Cornflower Books

New arrivals

  Various new arrivals are due a mention here before they settle into their temporary accommodation which is one or other of the TBR piles. Just this morning, in has come The Cunning Man by Robertson Davies. I'm already well on with his Fifth Business and mightily impressed by it, so I'm looking forward to reading this one (details here).
     Neil Gaiman was a big hit with me last year with his terrific The Graveyard Book, and now I've got his famous Coraline, "a tale of wonder, dark secrets and bravery" about a young girl who ventures through a mysterious doorway to discover a house just like her own...
     Back to Canada for the next book, Joseph Boyden's acclaimed Through Black Spruce. Isabel Allende says of this, "a beautifully written and haunting story of survival and innocence shattered, of friendship, death, redemption and love of the land... Please, please don't miss it!" Indeed, Isabel, I shall not!
     Then two books which are, well, not quite 'me', I feel, but perhaps I'll be surprised. Clive Cussler is a famous name, though not one seen on these pages before, but I have his Corsair and The Navigator for when next I crave action and adventure!

Congratulations to...

....Vanessa and Malcolm and their staff at The Children's Bookshop here in Edinburgh for being shortlisted for the Scottish section of the Independent Bookshop of the Year Award. You can read more about it on The Fidra Blog, but well done them, and fingers crossed for the next stage.

Escapade

    

    I asked for escapist literature and I got in spades with this delightful novel! Having read only one other Margery Allingham - the superb, darkly atmospheric The Tiger in the Smoke - I was surprised at the marked change of tone in this (earlier) book. Sweet Danger is a romp, often comic, wonderfully exuberant and over the top, a mixture of P.G. Wodehouse, the Famous Five and a less worldly James Bond!

    The plot revolves around a tiny Balkan state called Averna which has become of major political significance. Its rightful owners are the Fitton family, now living in reduced circumstances in a ramshackle mill in deepest Suffolk, and Campion, Lugg and co. weigh in to establish the family's title in the face of extreme danger from a criminal financier and his ugly cohorts. Add to that a mad doctor whose modus operandi would fall far short of modern clinical guidelines - it doesn't actually contain the line "throw the switch, Igor, the storm is at its height!", but it certainly could, so dramatic is its climax -, a romance, beautifully underplayed, plenty of action and the discovery of long-hidden treasure, and you have a book of charm, fun and complete entertainment.
    As you can tell, I loved it and shall move on to more of the remarkable Margery Allingham as soon as I can.

Cornflower Book Group 2009 : Volume 4

    I was very pleased to read the comments by Lisa and Barbara on yesterday's post as, coincidentally, they embodied considerable support for the writer whose book I had already chosen for our next CBG read. Again, this is someone completely new to me, but a recent conversation with Lindsay about Robertson Davies (and his post about another of this Canadian author's books) made me think that here was someone worth trying.
    I've gone for Fifth Business (the first volume of The Deptford Trilogy) which one critic described, "as masterfully executed as anything in the history of the novel". The blurb goes on: "[it] might be described simply as the life of a schoolteacher named Dunstan Ramsay. But such a description would not even suggest the dark currents of love, ambition, vengeance, and death that flow through this powerful work, cast in the form of Ramsay's memoirs. ... [It is] the story of a rational man who discovers that the marvellous is only another aspect of the real". Intriguing!
    The New York Times says of it, "[An] enigmatic novel, elegantly written and driven by irresistible narrative force".
     In the light of all the above, I hope this will be a good discovery for many of us, and perhaps a welcome re-read for some. The book appears to be easily available, both in libraries and shops, and for those of us with lots of other reading to do, it's not too long!
     I'll set the date for our discussion of it for five weeks hence, Saturday 11th. April - if that's awkward for people, being Easter weekend, we could postpone it, but meanwhile I hope a good few of us will give this a try, and if you haven't joined us before but would like to do so now, you'd be very welcome.

I'm reading ...

 

 

   

     It's World Book Day today so what better than another round up of what we're all reading (and Dovegrey says it's alright to read all day, so that's a relief - not so sure about her 'World Washing the Floor Day' though....). I have one or two things on hold, but a couple of books are very much 'live' just now, and they are J.L. Carr's A Month in the Country for our Book Group discussion next week and Margery Allingham's Sweet Danger which I chose from all the excellent suggestions for escapist reading you gave me. There are others you mentioned which I very much want to take up, but that was the book to hand so that's what I'm reading and it is pure escapism and wonderfully enjoyable - more on it when I've finished.
    Not content with these and the enormous TBR pile ( more from there to talk about soon) I have just ordered another book because of a review, and must now choose what the Book Group will read next - always a tricky decision.
    That's my little lot - what are you reading?

   

Links

     A few miscellaneous links worth following, all of them to do with people or books already mentioned on these pages:

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie has been one of my favourite books so far this year (I wrote about it here). You can read an interview with its author Alan Bradley on Abebooks - the bit about his experience at school is so sad!

Mapp & Lucia fans who can get to Oxford on 1st. April will want to hear Guy Fraser-Sampson talk about his book Major Benjy (details of the Oxford Literary Festival event are here).

Lastly, something a bit different. My multi-talented friend Sarah Salway - she is a novelist, poet, short story writer, creative writing tutor, and many more things besides - has been posting a series of fifty word stories on her blog. There's one on today's post, but scroll down and you can read others, all of them so clever. I particularly like Beekeeping!

Reading other people's letters

     With a number of letters of my own to write, I've been neatly avoiding doing them by reading other people's. No particular aim in mind, just a browse and a glimpse of other lives through snatches of their written conversations. But letters can be so personal, so intimate, that reading them even long after the deaths of writer and recipient can seem intrusive and inappropriate. Such sensibilities notwithstanding, these examples in their different ways make touching reading.
First I picked up a book I've yet to read: There are No Letters Like Yours: The Correspondence of Isabelle de Charriere and Constant d'Hermenches is an account of an eighteenth century amitie amoureuse. Here is what the older, married Constant says to his young Isabelle who, unlike anyone else of his acquaintance, has presumed to try to curb his excesses and apply a slight corrective hand - "I bless Heaven, perhaps for the first time in my life, with an entire and complete sincerity. It has made me a gift that I had always hoped for, that seemed my due, and that for the last several years I had despaired of obtaining..... What radiance your friendship and your penetrating mind have brought to my existence! Ah! if only this fortune had befallen me earlier, what might I not be today!"

The Letters of Edwin Lutyens to his Wife, Lady Emily includes this from Lutyens writing in 1913: "I have a vasty insight into things, somehow, but no authority, no education. I take paragraphs at a run. I hear things, see things, unconsciously almost, and store them and they turn up afterwards - from whence I know not. I believe I am more astral than you, but I have one huge anchor in this plane and that is you, incarnate, darling. You are more logical than I am, more determinate, consciously aspiring to spiritual things and having pleasure in the statement of them, so we are severally the two faces of a medal - the same medal."
His words are semi-prophetic when you read on and discover that a year later his wife informed him - by letter - of the cessation of the physical side of their relationship. And to add insult to injury, she then had him build her a meditation room complete with a picture rail - a feature he particularly detested!

Written over the course of a long marriage, Speaking for Themselves: The Personal Letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill are full of affection, and here in 1958, after fifty years together, is Winston writing from France: "My darling one, All is peace and quiet here....I am passing the morning in bed - reading a book about ancient Greece which is rather good. Tomorrow I shall try to paint... But I am doubtful, inert and lazy. I wonder what you will be doing and when you will set off for Chartwell. Would you give some food to the fish? They are very appreciative. And the black swans.... You have all my fondest love my dearest. The closing days or years of life are grey and dull, but I am lucky to have you at my side. I send you my best love and many kisses. Always your devoted W".

Pride and prejudice

   

     Lindsay's post on John Updike's Rabbit, Run got me thinking about (irrational?) reactions to books we haven't read. I've never read Updike, though two members of my family rate the Rabbit books highly, but despite their views and Lindsay's piece, I'd be hard put to it to pick up that book. Why? Nothing to do with the quality of the writing, of course, as I know the author's reputation, but the subject matter and the main character strike me as decidedly seedy - that's about the best term I can come up with to describe the impression I have, one based on odd fragments of information gleaned here and there but all contributing to preconceptions and negative prejudice. I don't much want to read anything seedy and sordid, and the Rabbit bloke sounds dire (to me), so in the absence of an obligation to read it I would pass it by. My loss, perhaps, but that's the point, and I would stress that I take no pride in any prejudice, whether pro or con.

     Despite having a generally open mind (and the above is uncharacteristic for me) I can't approach the super-human level of neutrality evinced by Dark Puss in his comment when I posted on the latest Book Group title and concluded with the hope that the choice met with approval!
     But what about you - any literary prejudices? Any books you run from, Rabbit-like?