What I bought

   Here's my modest purchase from Friday's bookshop visit, a book I've had on my wishlist since it came out last year, The Music Room by William Fiennes. Despite not being 'a bird person' at all (I'm quite ornithophobic*), I loved Fiennes' first book The Snow Geese for the way he sees things and the way he writes. His new book is "a small masterpiece - a tribute to the power of place, family and memory".

 

This very personal account of home and family has had such effusive reviews it's hard to know which to quote, but here's one that caught me - "An enchanting book, almost musical in its vividness and exactness. Fiennes has the gift of transmuting the detail of everyday life into a moving poetry".

    I hope to read it soon and add my own thoughts to those of all the others who have loved it.

                       ~~~~~~~

*To go back to things avian for a moment, The Daily Telegraph has taken to publishing large pictures of very scary birds which give me quite a fright as I note it, all unsuspecting, over my breakfast coffee. Yesterday I couldn't read the Mandrake column (tsk tsk) because there was an enormous osprey right beside it and I had to turn over quickly to Tom Stoppard's comments on reading being undermined by technology. It is time I set up the RSPBP, that is the Royal Society for Prevention of Birds in Papers!

Before anyone complains (Lindsay, DP), I am only joking, and I am not anti-birds, I just don't like larger ones getting too close to me, or stuffed ones, or dead ones, or even small ones if they come in the house, or ....

Comments

[Verity]

The music room was one of my favourite reads of last year - I literally could not put it down and had to send my OH because I could not bear to have anyone in the house creating anything that would distract me from concentrating on the wonderful writing and story.

[Dark Puss]

I know well your avian dislike, though I hadn't appreciated before that it extended to static pictures. I'm just sorry you can't enjoy one of the glories of the natural world. Presumably you rapidly skated over "my" Osprey on Morgana's Cat.

[Dark Puss]

Reading Tom Stoppard's article makes me think two things:

1) Please provide the evidence.
2) It sounds much like what people said about television, radio, newspapers, movable-type printing, paper etc.

I'd never get away with writing an article like that without providing some support for the argument. When I was young, no doubt my obsession with Lego was a major distraction from reading as was gardening, hill-walking and listening to the John Peel show. For my father, one of the best read people I have ever known, cycling and natural history kept him away from his books for a large part of his free time as a child in the 1920's and 30's.

Go on bash the kids! Find a new demon to throw coconuts at! Grrrrr.

[Cornflower]

I don't mind them at a distance (pictures or the real thing), it's close-ups which I find very off-putting.

[adele geras]

Well, Cornflower, there's a very good Hitchcock movie I can heartily recommend!!! I too am not keen on birds indoors. One tiny little thing came into our larder, years ago and I had to run and fetch a neighbour to help escort it out of my kitchen...Oh dear!

[m]

I do sympathise, having spent the weekend flinching from vicious looking seagulls. There's a nest on a neighbour's chimney and people were cowering!

[Mr Cornflower]

If seagulls were very rare we'd think them startlingly beautiful or at least very odd-looking birds.

[Dark Puss]

I do think they are beautiful! And the Jay is fabulously exotic and much under appreciated just because it is "common".

[m]

I'd just sooner admire them from a distance; it's the swooping that unnerves me!

[Simon T]

I didn't know about your phobia, Karen - must be tricky as it's not catered for, as it were! I'm very arachnophobic (don't like typing that word, for instance) and have had to ask my housemate to cut a cartoon picture off the back of a book for me, because I couldn't hold it otherwise... this overcame my dislike of mutilating books!

[Simon T]

Oh, and more to the point... I've been thinking about reading this for ages!

[Julie Fredericksen]

I don't mind large birds, but pix of snakes - nooo! I taped the snake pages together in the "S" encyclopedia when I was a kid. I had an Australian blogger friend who used to post pix of snakes all the time. I told her she had to give a "Snake Warning" at the top of the blog. What an unpleasant surprise.

[Lyn]

Have you read Barbara Pym's Excellent Women, Cornflower? You'd enjoy Everard Bone's mother who believes birds are out to get us & eats as many as possible. Mildred Lathbury goes to dinner & Mrs Bone shows her newspaper clippings about owls biting people & a swan knocking a girl off her bike. " 'The Dominion of the Birds,' she went on. 'I very much fear it may come to that.'"

[Cornflower]

I haven't read it, Lyn, but thankyou - I should remedy that!