls to recommend historical fiction, and a great response I got!

    Then I discovered this little book, 100 Must-Read Historical Novels by Nick Rennison, and I thought that would be the perfect reference resource for when the 'period mood' strikes. It is pretty well pocket size, so ideal for carrying with you when you're in the bookshop or library and want a guide to point you in the right direction. But despite its lack of bulk it looks to pack a lot of information in between its covers.

    I've just been skimming through it, but here's the gist: 100 titles arranged A-Z by author with a further 500 'read on' recommendations; themed categories such as 'Scotland', eighteenth century adventures, writers' lives, and so on. Each of the 100 main books covered has been chosen to represent the broad range of the genre, while entries are concise, give some information about the author as well as their book and then suggest further reading, either stylistically similar or thematically linked, and film versions where relevant.

    How long will my wishlist be when I've dipped into this a few times, I wonder.