Cornflower Books

A book, a winner and a question

    Just released as an e-book, A Lifetime Burning by Linda Gillard. I have yet to read this novel but I happen to know that it is Linda's own favourite and the one she rates as her best; it's also her only venture into literary fiction so far, and it has the distinction of having nothing but 5-star reviews on Amazon, 23* of them at that!

    "A complex family drama spanning the twentieth century," "A Bouquet of Barbed Wire meets The Forsyte Saga"; here's the synopsis:

"Flora Dunbar is dead. But it isn’t over. The spectre at Flora’s funeral is Flora herself, unobserved by her grieving family and the four men who loved her.

Looking back over a turbulent lifetime, Flora recalls an eccentric childhood lived in the shadow of her musical twin, Rory; early marriage to Hugh, a handsome clergyman twice her age; motherhood, which brought her Theo, the son she couldn’t love; middle age, when she finally found brief happiness in a scandalous affair with her nephew, Colin..."

    If that has whetted your appetite, the Kindle version of the book is available for a mere £0.88.

                                                   ~~~~~

    Many thanks to everyone who entered the Cornflower Books birthday draw. Having numbered all the comments as they came in, I've used a random number generator to draw a winner, and that is Katie (fourth comment from the top), so a favourite book of mine will be on its way to her soon. Stay tuned, though, because I'll have more books to give away next week.

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    Click here and scroll down to 'A literary mystery of Jamesian subtlety', and you can read about Rupert Christiansen's star-studded reading group (devoted to the work of Henry James). As you'll see, the group has decided to dis-band, despite - or because of? - the fact that they meet only quarterly, and Christiansen surmises that that's because they've lost discipline: "people turned up without having read the texts, or cancelled at the last minute or arrived late and left early [...]".

    The only book group I've ever been part of is our own, but I wondered how typical the laxness RC describes is in physical groups generally - if you are or have been a member of a group, enlighten us please!

 

*Edited to add: now 26!

Friday miscellany

     The useful art of skipping:

Somerset Maugham was all for skipping parts of books because "a sensible person does not read a novel as a task. He reads it as a diversion". Robert McCrum has been pondering this and feels attitudes - and writing - have changed since Maugham's day. Click on that link to read more (without missing bits, of course) and see the contemporary novels in which he feels skipping is justified - of the three, I've read only the Byatt and I didn't skip at all, but then I'd have to be hard-pressed not to read every word of a book. How about you? And do you see novels as task or diversions?

                                            ~~~~~

    Books to the fore:

One of my best books of last year (the full list is here) was Half of the Human Race by Anthony Quinn (apparently out in paperback now), and I'm pleased to see it has been chosen as one of the TV Book Club's latest 'Best Reads'. I have three other books on that list waiting to be read, but I also have my eye on The Somnambulist by Essie Fox and Girl Reading by Katie Ward - have you read them?

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    Library augmentation:

If, like me, you could always do with another book, and you haven't already entered the draw to win one, please do have a go.

Here's where I get it from

     

    "A real escapist treat of a book" - Cornflower.

    "I couldn't put it down!" - Cornflower's mum.

    I pass on to my mum a lot of the books I've enjoyed as she's an avid reader, and I can usually judge pretty well what will be to her taste. Recently I gave her The Kashmir Shawl by Rosie Thomas (post on it here), and she handed it back to me today with the above comment. She loved it and she says it made her want to follow the main characters' trail to India and Kashmir and see Srinagar for herself.

    I'm always glad when something I've liked gets Mum's seal of approval because apart from the fact that it's good when a book has that cross-generational appeal, she has a keen critical eye - and she's the one who sparked my passion for books.

    What drew you to books in the first place? Was it being read to by a parent or grandparent? A teacher who inspired you? A single book, perhaps, that so appealed that a whole world then opened up for you?

Favourite things

 

   I've got plenty of books to talk about, but the day has run away with me, it's late, and I haven't the energy for careful appraisals tonight; however, I'm so enjoying reading about everyone's favourite things on the birthday post today that I thought we might adopt the idea over here.

    Just for fun, have a think about five* favourite book-related things: they could be books themselves, a favourite place or even a particular chair in which to read, what you most like to have to hand while reading, e.g. a cup of tea, glass of wine, and so on, the ambience, for example background music or the sounds of nature, your all time favourite author(s), maybe your favourite film adaptation of a book. Any or all of these, or something else entirely - the idea is to conjure up your favourite reading-related scene and tell us a bit about it, if you wouldn't mind.

*Edited to add: re. Carole's comment, you may have as many as you like!

The history girls

   

    In an article in the press today novelist Sarah Gristwood, author of The Girl in the Mirror, writes that historical fiction has become "a highly lucrative publishing phenomenon" [D.J. Taylor made a similar point about his books of that genre substantially outselling his contemporary fiction when I talked to him earlier in the year]. Female buyers seem to account for most of the sales, and according to Sarah Gristwood the attraction of books of this type is that they are "respectable, almost intellectually improving [...] wonderfully exotic and simultaneously comfortingly predictable"; she terms them "guilty pleasures".

    I read historical fiction, and although I haven't thought much about why it appeals to me, I suspect one reason may be to do with the detail - typically there's lots of 'stuff' in these books for the mind's eye to look at and for the imagination to conjure with in the same way that a historic house or stately home is a rich source of interest and perhaps inspiration, its scale and lavishness often a contrast to that of our own more pared-down modern lives.

    I'm interested in sounding out the Cornflower readership on this subject, so if you have a moment, would you be so good as to leave a comment here telling us whether you're a reader of historical fiction or not, and if you are, roughly what proportion of your reading it makes up? You may also care to indicate - if it's not obvious from your name - whether you're male or female! Thankyou.

All for one, or one for all?

    Here's a question for you: if, all of a sudden, money were no object (and space- and time-constraints weren't an issue, either), would you buy masses of books all in one go, i.e. everything you have on your wishlist or had earmarked to read some day, or all that took your fancy in the bookshop, or would you, despite this new freedom to acquire whatever your heart desired, limit yourself to just one or two books for now, with the intention to read them and only then go back for more?

    I'm interested to hear your responses because, as with a lot of these reading habits topics, they say so much about us. Would we, for instance, see this windfall (and I'm assuming now that we are free to spend it on 'frivolous' things) as the chance to have the library of our dreams - and if so, what might it contain? There is the view that just owning books is a pleasure in itself, seeing them there within reach, to pick up when the mood takes us; having them is the thing and reading them is a bonus. On the other hand, would acquiring a great many books at once mean that by the time we got around to reading most of them, the mood and the moment had passed and somehow they no longer appealed, as, fickle creatures that we are, we had moved on to the next new interest or taste?

    I put this question to Mr. C. and he said (a) he would splurge and buy all that he wanted in one go, but also (b) he would have an amanuensis come in first of all to catalogue the existing collection to see exactly where the gaps were.

    What would you do?  

Mind where you sit

    Reading The Miracle Of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh with its stress on doing things for their own sake and being present in the moment (I oversimplify, of course) has made me consider my reading habits, and specifically where I read and how that situation affects my concentration. I know I do too much at my desk, partly because I'm usually trying to accomplish several things at once anyway, and secondly because I often want to look up pertinent points as I read, so I have the computer on. Of course, this means I'm easily distracted as emails come in or I allow myself to get sidetracked by some other work, and I realise I'd benefit by being disciplined and getting out of harm's way, so today I've moved a couple of chairs and put an extremely comfy one in this spot, and the plan is to go and sit in it and do my reading there - radical, eh?

    Mindful of Mortimer Adler's caution, I'm after quality rather than quantity, that's to say my change of location is meant to help me read more attentively, rather than just read more. I hope it works.

Pet peeves

    I was interested to read Thomas's recent post about annoying aspects of a novel. As you'll see if you pop over there, some of the irritations for Thomas were errors of fact or degree, and many were things which proper research could have corrected, so I wondered how forgiving, as readers, you tend to be: do factual errors bother you, are you put off by certain stylistic devices, and so on? These annoyances can act like potholes in what should be a smooth road surface - uncomfortable and inconvenient at best, enough to through you quite off course (and make you put down the book) at worst.

    A lot of us don't care for present tense narratives (and despite endless commentary to this effect, writers don't seem to have got the message that we find them off-putting, and the book has to work all the harder to win us over), and a particular peeve of mine is when a middle-aged character who ought to have some sense behaves immaturely in order to establish their 'cool' credentials. As to facts, yes, I like things to be accurate where it's reasonable to expect it, and sloppy writing doesn't go down well with me, either. How about you?

No alarms and no surprises

    What do you read, I wonder, when what you want from a book is "no alarms and no surprises"? What constitutes - as the song says - "the quiet life", in reading terms? I don't necessarily mean comfort reads, though they probably fall into this wider category of the nicely predictable, the safe, the familiar, the formulaic, even.

    This could simply be a favourite re-read, or it might be a writer (or a genre) you can trust to deliver what you expect, no less and no more - they won't venture into unknown territory or test the reader's nerve or tolerance, instead they'll give you a smooth ride. Thrills and spills are all very well, but what book might you choose when what you want is to journey at a sedate pace, your destination certain, satisfaction guaranteed?   

A letter to the author

   

    Have you ever written to an author - or in these days of instant communication, emailed one about their work, and if so, did you get a reply?

     Over at The Blue Cabin Blog, Mike's post today about the correspondence between Mark Twain and the twelve-year-old D.W. Bowser brought the question to mind, and I remembered a young friend of ours who, in connection with a school project, wrote to her near neighbour Maeve Binchy, asking various questions about her books and writing methods. Melissa was thrilled to get a lovely personal letter in return.

    With writers nowadays so often having a presence on Twitter or Facebook, a website or blog, they are much more accessible, at least in principle, so maybe you've left a comment for them or exchanged tweets?

     Ages ago I sent two letters, one (via his publisher) to Leif Enger, because I loved Peace Like a River - he didn't reply, but I don't hold it against him as his book was a huge bestseller at the time and he was much in demand; the other was to Elizabeth Jane Howard as I'd enjoyed many of her novels and most recently then her memoir Slipstream - she sent a charming handwritten note in response.

    If any of the authors who pop in here are reading this I'd love to know whether you get fan mail or questions from readers in the old-fashioned way, or is it all done electronically, and whatever the method, is it ever burdensome or unduly intrusive?

Subject matters

 

     Another 'reading habits' question for you today: are there any subjects which would tend to draw you to a book?

    I don't mean genre here, rather what the book's about - what it features. So, for example, if a blurb or a review tells you a novel has a particular setting - exotic, domestic, an English village, a Tuscan villa, etc., or a character with a certain job - a writer, an artist, a musician or something more unusual, or that it focuses on a house or the creation or restoration of a garden, say, would that alone (quite apart from who the writer is or how starry the reviews may be) tend to make you pick it up?

    The question is not as daft as it may sound, as subject matter, when translated to title or cover design, can be the very thing which gets the potential reader's interest. For instance, you might be drawn to 'gates into a garden' books like this one or this, or something with a bit of balustrade! Of course our reading tastes and interests often range widely, but if you can put them in a nutshell and say something like "I'll always go for a country house in 1930s England" or "...a storm-lashed beach in nineteenth century Cornwall where a tortured composer walks by night", I'd love to hear about it.

(The picture is from the cover of this book, and those gates combined with: "As darkness settles on a forgotten castle at the foot of the Carpathian mountains ..." made me buy it!).

Finishing line

   A little reading habits question for you today:

do you like to finish any book(s) you're currently reading in time for the year's end so that you can start a new book on January the 1st., or does that tidying up of loose ends not matter at all? (I'm firmly in the 'finish and start afresh' camp so I'd better get a move on).

De-acquisition

 

     Since we're talking about living with books, and by extension parting with them to make space for others, how about a few de-acquisition tips?

     Dark Puss is contemplating a cull, and while the following is a bit obvious, it may be worth offering at least as a general starting point for anyone looking to free up space and make their book collection more relevant to their needs today.

You might begin with -

Books you've out-grown: that Miriam Stoppard babycare manual is redundant now that your children are hulking teenagers, or the cookery books whose complicated recipes do not suit your present busy lifestyle.

Travel guides: you may visit Paris again sometime soon, but better to have an up-to-date guidebook than one that's a few years old.

'Annuals': books such as The Good Food Guide go out of date quickly, too, and may not justify their shelf space.

Previous interests or reading 'fads': a passion for drying flowers or collecting model cars may have been replaced by a new hobby; likewise the craze for sci-fi novels or bodice-rippers may be a thing of your past. Keep the best of the bunch if you have the space, otherwise move on to the next thing.

The rest -

This is where things can get difficult. You may know straightaway, by head or heart, whether a particular book should be kept or chucked, but if you find yourself swithering, then in my experience decisions can be easier if you imagine they have already been made by someone else: your reaction to that hypothetical fait accompli will tell you how you really feel about it. So for example, pretend a third party has said "No, you may not keep book X", or "Stay the hand! You must forever house book Y"; you'll soon know what to do!

Any more?

(The book pictured - for those of us who love to look at rooms of all kinds filled with books - is Leslie Geddes-Brown's Books Do Furnish a Room).

Only two or three, sir

"... Not more than five or six, sir—or—or a dozen at the most, sir."

     I could be like Billy Bunter and his biscuits and try to claim that apart from the piles of books looking reproachfully at me while they wait to be read, I have a negligible few on my wishlist with a view to future acquisition; the current tally there is actually 'four'. Four hundred, that is. And eighty seven. In mitigation, some of that number are destined for other people as gifts, and the remainder fall into all sorts of categories - cooking, knitting and the rest - so they are not all 'reading books', but ... no, I'm not even convincing myself! I'm incorrigible, I suspect, though I know I'm not alone in this, and if you are similarly possessed/obsessed you might care to own up in solidarity.

    Books gradually trickle down here, making their way slowly from the wishlist to the Cornflower shelves, but on the subject of actual book-buying - rather than planning to buy - this survey claims that only 57% of Britons bought one or more books in the year in question, and in the US the figure was 50% - though that's not to say that many others didn't borrow from libraries, or read from their already extensive collections (see above).

    To go back to my covetous/acquisitive tendency, maybe this is largely a female trait, as book-buying in both countries is dominated by women, apparently, and this survey for 2007 shows the significance of the romantic novel to the market as a whole, with romance readers (who are mostly women) buying and borrowing more than consumers of adult fiction in general. Love and the ladies make the book world go round, it seems!

Book groups: hits and misses, pros and cons

     I run an online book group through this website, I write about reading groups occasionally, and have been on the radio to talk about them and yet I've never been a member of a real life, face-to-face group, but as I know a lot of you are or have been, I wanted to pick your brains on them. Don't feel you have to answer any or all of the questions, your wider thoughts and impressions are welcome, but any insights or anecdotes you're willing to give us will be of interest, whether we're group members or not.

How often do you meet?

How are the books chosen, and do you ever resort to sources of 'good books for groups' such as websites, reading guides?

Do you read non-fiction as well as fiction; do you read poetry, short stories or plays as well as novels?

Do you tend to read recently published books or range widely over works from all periods?

Has everyone read the book by discussion day? Does everyone get a fair chance to speak, or do some members dominate at the expense of the quieter ones?

Do you find you stick to talking about the book when you meet, or do you quickly move on to general chat?

Do you find you get more out of a book when you're reading it for the group, or does having to talk about it make the reading seem a bit more like 'work/school'.

Has any book been a particular hit with the group or given rise to an especially stimulating discussion? Likewise, have you had any failures - books about which there was just not much to be said?

Do blogs sell books?

    I've heard it said by people who supposedly speak with authority that blogs don't sell books. Now, I know that even the most popular book blogs won't have a readership to rival that of the newspaper book pages, but even so, I'll wager that we have greater influence among our own, smaller readership than do the reviews in the press - that is, you may be more likely to listen to the views of Blogger A or B, whose tastes are similar to yours and who feels more like a friend recommending a book than those of the (perhaps anonymous or less familiar) reviewer in the paper. That point has topical relevance, too, in that tonight sees the announcement of the 2010 Man Booker Prize winner, and a huge upsurge in sales for that book, whatever it is, is guaranteed, but some readers who instinctively shy away from Booker books and the like may yet be drawn to them by a blogger's having paved the way, as it were - by a post along the lines of "I enjoyed it, so you may, too."

    I am still a regular buyer of books, despite being sent so many by publishers, and while I read the newspaper book pages, most of the books I end up getting are those I've read about on blogs. Often the acquisition is months after I've first seen the post in question, but I keep a note of titles I want and will either get them myself, as and when, or put them on my Christmas and birthday lists as suggestions for the family when they ask me what I'd like. No-one would be able to trace the eventual purchase of Book X back to a review by Blogger Y, but that is where the sale arose. Furthermore, when I in turn come to talk about the book here, others will read it, and that viral effect shouldn't be underestimated.

    To go back to publishers for a moment, I'd love to know something about their policies on sending out review copies, but judging from the multitude I am offered and the number of individual houses or publicists within the big houses who are regularly in touch with me, they must see the blogs as a worthwhile means of spreading the word about their books.

    So, let's have an informal poll:

1. Have you ever bought a book or borrowed one from the library (I'm including borrowings as library requests must have some trickle-down effect on sales) as a result of reading about it on a blog or blogs?

2. If you blog about books yourself, have any of your readers ever come back to you to tell you that they've read a certain book because of your post on it, or have you been aware of such a purchase through affiliate links?

    My answers to these questions are "yes" and "yes", but I'd love to know yours if you have a moment to spare.

Resolutions revisited

    I may be being a bit mischievous here, reminding you of this, but as we are into the last quarter of the year I wondered how everyone was getting on with their reading plans and resolutions - remember this post? A fair few of you commented there telling us what you hoped to read over the coming months, so how have you got on? 

Total immersion

 

 

     Mr. C. read Troubles from cover to cover while on the train to and from London yesterday - and so I've told him he can write Saturday's post on it as I haven't finished it yet!

     My reading of it has been in short sharp bursts, perhaps 10, sometimes up to 70 pages at a time, but I've had to put it down to do other things and - crucially - put it aside to read other books. I'll go back to it today but I wonder whether taking it in in that rather drip-fed way will mean I have absorbed less of the book than I otherwise might so that its effect is diluted, while Mr. C., with his total immersion and saturation, will be far better prepared for the discussion.

    What do you find is your best way of getting the most out of a book: little and often, or 'all in one go', if life permits, or is it far more variable than that, depending on the genre, the particular book, your mood, and so on?

The thief of reading time

 

     We all know the saying "procrastination is the thief of time (...year after year it steals till all are fled, And to the mercies of a moment leaves The vast concerns of an eternal scene", Edward Young, 1683-1765), but who or what is the thief of our reading time? Probably not procrastination  - though I've been known to swither and dither over what to read next - but as many of us often refer to the number of books we'd like to read and how little time there seems to be for them, this may be something to think about.

    I'm not trying to be prescriptive here, everyone should read at their own pace whether that means a book a day or one a month, and always allowing for a fitting balance with other activities and commitments - reading is not everything!

    But what really steals your reading time? I acknowledge that if I switch off the computer (radical move) I am more productive in all ways than when I leave it on and pop back to 'just check' email, friends' posts, and so on; others find it's the television that ensnares them for more hours than they might like. We all need relaxation and time spent fairly mindlessly, pottering, daydreaming, browsing can provide a healthy break, but frittering is what I'm talking about here, squandering those precious minutes which might have been spent with a book.

   I shall leave you with that thought while I press the shut down button ...

Later: in this article about The Mainstreet Trading Company (which I visited recently), Rosamund de la Hey was asked "What single thing would most help [in running the bookshop]?"; her answer, "More time to read"!

Books worth staying up for

   

     After my re-read of To Kill a Mockingbird I gave the book to Mr. C as he had never read it. Once he'd begun he was hooked, and he stayed up until one o'clock this morning to finish it. He says "it's an amazing book", and I hope he'll give us a fuller comment later, but of course I agree with him.

    Books so good they are worth staying up for, books so gripping you eschew sleep - what have you read that made you put life on hold?