On the wishlist

     A few more additions to my wishlist based on gleanings from various sources.

To start with - and I'm very pleased about this - Bloomsbury are re-printing the second of Joyce Dennys' Henrietta books. The first one came out last summer and was of course trumpeted loudly here, and Henrietta Sees it Through: More News from the Home Front which is every bit as good, will be appearing in smart Bloomsbury Group livery a couple of months from now.

So Much To Tell is a biography by Valerie Grove of Kaye Webb, editor and driving force behind Puffin Books, and wife of Ronald Searle. Publisher of Roald Dahl, Joan Aiken and Noel Streatfeild among many others, Kaye Webb founded the Puffin Club (were you a member?), and though her business life was a huge success, sadly her personal life was not, as this review explains.

     This obituary of Penelope Hughes-Hallett led me to her book The Immortal Dinner: A Famous Evening of Genius and Laughter in Literary London 1817 which I hadn't come across before. It sounds wonderful - have you read it?

    

     Lastly today, more recommendations via Twitter, and specifically from the collected tweets of Alexander McCall Smith! Scoot over the list of famous motorcyclists (should not George Orwell be there?) and scroll down a bit and you'll see mention of Roger Scruton's books Beauty and Understanding Music: Philosophy and Interpretation. They've gone on my list.

Comments

[Simon (Savidge Reads)]

Oh I am beyond excited about the next Henrietta book and seriously can't wait, though am trying to not over excite myself with the prospect of it and then over hyping it before I read it!

[Verity]

The Kaye Webb sounds fascinating - I've just put a reservation in on it at the library.

[Dark Puss]

I think I was a member of the Puffin Club.
Despite your lauding it I was left baffled by the success of "Henrietta" (I'll admit to only reading about 20 pages in a book shop) so I hope you will excuse my lack of enthusiasm for volume 2. One day it will all become clear to me perhaps ...

Read my way, with difficulty, through your McCall Smith tweets, took me 30s to realise he is running them together into longer messages! Still baffled as to what it adds to other forms of communication; in this case it seemed to me to be a rather less easy-to-read version of a weblog. Again I look to you (and your enlightened readers) to help me here!

The Scruton book looks interesting and certainly my sort of thing, but whether I can read him with equanimity and an open mind is open to doubt.

Has your wish-list reached 1000 yet?

DP xx

[skirmishofwit]

Oh, I'm so excited the second Henrietta book will be republished - I adored the first so much. Thanks for the heads up!

[Dark Puss]

What about Che Guevara's The Motorcycle Diaries?

[Nancy]

Very interesting read about the Kaye Webb bio.

I, for one, cannot see the hoopla over tweeting. A couple of my Facebook Friends' posts consist of just their 'tweets' - not very informative or readable. For me, it's like, "Sooooo?"

[Frances]

More Henrietta! You have made my day.

[Margaret Powling]

I read a review of this book in the Telegraph Review but it didn't mention Kaye Webb was Editor of Young Elizabethan magazine, which I loved. I have now managed to get three copies of this from 1956 and am amazed at how bor-ring it was! I simply cannot imagine why I enjoyed it, aged 12! The only light areas are Nigel Molesworth! And the adverts ... my dear, Riding Clothes for Children from Moss Bros., Decca Records, Dunlop Tyres (I'm sure the kiddies were racing at Daytona when they weren't getting togged up in jodhs!), Ilford cameras, Fibrax brake blocks , Kangol pure wool berets and even Elizabeth Arden deodorant! They were more like adverts for The Lady than for a children's magazine!
PS A column entitled Nothing Dull Here reviews books, one of which has the most exciting title, does it not? Social Reformers by Norman Wymer. I dread to think what the reviewer thought was dull.

[Cornflower]

Wonderful, Margaret!

[Lucy M]

I'm sad to learn that Penelope Hughes-Hallett has recently died since, as it happens, I'm reading The Immortal Dinner at the moment. It is as wonderful as it sounds: an endlessly diverse and entertaining selection of biography, history and anecdote deftly pieced together into a coherent whole, like a literary quilt of intellectual and artistic life in 1817. It's elegantly erudite, psychologically astute, copiously illustrated and really a lot of fun. I don't want it to end.