Cornflower Books

Soon to be read

   

    I spent about two hours this afternoon writing a longish post on the books I'll be reading over the next couple of weeks, only to press 'save' and find that Typepad was down again, and my carefully crafted piece had vanished.

    So, to begin again, but more briefly this time, here's my 'soon to be read' pile:

     Going Back by journalist and broadcaster Rachael English is a debut novel which sees Elizabeth Kelly leave Ireland to return to Boston where she spent the summer of 1988. "Can she reconcile the dreams of her twenty-year-old self with the woman she has become?"

    Writing the Garden by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers is subtitled 'A literary conversation across two centuries', and is a collection of writings on the art of gardening by the likes of Vita Sackville-West, Elizabeth von Arnim, Edith Wharton, Beverley Nichols, Penelope Hobhouse and Margery Fish. Perfect for this time of year.

    The Collected Works of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin I have already introduced. I'm reading it now, and so far it's rather sweet and fun.

    The Steady Running of the Hour by Justin Go is another debut, this one a time-slip tale of an unclaimed inheritance, "part historical tour de force, part heart-rending love story," a breathless race from London archives to the battlefield of the Somme and the fjords of Iceland to piece together the events of a long-ago love affair and uncover vital proof of lineage. The author talks about it here.

    The White Russian by Vanora Bennett is "a sweeping, heartbreaking novel of illicit passion and family secrets set amongst the Russian émigré community in Paris in 1937". Evie comes from New York in search of art and adventure, but her grandmother's sudden death leads her on a quest to discover a mysterious man from her family's past. "With the world on the brink of war, she becomes embroiled in murder plots, conspiracies and more as White faces Red Russian and nothing is as it seems."

    Last but by no means least, The Stories, a collection of Jane Gardam's short fiction. Some of these I've read before, some are new to me, all come from the pen of a literary star whose work I love and admire. As the blurb says, "Jane Gardam shakes out life and finds diamonds in its folds." I can't wait.

    

    With the ongoing Typepad problems I hardly dare ask you to tell us what you're reading this weekend, but if you find you can leave a comment - and especially if you have something good on the go - please do let us know.

Writers and their notebooks

   

    "A junkyard of the mind", "literary mushroom compost", a record of "thwarted intentions", a "repository for obsessions", a "transitional" medium .... some of the many descriptions of writers' notebooks given by Lawrence Norfolk, A.S. Byatt and others in this programme which I flagged up a few days ago and which was broadcast last night.

Metafictional

   

     "Agatha [...] invented a character, Ariadne Oliver, who is a fictional take on 'Agatha Christie'. Mrs. Oliver, who first appeared in Parker Pyne Investigates, is a large grey-haired woman who writes murder mysteries, eats apples and is saddled with an imaginary detective - the Finn, Sven Hjerson - whom she cannot bear ('Of course he's idiotic, but people like him'). It is a wonderful joke, and Mrs. Oliver is a wonderful creation, but she is not Agatha; although occasionally she does speak in her authentic voice:

    A deal table, her typewriter, black coffee, apples everywhere ... What bliss, what glorious and solitary bliss! What a mistake for an author to emerge from her secret fastness. Authors were shy, unsociable creatures, atoning for their lack of social aptitude by inventing their own companions and conversations.

    '...The truth is I'm not very good with people.'

    'I adore people, don't you?' said Robin happily.

    'No,' said Mrs. Oliver firmly.

    'But you must. Look at all the people in your books.'

    'That's different ...' "

 

From Agatha Christie: An English Mystery by Laura Thompson.

Have you read ... Catherine Gaskin?

    Alice has, but I haven't - yet!

    Catherine Gaskin's is a name I know from years ago as I have a feeling my mother and grandmother read her books. I have never done so but I do now have The Property of a Gentleman waiting on the Kindle, and judging by Alice's post this "poignant, thrilling tale, full of intrigue, mystery and romance" is great fun, so I must get to it soon.

    I have done a little reading around, finding out a bit about this bestselling author, and I learn that although she was born in Ireland she grew up in Australia; despite early ambitions to become a pianist she wrote her first novel when she was only 15; it came out when she was 17 and sold 50,000 copies in its first two months, so her path was set. She moved to London shortly afterwards, married an American, and lived in the US, Ireland and the Isle of Man before returning to Australia in her later years. She died in 2009 at the age of 80. You can read more about her here, and do listen to her Desert Island Discs on which, in conversation with Roy Plomley, she comes across as a very vivacious lady.

    What of the books, though? There are 21 novels, published between 1946 and 1988, and despite the very high profile she had while active, selling 40,000,000 copies, Catherine Gaskin said that she "was resigned to becoming obsolete in her own lifetime". She's been proved right, as far as I can gather, in that "the girl with the golden pen", as she was once called, is now out of print here except for the recently released The Property of a Gentleman.

    A popular success, dubbed "the queen of storytellers"; have you read her?

Bookish oddments

    Some miscellaneous links with which to end the week:

    Last year I quoted Lawrence Norfolk on notebooks; he'll be on Radio 3 next Wednesday (21st. May) talking about that very subject to A.S. Byatt, David Mitchell and others. See also the British Library's Discovering Literature site, an online repository for manuscripts, diaries, notebooks and more.

    Further to Wednesday's Mary Stewart post, I've put links in the comments there to a couple of the newspaper obituaries, but for a more personal view, here's a piece by author Jan Jones on what Mary Stewart means to her.

    We have our own Cornflower Books reading map - and a new post is long, long overdue, I know - but here's Bloomsbury's version for you to 'read your way around the world'.

    Books in boxes - take a look at some of the work of the London Library's conservation studio.

    The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction is one I follow keenly. Here's a neat summing up of this year's shortlist by Richard Lee, founder of the Historical Novel Society.

    Lastly, do listen to 'Pulped Fiction' - an entertaining and wide-ranging look at the waxing and waning of literary reputations by novelist D.J. Taylor.

Joy in the discipline

    "How did Agatha [Christie] develop from the amateur, 'trying things, as one does', into the creator of this dazzlingly accomplished book*? By degrees. By intelligence; by instinct; by confidence; by courage. By trusting her own judgement about what made her writing work. By having a mind uncluttered with received ideas, and an imagination that naturally ran so free she could enjoy the exercise of its restraint. It was a relief, in fact, to trammel it within a genre. Although the structural work of a detective novel was very difficult, there was joy in the discipline. She was ordering her brain like a well-run establishment. Like Lucy Eyelesbarrow in 4.50 from Paddington, she was shining the silver and scrubbing the kitchen table and making a Spanish omelette with the leftover potatoes. She was living in a world where all could be known, all motives uncovered, all ambiguities penetrated. Where mysteries were within her control."

    That's from Laura Thompson's Agatha Christie: An English Mystery which I'm much enjoying, and I was amused by the following passage quoted earlier in the book and relating to a period when Agatha had fewer novels under her belt; here she looks back on the early years:

    "It was by now just beginning to dawn on me that perhaps I might be a writer by profession. I was not sure of it yet. I still had an idea that writing books was only the natural successor to embroidering sofa-cushions."

 

*The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

R.I.P. Mary Stewart

   

    It's a day for sad news, it seems, as I've just heard that Mary Stewart has died.

    I know her books are great favourites with a lot of us and are often taken up when some escapism or comfort reading is needed, and although it's been some years since she published her last novel - and at the age of 97 that's not surprising - I am so sorry to hear that she's gone.

    I have linked to this television interview with her once or twice before, but if you haven't seen it, do give it a look and discover the lovely lady behind the books.

    Most recently I've read Touch Not The Cat and Thornyhold and enjoyed both enormously, and happily I have others still to read including The Crystal Cave, the first in her acclaimed Merlin series, as well as some re-reads first encountered as a teenager. As her books have been so spread out for me I couldn't pick a favourite, but if you have one, please let us know.

Reckless

   

    William Nicholson puts such thought into his novels. He's not 'just' a skilled storyteller with a screenwriter's ear for dialogue, his books are layered with themes, people and episodes which link one to another, although each stands on its own, and those common elements have so much heart behind them - emotional honesty, compassion - that the reader surely can't fail to respond to that openness in the writer himself.

    His latest, Reckless (which as I write is a Kindle bargain) moves from the 1940s to the early '60s, the Cuban missile crisis and the Cold War. Rupert Blundell is strategic adviser to Lord Mountbatten, Chief of Defence Staff, and as his confidant and wise counsel he has a part to play in the high stakes game of diplomatic and military manoeuvrings, but it's his personal life which preoccupies Rupert, and a relationship which develops from unlikely beginnings.

    Elsewhere in London, Rupert's young family friend Pamela Avenell is in search of 'life', and falling in with Stephen Ward's coterie, this beautiful but naive girl ultimately finds herself questioning her ambitions.

    International politics, real people and events provide the setting for a most touching love story, but it is in his fictional characters' personal predicaments and development that William Nicholson excels, and where his romantic idealism proves irresistible.

Books in brief: Hue & Cry

   

     Just to follow on from last Saturday's post, I loved Hue & Cry, the first of Shirley McKay's Hew Cullan mysteries set in 16th. century St. Andrews. It's the perfect mixture of Town and Gown - St. Andrews is the oldest university in Scotland and the third oldest in the English-speaking word - so as we walk among the colleges which sit by the ruined cathedral, above the harbour, and with their feet in the stoor o' the burgh, as it were, so we learn about life for the students and their tutors, and the merchants and tradesmen they live among.

    There's a compelling mix of domestic and social detail, legal matters and all things medicinal, not to mention the mores and philosophical thinking of the time, and within this context is the ingeniously plotted murder mystery in which our sympathetic young lawyer hero Hew plays detective and advocate. The author's extensive knowledge of the period and gift for language colour the book beautifully, and in the central character we're given a man of intellect and compassion whose personal story alone should be worth following. I'm greatly looking forward to reading the other books in the series.

Secrecy, enchantment, mystery...

  

    I greatly enjoyed Adèle's post today on her recent stay at Agatha Christie's house Greenway, and it prompted me to look up Laura Thompson's biography, Agatha Christie: An English Mystery, to see what she had to say about it; the passage is worth quoting:

     "Greenway House, that magical white box set above the gleaming River Dart; Greenway with its wild romantic gardens; Greenway, rooted in its Devon history and yet, with its ghostly pallor, looking as if it might at any moment vanish into the air. 'I sat on the seat overlooking the house on the river,' wrote Agatha to [her husband] Max in 1942. 'It looked very white and lovely - remote and aloof as always - I get a kind of pang over its beauty ... "Too dear for our possessing" but what excitement to possess it! I thought tonight, sitting there - it is the loveliest place in the world - it quite took my breath away.'

    The house she had dreamed into life [in her childhood home] - the river at the end of the garden, the vast unknown rooms that opened out from familiar doors - was now a reality. Agatha bought Greenway in 1938 for six thousand pounds: an unbelievable sum, it would seem, equivalent to not much over £200,000 in today's values, but not everybody wanted to take on such a property and its thirty-three acres. (...) The main rooms opened out from a central hall: library, dining room and sitting room, which itself led to a drawing room with long, white windows, giving on to a small secret lawn. (...) Everything was high, deep, rightful. Everywhere was secrecy, enchantment, mystery."

    Doesn't that last sentence make you want to find out more? Time for me to read the book, I think.

Monday miscellany

    - Books on the wish list: reviews from Catherine and Lyn have made my list a little longer. Has anyone else read Longbourn? I've heard nothing but good things of it.

    - Bookplates: take your love of reading to the table!

    - Books to look forward to: the publication date for Anne Tyler's next novel A Spool of Blue Thread was announced recently; the book won't be out until spring next year, but while we wait for it you may like to listen to this interview in which she talks a little about it and her work in general.

    - 'Best' books: here's a list of the 20 best crime novels of all time. I've read only 6, I think - Tey, Christie, Sayers, Vine, James, and the Kate Summerscale which isn't a novel at all!

Where's your reading taking you?

      This coming week sees the publication of Friend & Foe, the fourth book in Shirley McKay's series of mysteries featuring young lawyer Hew Cullan, set in St. Andrews during the reign of James VI. The arrival of that book reminded me that despite having had them on the shelves for ages I've still to read the earlier ones, so at long last I've made a start.

 

Click to enlarge

     Hue & Cry is the first one, and it begins in St. Andrews - a place I'm very happy to visit either in real life or on the page - in 1579. Hew has returned to Scotland from studying in Paris, to find that his friend, university regent Nicholas Colp, is accused of murdering a boy who was a private pupil of his. Hew investigates what appears to be an open and shut case, and in so doing he uncovers "a dark tale of duplicity and passion amidst a world of religious piety and the chilling austerity of university life."

    The book has been described as "not only a gripping mystery that holds the reader to the very last page, but also a marvellous portrait of St. Andrews in the sixteenth century," so I'm greatly looking forward to getting deeper into it, and to seeing the present day town through fresh eyes when next I'm there.

    Where's your reading taking you this weekend? The past, the present, the future? Close to home or far away?

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    On an unrelated note, I was in a charity bookshop today and I happened to find a copy of Told by Eileen, a children's novel written by my great-grandmother's cousin Alice Massie. I didn't buy it as I already have one, but that's the first of Alice's books I've come across 'in the wild', and I was very pleased to find it. I'll continue to look out for her work.

Book of the day - An Appetite for Violets

    "In the dark heart of 18th. century England: a mistress, a maid, a mystery ..."

    Martine Bailey's An Appetite for Violets will be published later this month and it sounds like one to look out for:

    "Irrepressible Biddy Leigh, under-cook at the foreboding Mawton Hall, wants only to marry her childhood sweetheart and set up her own tavern. But when her elderly master marries the young Lady Carinna, Biddy is unwittingly swept up in a world of scheming, secrets and lies.

    Forced to accompany her new mistress to Italy, Biddy takes with her an old household book of recipes, The Cook's Jewel, in which she records her observations. When she finds herself embroiled in a murderous conspiracy, Biddy realises that the secrets she holds could be the key to her survival - or her downfall ..."

    The novel is billed as "an utterly compelling story of food, obsession and mystery, introducing a brilliant new voice in historical fiction, " and Maria McCann, author of As Meat Loves Salt and The Wilding (on which there's a post here) says of it, "I adored this novel: a delicious addictive mix of confectionery, skulduggery and crime, sprinkled with dark secrets and sauced with piquant comedy."

More books in the home!

    Following on from Sunday's post, this Jessie Willcox Smith illustration redresses the balance!

On when to read a book

    "For books, timing is everything. The moment you first encounter a particular book is the right time to read it. To avoid missing that moment, I recommend that you keep your collection small."

    Marie Kondo, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying.

    The chapter on the place books have in our homes and in our lives provides advice and food for thought: for example, regarding unread books, " 'sometime' means never", Marie Kondo says; sorting your books with a view to disposing of some requires you to move all of them from shelves to floor and then pick up each in turn and gauge your reaction to it as you handle it (she explains why this method works); she suggests keeping a small collection which she calls 'the personal Book Hall of Fame', and any book which gives only "moderate pleasure" should forfeit its place on the shelf; and she reports from personal experience that having fewer books "increases the impact" of what one reads.

Cornflower Book Group - In this House of Brede

  

    Rumer Godden spent five years writing In this House of Brede and she said they were "among the richest and most rewarding" of her life. Her close and very personal contact with the Benedictine community at Stanbrook Abbey meant that she gained access to many of the nuns on her regular visits, and was given permission to observe all services and ceremonies. Her research into Benedictine history, tradition, liturgy and music was detailed and extensive, and the book is the richer for it.

    When asked why she chose the religious life as the subject for a novel, she recalled, "My writing self, which is the more truthful, answered: Because nuns are dramatic. Theirs is the greatest love story in the world." It is a dramatic and utterly gripping story she has told, one which sheds so much light on a way of life about which we perhaps know a little, or have certain preconceptions, and which illuminates with great empathy, not to mention the novelist's skill.

    As a story, I felt it was at its most successful when within the abbey walls, the narrative strands which took us into the outside world seemed, in comparison, rather less assured and more contrived on occasions, but in its depiction of a life underpinned by simplicity, humility, clarity, selflessness and common purpose it was masterly.

    What did you think of it?

Books in brief: The Professor of Poetry

   

    Grace McCleen's The Professor of Poetry is such an intense, complex, many-layered novel - although at 300 pages it's a highly concentrated one - that I could spend long enough trying to explore its depths here. Instead, I'll just point you towards the preview and then say that I loved it.

    It reminded me a little of Amy Sackville's Orkney in that both concern professors of literature and relationships between older academics and their former students, and both are taut and tense books, immersive for the reader, and presumably even more all-consuming for their writers, but while Orkney is a melody played on a single string, The Professor of Poetry, while staying true to its chosen 'key' throughout, has greater range and richness.

    It uses poetry and literary theory to fascinating effect; its setting is surely Oxford, unnamed but distilled, essential, and potent; its central characters are prickly, distant and hard to warm to; but in all its abstract, intricate theorising, its playing on musicality, time, memory and dreams, its fairytale-like motifs, stresses and exaggerations, and despite its flaws (for it has them), I was quite swept up in it. It won't appeal to all, but for those whose ear is attuned to its particular, and at times peculiar, literary frequency, it is a highly absorbing read.

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    It appears that following Typepad's technical problems over the last few days, comments are still not functioning, but I hope this will be corrected soon.

Later: comments are now back.

All things Shakespearean

    Today is the 450th. anniversary of the birth of William Shakespeare and we shall not let it pass unmarked.

    The Folio Society have issued a limited edition of the poems, sonnets and plays, printed by letterpress and bound by hand. The complete set will cost you £11,555, but if that's beyond the budget, you can read all about it here, and watch these videos of the craftsmen and women involved in the project at work:

                                                       ~~~~~

    

    The Treasures of William Shakespeare by Catherine M.S. Alexander has been produced in association with the Royal Shakespeare Company. It is large and lavishly illustrated, and begins by setting the Elizabethan scene into which Shakespeare was born; it follows him to London, looks at his contemporaries, the world of the court and the theatre, and then moves on to his works themselves, examining the "infinite variety" with which the plays have been adapted for stage and screen. 

    The book includes 20 removable facsimile documents such as extracts from the First Folio of 1623, and from the prompt book for a 1965 production of Twelfth Night directed by Sir John Gielgud; Shakespeare's marriage bond and will, and the entry of his burial in the parish register; and in addition there is a 53-minute CD of classic excerpts from the plays.

                                                ~~~~~

        The play's the thing, and Shakespeare's Globe are going to take one of the plays right around the world over the next two years, performing Hamlet in all 187 countries. Their Globe to Globe Hamlet project is looking for funding via Kickstarter, so click here to watch the video about their plans and back them if you will, and here for more information including tour dates and venues.

The skybrary

    1400 square feet of bespoke bookshelves hand-carved to look like vines, a whimsical miniature desk with secret compartments, a 14' table made from an acacia tree ... it's Elizabeth Gilbert's 'skybrary', her library in the sky full of "magical mysteries and wonderment", and along with the rest of her house it's for sale.

    The skybrary is where she wrote her wonderfully warm, witty and engaging historical novel The Signature of All Things, and I wonder how she can bear to leave it! Watch the whole video if you have time, but to go straight to that unique room, skip to the 6.50 mark.

Tree books

    As part of the Sylva exhibition currently on here at the Royal Botanic Garden, certain favourite tree books are on display, all chosen by garden staff, conservationists and others.

We were pleased to see among them Brendon Chase by 'BB', beloved by Mr. C., Jean Giono's The Man Who Planted Trees (post on it here),

and Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees by Roger Deakin,

and we loved the jacket design for The Native Pinewoods Of Scotland.

    Just for the fun of it, do you have a 'tree book'  - in the loosest sense, and fiction or non-fiction - which you'd like to mention? I'll start with Betsy Lerner's The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers which Madeline Miller recommended and from which I've quoted here; and one to look out for in due course: Tracy Chevalier's next novel will feature fruit trees (find out more here).