Cornflower Books

Good words: stravaig

    If you're having a bit of a browse, going from this site to that with no particular aim in mind, you could be said to be stravaiging. It means roaming or wandering about "in an aimless casual way" and as a noun, too, it means a ramble or stroll.

   There will be plenty of people stravaiging about the place here in Edinburgh tonight as they take in the new year, but if quieter pursuits are more your cup of tea, why not stravaig over and try Norm's fiendish literary quiz - with prizes!

Good lines: music

    

     "I think music is what language once aspired to be."

From Love begins in winter by Simon Van Booy.

Good lines: living with books

   

    "In my view, there should be books in every room of the house, with the possible exception of the larder. Books in the attic waiting to be re-read; in the garage, waiting to be re-cycled at the jumble sale; and of course, in piles in the box room. These are just in store, awaiting their moment. All other rooms also need their quota, ready to be pulled from the shelf or the coffee table for a desultory browse. You never know when you might need a quick fix - for books are as addictive as any class A drug. Those lucky enough to have the habit cannot go without reading matter for even a day.

     " To me a room without books is missing an essential feature, as important as lights, chairs or carpets. Or pictures: in their way, books are like pictures on the wall; they reveal whether you are a minimalist with all covers hidden under plain wrappers, a maximalist whose every room has a generously filled bookcase, or an anarchist whose preferred method of storage is an untidy heap."

From Books do furnish a room by Leslie Geddes-Brown.

In the bleak midwinter

    

    I said the other day that Nicci Gerrard's The Winter House had held me from the start, and that remained true throughout. It's a very 'collected' book, emotionally well-pitched and controlled, technically accomplished in its switching from past to present and voice to voice, and though its mood could have been unremittingly sombre or uncomfortably maudlin, it avoids these traps and is instead moving and absorbing.

     It is a book about love as an unbalanced equation; there are several examples of this but chief among them is the complicated relationship of Marnie, Ralph and Oliver, teenage friends who meet again many years after the passions and betrayals of their early life when the dying Ralph summons them to his remote cottage in the Scottish highlands. As Marnie and Oliver keep vigil through the short, dark midwinter days and long sleepless nights, so the story of their shared past is told, and despite the circumstances of their re-acquaintance, perhaps there will be a future for them after all.

     Ralph is vulnerable, quixotic, elusive, but he inspires affection, and in Marnie that shows as a desire to save him from himself. She is independent and alone, and though capable and kind she could so easily be overlooked, but her straightforward plausibility and clear good nature carry the book. She is not a showy heroine but she is a strong one, and the complex but fitting play of her character against the others makes for a compelling piece.  

Happy Christmas!

    I hope Santa brings you lots of literary delights!

Wintery reading

  

    A secluded cottage in the Scottish highlands, three friends "bound by ties of love and betrayal", a short time in which to right wrongs and say what needs to be said. That's the gist of my pre-Christmas reading, The Winter House by Nicci Gerrard.

    I haven't read any Nicci Gerrard before, nor her collaborative works (written with her husband) which appear under the name Nicci French, but something about this book appeals, and only one chapter in I'm already held by it.

Wondair

    

     A late addition to the non-fiction books of the year list is Charlotte Mosley's collection The Mitfords: Letters between Six Sisters (begun last year, put aside reluctantly, finally finished), which has kept me absorbed for weeks. I have laughed helplessly countless times, been moved and been fascinated to be privy to a remarkable correspondence spanning the years from 1925 to 2002 - the letters included here being only a tiny fraction of all those exchanged by Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica and Deborah.

    Despite enormous personal and political differences, distance and ideological separation, but because of genuine love and deep feelings, the sisters kept in touch assiduously, their letters often sustaining one another at their most difficult moments and providing a commentary on long lives and changing times.

     They can be variously waspish, witty, disarmingly honest, ingenuous and perceptive, but are usually warm and caring and always delightfully distinctive in tone and turn of phrase. The 'quotable quotes' might fill a volume of their own, such is the interest on every page, but for all the running jokes, the nicknames, the affection and disaffection, what is recorded here are the joys and sorrows of six lives and how those episodes - from the mundane to the dramatic - were shared. As a piece of social history they are and will be of great value, but external use apart, they are wonderfully entertaining in their own right. Do admit!

Good lines: the agricultural show

  

     "The man on the loudspeaker said please no worms in the Pet Class. Last year someone dug up and entered 3."

Deborah Devonshire to Diana Mosley.

From The Mitfords: Letters between Six Sisters edited by Charlotte Mosley.

Books for groups

     If you look sharp and enter Bloomsbury's draw today (Friday) your reading group could win a set of eight copies of one title from The Bloomsbury Group series plus some other goodies. All the information is to be found on this page, but it's open only to residents of the UK and Ireland.

    

     This gives me an excuse for another shameless mention of 'my' book from that series, Henrietta's War by Joyce Dennys; read all about it, then read it!

Christmas stocking

  

    Julie mentioned in her comment yesterday which book she's hoping to get for Christmas. In this house there is something of a resistance movement to getting me books on the part of my family as they can actually see the extent of the piles of the-as-yet-unread and they say I can't possibly want/need any more - but we know different, don't we?

    I've asked for a modest few titles, one of which is After the Armistice Ball by Catriona McPherson which has been so warmly recommended by 'people of taste'.

    But what about you? Which books would you be pleased to find in your Christmas stocking?

Have you read ...

 ...  The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery? With over 2.5 million copies sold worldwide there's a fair chance you have, and if so, what did you think? Amazon reviews are very mixed with strong feelings both pro and con.

A cultured concièrge, an unhappy child, a Parisian apartment building, come together in a "profound but accessible book", one of "great charm and grace".

 

    Just in but not quite out here yet is Ru Freeman's A Disobedient Girl , "an epic, heartbreaking novel about the linked destinies of two women, set against the backdrop of beautiful, politically turbulent Sri Lanka".

Margaret Forster loved it, but what about you - as I see it was published in the US a few months ago, have any of our American visitors read it?

Out of Africa

   

    Robyn Scott had a very unconventional childhood. Growing up in Botswana, her father a flying doctor, her mother an enthusiastic though haphazard home-schooler, the family lived in a converted cowshed in the bush, close to their irascible, eccentric Grandpa Ivor who had been pilot to Sir Seretse Khama.

    In Twenty Chickens for a Saddle, her memoir of her fifteen years in Africa, Robyn gives an account of living in a loving, hard-working home with freedom most children don't even dream of, but also proximity to the harsher side of life. It's a beautifully fresh and natural book, funny, very well-written, an unsentimental, affectionate portrait of a family but also of a country - one that is now familiar to many of us through the Botswana fiction of Alexander McCall Smith. On the serious side, this is also a frank and clear-sighted story, never moreso than when Robyn covers the country's fight against AIDS, in which her father was closely involved.

    I found it all greatly engaging, moving, and extremely interesting, while Robyn herself comes across as very strong, very positive, very likeable. I thoroughly recommend it.  

(By the way, Robyn has a website).

Paperback of the year

  
      The Times WH Smith Paperback of the Year is the most excellent and delightful The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer. That book was one of my Cornflower Blues last year, and was every bit as good on a recent re-read.

Misc.

 

    I like this poster - it's one of a series outside the National Library of Scotland; I'd have snapped some more but the bus I was in set off again.

   On the subject of libraries, and with thanks to Dark Puss for the link: does this one have enough books for you?

   While I'm keen to have a Kindle or similar - in addition to proper books, of course - I think I'll give this version a miss, thankyou. (M&B didn't crop up on anyone's Guilty Pleasures list, but it did appear on the NTBR piles!).

Cornflower Book Group - The Diary of a Nobody

    

    "I left the room with silent dignity, but caught my foot in the mat."

     How typical of Mr. Pooter, the subject of George and Weedon Grossmith's The Diary of a Nobody: prone to minor mishaps, so often the butt of the joke while yet taking himself so seriously. Self-righteous, self-important, his diary is caught on the coat-hook of social standing, the niceties and minutiae of an 'ordinary' life.

    We laugh at him, not at his attempts at wit and the situations from which he derives so much amusement, but at the fact that he acts as he does, and from that level we cringe also as he is put down yet again, but so often, despite his vulnerability, he has brought it all on himself.

    How modern the book is, though, with its account of the daily doings of a suburban everyman ("it's the diary that makes the man"), like the blog or Twitter of its day. Recognisable too are the Pooters' concerns over their son, Lupin, and the trials of living with that feckless young adult and all the generational differences - slang included - which that throws up; it has a relevance, a familiarity, which makes it bang up to date.

    Amidst the farce and slapstick and the running jokes there is considerable subtlety, social commentary and history, so it's an interesting read on many counts. Stylistically it's beautifully distinct - the Pooter voice -, though naming a character "Mr. Murray Posh" seemed almost a McCall Smith touch!

     Cultural icon, English archetype (as it says on the back of the book!), or pain in the neck? What did you think?

Postcards from Penguin

     Another quick update on Postcards from Penguin: 100 Book Jackets in One Box - that link will take you to Amazon where they will be back in stock on the 15th. but available to order now.

Cornflower Blues 2009 - part 3 (the rest of the fiction)

    

    Here's where it gets really difficult - choosing just a few titles from the eighty-eight novels I've read to date this year. I'm going to eliminate re-reads to narrow the field slightly, and then because as I begin to write this I'm still swithering(!), I'll just list the books and give a link to their original posts.

Here are the top twenty:

 

and in no particular order, the top ten:

Brodeck's Report by Philippe Claudel; out in paperback soon (post)

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley (post)

Stone's Fall by Iain Pears (post)

Earth and Heaven by Sue Gee (post)

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (post)

Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd (post)

Ask Alice by D. J. Taylor (post)

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje (post)

The Outlander by Gil Adamson; due in paperback soon (post)

A Proper Education for Girls by Elaine di Rollo (post)

Cornflower Blues 2009 - part 2 (book group books)

    The second category in my books of the year list is for best book group books. If you've taken part in the Cornflower Book Group at all - and look, we're famous now! - please join in here and let us know which titles made the biggest impression on you. I'm giving my top four, though others are close contenders, but these books stood out in my fiction reading overall this year, not just in what the group has read.

   J. L. Carr's A Month in the Country was a beautiful, finely-balanced study of a brief period in a man's life, both for what it was and for what it might have led to. (Our thoughts on it are here).

  Robertson Davies was another author I'd never read before he came up on the list of suggestions for the group, but his Fifth Business was a most interesting, thought-provoking read, with a narrative of "page-turning force".

Elizabeth Jenkins' The Tortoise and the Hare, a study of an uneasy marriage undermined by an unlikely affair, certainly got us all talking! 

Wallace Stegner was another great find for those of us who read his Crossing to Safety; much to admire and much to ponder.

Cornflower Blues 2009 - part 1 (non-fiction)

    It's time to choose my books of the year, and agonising over which to include and which - reluctantly - to leave out, I've decided to 'cheat' a bit in order to fit in more novels than usual. I'll start by listing my top non-fiction titles and favourite book group books, and then I'll go on to the rest of the fiction.

Criteria for inclusion? They must have impressed me on one or more of the following counts: mastery of material, narrative thrust, intelligence and beauty of writing, sheer enjoyment! As you can see, this is not scientific, it's simply some of the books I've got most from or have rated most highly since the beginning of the year.

Why do we make mistakes (though not, of course, when choosing our books of the year...)? Read Michael and Ellen Kaplan's breathtaking Bozo Sapiens: Why to Err is Human for an entertaining, accessible, multi-disciplinary look at errors of all kinds. (More on it here).

For a clear-sighted view of an author and her work you could do no better than read Julia Jones' The Adventures of Margery Allingham: a reliable, well-researched, thoroughly enjoyable biography of a writer who is worth getting to know as a person in her own right as well as as a creator of memorable fiction. (Original post here).

A look around someone else's bookshelves and a chance to hear their literary reminiscences are pleasures I find irresistible, and Susan Hill gives us both in her very personal, individual Howards End is on the Landing, an account of her 'year of reading from home'. (The full story).

Monty Don's The Ivington Diaries was a big hit with me, savoured slowly over a couple of months of quiet, reflective reading. I've talked about it several times, but here's 'the passionate gardener'.

20th. December, edited to add:

The Mitfords: Letters between Six Sisters, ed. Charlotte Mosley. Just finished, but more than deserving of a place on the list. Screamingly funny, very moving, hugely absorbing.

Just arrived

    Just arrived, two books whose writers - coincidentally and quite by the way - were Edinburgh-born.

    Jane Robinson's Bluestockings is subtitled "The Remarkable Story of the First Women to Fight for an Education", and it tells of the progress of higher education for women in Britain. This is an account of "... defiance and determination, of colourful eccentricity and at times heartbreaking loneliness, as well as of passionate friendships, midnight cocoa-parties and glorious self-discovery." To think that at one time doctors warned that if women studied too hard "their wombs would wither and die"; how far we have come.

 

    Unlike the ladies, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have had little difficulty gaining admission to the medical school of Edinburgh University, but it was there in the late 1870s that he encountered Dr. Joseph Bell, on whom he is said to have based the character of the world's most famous detective. The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes - with a foreword by Ruth Rendell - contains the four novels and fifty-six short stories which form the Holmes canon, and I am really looking forward to starting them and to "... a close study on the printed page of Holmes' deductive methods", for while familiar with Holmes and Watson through numerous television adaptations, as Ruth Rendell says, "Doyle's fiction needs to be read."