Cornflower Books

A thought

     I asked Mr. C. (and please permit me a bit of patting on the back here as he's just home from London where he was collecting an investment award - there was only slightly less glitz and glamour than the Oscars, he tells me); anyway, I asked him what he'd ideally like to see in today's post, and he said airily, "fishing, country pursuits, detective novels, poetry, history, that sort of thing..." Not much, then.
    But joking apart, that makes me think that it would be a great idea if novels were catalogued/cross-referenced in some way according to elements of content so that you could search - in a library or on a bookseller's list - by themes and references. For example, I'm reading A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book (riches untold!) and it would tick boxes on folklore, Fabianism, Arts and Crafts and arts and crafts, William Lethaby, William Morris, Lalique, Art Nouveau, Jugendstil, pottery, embroidery, the V&A .... the list goes on and on. Of course, you'd have to differentiate somehow between a passing mention and more substantial content, but wouldn't there be a call for this - i.e. something deeper than a 'keyword' search -, both for the 'casual' reader with a particular interest and for anyone doing more serious research?

Odds and ends

 

    In an essay entitled "My Odd Shelf" in the delightful Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, Anne Fadiman writes:
"It has long been my belief that everyone's library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner. George Orwell's Odd Shelf held a collection of bound sets of ladies' magazines from the 1860s, which he liked to read in his bathtub. Philip Larkin had an especially capacious Odd Shelf crammed with pornography, with an emphasis on spanking. Vice Admiral James Stockdale, having heard that Frederick the Great had never embarked on a campaign without his copy of The Encheiridion, brought to Vietnam the complete works of Epictetus, whose Stoic philosophy was to sustain him through eight years as a prisoner of war."
Anne Fadiman goes on to reveal that her Odd Shelf holds sixty-four books about polar exploration, a lonely interest, it seems: "I cannot trot it out at cocktail parties."
Do you have an Odd Shelf and are you willing to disclose what's on it? I have one, but I'm not saying what it holds (unless anyone can guess!).

Teenage reading

 

     A quick check of the two teenagers at hand while writing this reveals that Harriet (13) is currently reading Alan Bradley's The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. Her comment: "enthralling and wonderfully witty", and I concur - wholeheartedly!

 

     Meanwhile, Will (almost 18) recommends George Macdonald Fraser's Royal Flash which he describes as "riotously funny".

  

I'm trying to remember what I read when I was a teenager (that was long before I began keeping a list). Winston Graham's Poldark novels loomed large - and I have them today. Then there was Susan Howatch's Cornish saga Cashelmara, and it's still on the shelves, as is Anya Seton's Green Darkness. Just handling these books again takes me back! There were lots more, of course, but these have stuck in the mind more than others, and they are all historical fiction, so perhaps that's significant.

Bozo Sapiens

   A footnote to my post on the excellent Bozo Sapiens:
Michael Kaplan, junior half of the writing team and wise fool that he is, has taken up the dubious pastime of blogging! You can read him here.

Good lines: hidden lives

   

     "She had an intense secret life, which consisted of reading novels about women reduced to silent attentiveness, full of inner rebellion, or of the effort of resignation."
From The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt.

Cornflower Book Group - The Solitude of Thomas Cave

   

     1616, and a British whaling expedition to the Svalbard archipelago sees a member of the crew accept a wager to stay alone, throughout an Arctic winter, in that unexplored and inhospitable region. Thomas Cave must have his reasons for taking on something believed to be impossible, and what is behind his assent is gradually made clear as the months draw on and his isolation becomes ever more acute.
    Georgina Harding's The Solitude of Thomas Cave is a book of taut, restrained emotion, sometimes ethereal mood, as often raw, painful truth. It's a still book - still as in a calm sea, but one over which the storm clouds are massing.
    I found it very powerful, partly due to the stark contrast of the vast and pure landscape despoiled by the butchery of the whaling and the concomitant operations: crude, foul, industrial processing, the remains of which are memorably described in one scene as "... heaps of bones with a raucous multitude of gulls still picking and screaming amongst them, milling beneath the great white jawbones like the congregation of the damned beneath the arches of a fallen cathedral", but also because of Thomas' personal story - not just his dogged, methodical modus vivendi, but what led him to those shores, what possessed him to stay there.
    I don't want to give away anything to those who haven't read the book, so I'll be careful what I say here, but I was less taken with the later parts - I couldn't quite see an unbroken path to the end, and what is there is 'muddied' a bit. But that said, while 'haunting' is an over-used word in book review terms, this novel does linger like sea-fret, and I found its spare simplicity drew me in and held me.
   How about you?

Wise fools

    If you feel your synapses are in need of a little stimulation, this is the book for you!
    It's hard to plot precisely the range of Michael and Ellen Kaplan's extremely comprehensive Bozo Sapiens; likewise, to do justice to its pace, wit and all-round interest, but if I say it is broad but concise, compiled with consummate skill and beautifully written with a light touch, you'll get the general idea.
     Subtitled "Why to err is human", it examines how and why we make mistakes - why, when faced with a choice, we so often get it wrong, why, even when we have knowledge and past experience to help us, we fail to make the right call. The raw material used to support theories and provide explanations is a polymath's dream, and here I'm reminded of the BT advert where for Maureen Lipman's Beattie, her grandson's "ology" qualification was the highest mark of success; this book's "ologies" - from psychology to physiology, anthropology to sociology, with economic theory, philosophy and evolutionary biology thrown in, are more than enough to establish its credentials.
     So, if you want to know why going shopping when you're feeling low is just as dangerous as visiting the supermarket when you're hungry, why it's as bad an idea to lend the car to the elderly grandpa as to the teenage boy, why serotonin can make the workplace unpleasant, and it's not always wise to follow the leader, you'll find it all here. From dating to dieting, Shakespearian semantics to the Swiss T-shirt test, the authors use examples both trivial and highly serious to demonstrate how, as humans, our failures are a product of our success.
     I loved the humour, the effortless cross-disciplinary shifts, the presentation of complex, inter-connected information with ease and a stylish flourish. It's quite fascinating and makes highly rewarding reading - trust me, I'm not wrong!

Colour and limelight

     I am very pleased indeed to see that Francesca Kay has won this year's
Orange Award for New Writers for her novel An Equal Stillness.
I read it back in January and it impressed me greatly - that post is here. Like the judges, I'm keen to see what the author does next, as this book was unusual and highly accomplished.

Making sandcastles

   The heroine of Maggie Dana's novel Beachcombing is Jill Hunter, a fifty two year-old divorcee, hardworking, independent, devoted to her family and close friends. Jill is also scatty, disorganised, accident-prone, and when it comes to men, lacking the sense she was born with. Meeting her first love Colin again after thirty five years she falls for him in a big way and 'comes over all unnecessary'. At this point, the reader wants to shake her and say "get a grip, woman!" because it's not just her clothes she's all too eager to slip out of, it's her maturity as well, and we can see - as she cannot - that she can't afford to discard either.
    The story moves between Jill's Connecticut village where she lives in a charming cottage on the beach, and England, her former home, where she visits both her good friends and her bad lover, and this dual setting works well. Maggie has most skilfully given us all Jill's back-story, too, her difficult relationship with her mother, her failed marriage, her firm ties with those she loves, and shown how all this affects her present quite precarious existence. That makes for a very well-rounded book, a warm-hearted story, and one in which the pace never flags.
     I have one criticism - and I must stress this is purely a matter of personal taste - I find bad language deeply unattractive and boring, and for me there was just too much of it. But moving swiftly on to what I did love about the book, it's very natural and unforced, it's got loads of zip and zest, its New England location is very attractive, and Jill is an engaging heroine for whom we really want things to work out - and there are even two labradors with literary names in it! I enjoyed it very much indeed and I shall look forward to reading Maggie's next book.

By the way, Maggie will be in England shortly and has various events and signings scheduled, details here.

Cover versions

   Back on my hobby-horse of cover design, I couldn't help taking an instant dislike to the new Faber & Faber cover for Cyril Hare's Tragedy at Law (below). Any of the above would have been preferable, I think, from the neutral Penguin in its green crime livery, to the older Faber version with its faint but discernible legal feel to - best of all - the coloured illustration which (I read) "captures the mood of the book".

    In contrast, what does this one say? If the book's period feel is one of its charms, and its setting in the legal world a perfectly realised and important characteristic, is that conveyed by what's on the front? Not to me, and had I not had P.D. James' recommendation, I don't think I'd have picked up this book in a shop. Granted, I haven't read it yet and the design may turn out to be apposite, but I ha'e ma doots!

Dark Puss was asking about the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. I'm no expert so I can but point to this explanation, but if anyone knows more (or can supply a good link) please tell us. Or, we could all attend this course!

The prize goes to ....

    Marina!
    Thankyou to everyone who entered the draw. A copy of Star Gazing will be heading off to Marina very soon, and I hope it will delight her as much as it did me.

Reading in pleasant places

   

   

    The weather here this weekend has been so warm that I got to read outside for the first time this year (when I wasn't weeding, that is). But you can have too much of a good thing, and when it got too hot for comfort I retreated into the house to this chair with its view of the garden and the steps down to it, so the best of both worlds.
     That's a favourite reading chair, not so comfy that you might fall asleep in it, but just the thing for when you want to keep your wits about you.
    Much of my reading is done at my desk - another pleasant place - or in an 'easier' chair beside it.
    Probably best of all, though, is reading in bed.
    How about you?