Cornflower Books

In profile

 

     Thinking about possible posting topics for this site I began to wonder if there is a "typical" Cornflower Books reader - are there large overlaps in our reading and conversely, periods or genres we tend not to venture into? I'm not proposing to conduct a poll or do any kind of in-depth survey but I wondered if we might glean some useful information by asking everyone who is willing to tell us (and please don't be shy) to leave a comment listing three things:

1. What you are currently reading.

2. Which book you have enjoyed most since the beginning of the year, or thereabouts, and whether that is fairly representative of what you read.

3. What is at the top of your wishlist (real or putative), that is, which book you are most looking forward to reading.

Wordless Wednesday

   

 
 

     My thanks to Kelly for alerting me to this slideshow of literary Edinburgh, and happy birthday, Ian Rankin!

              ~~~~~

   PS. I've just discovered this rather nice clip of another pillar of literary Edinburgh (and a neighbour of Mr. Rankin's) at his home in the city.

    

    

Paging through

  

     I'm dashing today but I want to say how much I'm enjoying all the comments on yesterday's post, and I shall pick up some of the points raised and take them further, but for now I'd like to really accentuate the positive and give the briefest but most wholehearted of recommendations to the two books I've just finished reading: Alexander McCall Smith's The Double Comfort Safari Club and Julia Child's My Life in France : both delightful!

Accentuate the positive

   I've recently felt quite out of step with fellow reviewers whose opinions of a certain book are markedly at odds with mine. Broadly speaking, they are raving about it, while I found its flaws too great to overlook. The best analogy I can give for this is to say imagine a house which seems extremely attractive on paper or in pictures, so interesting and beautiful that everyone wants to go and live in it, but when you look closely you see that the architect has provided insufficient bathrooms, sited the dining room miles from the kitchen, and positioned the building so that the scullery and the boot room get the best views. Not only that, the windows don't fit and the roof leaks - but it looks absolutely wonderful!

    Sometimes a book works so well that the reader can make allowances, ignore continuity errors, lacunae or non-sequiturs, put up with some stretching of the imagination. Suspension of disbelief means you can accept a lot because of the spirit in which that's been asked of you, but what happens when the writer has got so carried away with their overall idea and their plot at the expense of actually making it work, of getting their characters from A to B in a complete and credible manner? - then this reader is reaching for the red pen.

   Why am I not naming the book? I could be being unduly censorious (though I'm often thought to be too 'soft' on books and not caustic enough for some tastes), and I don't want to burst anyone's bubble and spoil the fun that others are obviously having. Why do I mention it at all, then? Because it has truly vexed me since I read it, even moreso given what I'm reading about it which makes me question my critical skills.

    This is all part of a much bigger issue and one where the blogger may feel the need for self-drawn guidelines for writing 'negative' reviews, something which came up in this quite memorable post. As you see, I'm still working on mine.

Cornflower Book Group - The Debt to Pleasure

   

     Where to begin to talk about the tour de force which is John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure? The plot need not detain us for the style is all. Tarquin Winot's "gastro-historico-psycho-autobiographico-anthropico-philosophic lucubrations" served up in "serendipitous, ambulatory and progressive structure"; part food memoir, part reminiscences of a life in which suspiciously tragic fates befall those who know our hero. Blackly comic - and I did find it very funny - all it lacks is the judicious intervention of Inspector Clouseau!

   Elegant, eloquent, discursive, arch, all these adjectives apply equally to Tarquin and to the book, though the tone is tempered - like bitter chocolate - when the gastronome shows a surprisingly subtle side. His snobbery and innate superiority are wonderful to behold as he pronounces on matters culinary "with an attractive air of qualified omniscience" which can be as withering as it is self-adulatory, but it is the book's brio and its cleverness which appealed so much and made it marvellous entertainment.

   Tarquin's ironic musings on art, food, philosophy and murder are not the literary equivalent of comfort food, but his acerbic account of jealousy and revenge has a delicious piquancy all its own.

    Was it to your taste?

    (You'll find the book's 'cake' here).

Twittering again

    For anyone wondering about Twitter, this is the reason I joined, but most fun so far  - and thanks to Barbara for the suggestion - has been following the hilarious reelmolesworth, especially during the leaders' debates!

(I'm there as Cornflowerbooks).

Time and place

 
   
      Victoria Finlay's name popped up this morning and I remembered her excellent book Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox (which I no longer have as I lent it to a friend, and sadly....), but what came most vividly to mind was where and when I read it.

    On the long flight to Australia a few years ago I had three books in my bag, Adèle Geras' wonderful novel Facing The Light (and you can see a brief clip of Adèle talking about the book here), David Attenborough's Life on Air: Memoirs of a Broadcaster, and Victoria's Colours. Not being one to travel very often or go very far, that journey was particularly memorable for many reasons but not least the reading matter. Flying above, for example, Afghanistan while reading about the lapis lazuli which is mined there meant that places mentioned in the books became so much more real than names on a map tend to be; meanwhile a very English novel allowed me to have one foot still on home ground, so to speak, despite being very far away.

    The books take me back to the time and place I read them, and reminiscing about the journey brings the books to mind; the connection is double-stranded and both plies are equally strong. Other examples: Margaret Forster's Lady's Maid read while in the maternity ward with baby number two, Gone with the Wind aged fifteen and in grim hospital recovering from tonsillectomy!

    How about you?

Good lines: ?

  

    "When vacuum and content threaten syncretistic - not to say syncretinous - convergence, a moral black hole bids fair, or foul, to engulf the ci-devant civilised world. The meta-Yeatsian, quasi-Hegelian eclipse of centrality is maieutic to a conscienceless extremism which proclaims itself exempt from any need to give a reasonable account of itself."

From Final Demands by Frederic Raphael.

I'm glad to say that the rest of the book is more comprehensible than that passage might suggest, (and no cracks from you, young Lindsay!).

Oranges, passions, cow parsley and cabbages

      

  Delighted to see that Rosie Alison's The Very Thought of You has made the Orange Prize shortlist (my impressions of the book here)*. Wolf Hall, is there too, of course.

  

*Edited to add: And this piece makes interesting reading. 

   

     Those of us who are fanatical about recording what we've read and what we want to read may like to know that we can keep our obsession 'under covers' with a Moleskine Passion Notebook! (There's even a video).

    

     Here's another book for the wishlist - mine, at least - The Surprising Life of Constance Spry by Sue Shephard; floristry, cookery, the rose, and a lot more, by the sound of it.

Monday miscellany

   

    Two or three weeks ago I did a brief post on the Lost Man Booker Prize. One of the three shortlisted books I particularly liked the sound of was J.G. Farrell's Troubles, set in a grand but faded Irish hotel in 1919, "a brilliant recreation of a lost period". Happily, I now have the book which I'm looking forward to reading, but we can all vote for the title we feel should win, and we have until midday on 30th. April to do so. (And Claire, I've still to get the Muriel Spark!).

 

     This book caught my eye thanks to a review by Alexander McCall Smith (which I cannot find online). Andrew Greig's At the Loch of the Green Corrie is about poetry, the land, friendship, fishing, climbing and more, the language "richly evocative, but handled with lightness and delicacy...It is like a rare malt whisky: poignant, smoky and with a taste that makes you think of many great and important things".

 

    I loved David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet - as you may have seen - and here is an interview with the author (he sounds very nice!).

And PS: this is refreshing!

Back to the wall

    Do come and find me on Facebook.

She is too fond of books

     A person can always do with a good book bag, and this is an excellent one. If you click to enlarge the picture you'll see that it's very roomy, made of stout cotton, and has straps long enough to carry comfortably over the shoulder. It will go in the handbag for any impromptu shopping, or will cart quite a few books around - not to mention sizeable knitting projects.

    You can find the bag and the matching notebook at Long Barn Books. They're a must for those of us whose brains are well and truly turned!

Good lines: icons and avatars

     "Icons and avatars are part of the way we interact. Like the shield designs of mediaeval times, they serve both as a defensive tool and as the image of ourselves we show to the world, cheap escutcheons for those of us with no honour, no king, no country."

From Blueeyedboy by Joanne Harris.

Cornflower Book Group 2010: Volume 5

  

    The CBG is gearing up to discuss John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure in just over a week's time, but for our May book I've gone back to the master list of suggested titles and chosen Daphne du Maurier's 1951 novel My Cousin Rachel.

   This may well be a book you've read before, perhaps a long time ago, but it's bound to be new to many of us, and should, I hope, be an excellent read. Here's the blurb:

"Orphaned at an early age, Philip Ashley is raised by his benevolent older cousin, Ambrose. Resolutely single, Ambrose delights in Philip as his heir, a man who will come to love his grand house as much as he does himself. But the cosy world the two have constructed is shattered when Ambrose sets off on a trip to Florence. There he falls in love and marries - and there he dies suddenly.

     In almost no time at all, the new widow - Philip's cousin Rachel - turns up in England. Despite himself, Philip is drawn to this beautiful, sophisticated, mysterious woman like a moth to the flame. And yet ... might she have had a hand in Ambrose's death?"

   Sally Beauman says in her introduction that this was the last of Daphne du Maurier's great bestsellers, a book in which she used the full battery of her skills ..."The result is dazzling".

   My Cousin Rachel should be easily obtainable through retailers and libraries wherever you are, but in case of difficulty, The Book Depository will supply it with  free delivery worldwide. Let's talk about from Saturday 22nd. May onwards, and please do join us if you haven't done so before and would like to take part - we are a friendly bunch!

Bookshops take note

   See the comments on this post!

Delightful, delicious, de-lovely de Luce

  

   

     This is a rich fruitcake of a book, chock-full of choice morsels, drenched in heartening spirit! If you've read The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie you'll know what I'm on about because the excellent Flavia de Luce, eleven-year-old master chemist, poisons expert and sleuth to be reckoned with, has returned in Alan Bradley's The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag, and it does not disappoint.

   If you're unfamiliar with Flavia, she lives (in 1950) in a large but crumbling house on the edge of the English village of Bishop's Lacey. Her mother met a tragic but somewhat mysterious end when she was a baby - and I hope this back story will be developed as the series continues - so she is growing up with her emotionally distant father, two beastly sisters and various family retainers for company, but she's rarely on the back foot, being a girl of sharp intelligence, ingenuity, and encyclopedic knowledge.

    When master showman Rupert Porson, famous creator of television's "Magic Kingdom" and Snoddy the Squirrel, is murdered during a puppetry performance at the village hall, Flavia gets involved. What was the dead man's connection with the Inglebys of Culverhouse Farm? Could the vicar, possibly, have ...? And what did Mad Meg really see in Gibbet Wood?

   All will be revealed, of course, as the intricate plot unfolds, but there is such period charm to the book, and the precocious Flavia is so original a character, that on all fronts it's a joy to read from start to finish!

This week's reading

  

     This week and next I'm reading half a dozen novels, so here's a brief look in case you haven't already come across them:

Into Suez by Stevie Davies - so far, so very good indeed. British occupation in the Middle East in 1949, and a daughter retracing her mother's footsteps many years later.

Wanting by Richard Flanagan - "moments of great power and lyricism" says William Boyd in his praise of this book which is set in Van Diemen's Land in 1841 and which involves Charles Dickens.

The Double Comfort Safari Club - I shall return very happily to Alexander McCall Smith's Botswana in this, the latest in the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series.

Final Demands is the third volume in Frederic Raphael's The Glittering Prizes trilogy and is "vivid, witty, satirical" and "epigrammatically brilliant".

Blueeyedboy by Joanne Harris  - "a... tale of synaesthesia; deceit; colours; revenge; scents; ... a blind child prodigy who 'sees' music - and murder". BB re-invents himself online and plays out his murderous fantasies by means of a website!

Finally, The Silver Linings Playbook by Matthew Quick - a novel about "life, love and American football ... ", "touching", "sweet" and "utterly original".

In London town

    I was in London last week at the kind invitation of the publishers Sceptre, attending a lovely gathering of authors, book bloggers and members of the publishing team at which we discussed all kinds of things  - though mostly books - and had a lot of fun (and re. the post below, one of the things which came up was the use of functions such as Twitter and Facebook in the book world). For someone not in the habit of straying far from her own desk this was a rare treat and hugely enjoyable, and I must thank our hosts for a great afternoon at The Hospital Club.

   I'd gone there directly from the famous London Library, a marvellous institution in whose stacks I could have browsed happily for hours. If you ever get the chance to visit, do so; current major and ambitious structural work has created, amongst other things, beautiful new areas in which to work, but the charm and style of the original building is still very much there. My thanks to my excellent guide for a long-awaited and eagerly anticipated tour.  

Twittering on

    As I mentioned on Cornflower, I've just joined Twitter. Now, who to follow and what to say? I'm there as Cornflowerbooks, by the way.

Reading in pairs

     

     By a happy chance I've managed some complementary reading over the last few days. I had two books in my bag for the London trip: The Debt to Pleasure, for idle moments here and there as I needed to get on with it in time for the Book Group, and as the perfect travelling companion for both the bustle of airport lounges and the rather quieter moments* when we were above the clouds, Julia Child's My Life in France. A couple of books, one a novel, the other memoir, the two overlapping in pleasingly coincidental ways, and each satisfying a different part of the appetite, so to speak. I'm enjoying them equally and enormously and finding that paired reading of this type - if you can achieve it in a balanced way - is a good idea, and something I've never done before.

   *I say 'quieter' and it was mostly, but I had a little boy sitting next to me who whipped the lifejacket from under his seat before we'd even had the safety video (just as well we weren't in the row by the emergency exits as he might have been trying the door handles, too), kept up a running commentary on our progress, asked the stewardess what type of tea she was serving and graciously accepted the English Breakfast on offer, later deeming it "very refreshing"!