Cornflower Books

And the vampire drives a Jaguar

 

    I had not expected to be reading a book set in the Bodleian Library and featuring vampires and witches, but that is what I am doing today.

    Being Hallowe'en weekend, I took from the shelves Edith Wharton's ghost stories The Demanding Dead and Kipling's Selected Stories in order to re-read his beautiful, perfect "They", but then the postie arrived with a fat parcel and in it a proof copy of a book not due out 'til February - "I'll have a quick look at the first page" says I, "and see what it's like", and now here we are 90 pages in and everything else is going to have to wait.

 

    For your information, of the central characters in Deborah Harkness' A Discovery of Witches, the witch is a historian of science, the vampire is a geneticist (though they are often nowadays physicists, the book says, particularly those of the particle variety, so I shall be looking closely at Dark Puss the next time I see him....), and they meet in Duke Humfrey's Reading Room in the Bodleian [I love the little reader's ticket inside the cover!] - oh, and the vampire drives a black Jaguar but frequently gets around Oxford by less conventional means...

 

   As I say, I hadn't planned to start on this 600-pager, but now that I have, I'm off to read on - and let no-one get in my way.

Have you read ... Alan Garner?

       Funny how names - ones you know, ones long held in the memory - can suddenly come up and bring a writer or a book to the forefront of your attention. So it is with Alan Garner: first Geranium Cat's post on his novel Thursbitch, then DamsonLily saying that that book had completely obsessed her book group a while ago. I've never read Alan Garner, though The Owl Service has 'hovered' as a might-read, and The Weirdstone of Brisingamen has been in print for fifty years. All these books tempt me; have you read them?

Group hug

    I'm so enjoying reading all the comments on your book group experiences - there are good tips and guidelines there which might be useful to any group, and what fun is being had all round with films, meals, book-related walks, behind-the-scenes-at-the-bookshop visits, and other related activities going on!

    Jodi mentioned that her group includes a severely dyslexic member, and I was glad to hear that; reading easily is something so many of us can take for granted, but for others it's no simple pleasure - being in the group must help that a lot, I should think. I'd like to know more.

    Oxslip mentioned Rachel Cusk's article, and I'm not surprised that it didn't go unremarked (see Oxslip's comment for the links). But aside from the hurt feelings there, Ms. Cusk's respondent makes an interesting point: "Aren't unpretentious book groups like ours the backbone of fiction sales these days?"

    Back to all of you who contributed your thoughts to the post, and what is so lovely to see is the enriched enjoyment that so many of you are getting by reading books you might not have chosen for yourselves and by seeing them through others' eyes as well as your own. Thankyou for taking the trouble to comment and for giving us such detail.

Just browsing

      I had a quick browse in a bookshop today, seeing what's new to me, noticing what other customers were picking up and putting back. I'd love to have had the nerve to say, "Buy that, it's great", and "Leave that one there, it's not up to much", but they might not have appreciated being accosted by a complete stranger trying to influence their choice of reading matter, so I contented myself with mentioning to an assistant - to whom I was chatting in passing anyway - that Katherine Swift's The Morville Hours: The Story of a Garden doesn't belong on the fiction shelves. (I'm sounding awfully bossy and interfering here, and I'm not really like that at all, just a bit daft when it comes to books).

    I didn't buy anything, but scouted round to store up some likely-looking titles for later. Three things caught my eye, and I'm wondering if anyone has read them and would recommend - or not.

    I think I've mentioned Shirley McKay's Hue and Cry here before as I've been aware of it for a while, but this "gripping mystery" set in sixteenth century St. Andrews and featuring young lawyer Hew Cullen has a new cover and now a sequel. Being tempted by C.J. Sansom's Matthew Shardlake books (Dissolution etc.) I thought as this sounds vaguely like a Scottish equivalent I might give it a go.

    I'm not sure how to summarise The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen - illustrated with maps and its 12-year-old protagonist's thought processes, it's about travel and the adventures of a prodigy; "a treasure", says Stephen King. Eye-catching, certainly.

    Quilt by Nicholas Royle was face-out on the shelf, and knowing nothing about it, I was drawn to it by its title, its cover and Frank Kermode's words, "a work of remarkable imaginative energy". Amazon reviewers are unanimous in giving this mystery and love story 5 stars, and it sounds unusual and intriguing.

    The irony of all this potential library augmentation is that over the last fortnight I've managed almost no reading at all, just a few pages in bed each night, and that's despite the fact I'm enjoying all the books I have on the go very much indeed. I'm hoping for a quieter, more focused few days soon.

Book groups: hits and misses, pros and cons

     I run an online book group through this website, I write about reading groups occasionally, and have been on the radio to talk about them and yet I've never been a member of a real life, face-to-face group, but as I know a lot of you are or have been, I wanted to pick your brains on them. Don't feel you have to answer any or all of the questions, your wider thoughts and impressions are welcome, but any insights or anecdotes you're willing to give us will be of interest, whether we're group members or not.

How often do you meet?

How are the books chosen, and do you ever resort to sources of 'good books for groups' such as websites, reading guides?

Do you read non-fiction as well as fiction; do you read poetry, short stories or plays as well as novels?

Do you tend to read recently published books or range widely over works from all periods?

Has everyone read the book by discussion day? Does everyone get a fair chance to speak, or do some members dominate at the expense of the quieter ones?

Do you find you stick to talking about the book when you meet, or do you quickly move on to general chat?

Do you find you get more out of a book when you're reading it for the group, or does having to talk about it make the reading seem a bit more like 'work/school'.

Has any book been a particular hit with the group or given rise to an especially stimulating discussion? Likewise, have you had any failures - books about which there was just not much to be said?

Monday miscellany

     We haven't had a miscellaneous post for a while, so let's put a few oddments together today:

Books and cakes: The Bridge of San Luis Rey now has its accompanying baked goods - falling apart, like the bridge itself, but very moreish nevertheless.

Books in unsual places: leafing through the catalogue of the mail order company Culture Vulture, I found amid the jewellery, accessories, ornaments and what-have-you, three Bloomsbury Group books including my favourite.

Books and the Booker: judge Tom Sutcliffe talks about reading 140 novels in just a few months for this year's Man Booker Prize.

Books to recommend: Mr. C. has just finished The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance by Edmund de Waal. He couldn't put it down.

Books and Babel: have you ever wondered about what goes on at the Frankfurt Book Fair? Read what an editor writes (I find the remark about the "clarity of purpose and a vivifying sense that all things are possible" heartening).

Good lines: on happiness

     "He turned away; he didn't feel he could bear it. He was terribly afraid that happiness might be a habit, or a quality knitted into the temperament; or it might be something you learn when you're a child, a kind of language, harder than Latin or Greek, that you should have a good grasp on by the time you're seven. What if you haven't got that grasp? What if you're in some way happiness-stupid, happiness-blind? It occurred to him that there are some people, ashamed of being illiterate, who always pretend to others that they can read. Sooner or later they get found out, of course. But it is always possible that while you are valliantly pretending, the principles of reading strike you for the first time, and you are saved. By analogy, it is possible that while you, the unhappy person, are trying out some basic expressions - the kind of thing you get in phrasebooks for travellers - the grammar and syntax of this neglected language are revealing themselves, somewhere at the back of your mind. That's all very well, he thought, but the process could take years. He understood Lucile's problem: how do you know you will live long enough to be fluent?"

From A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel.

Cornflower Book Group - The Bridge of San Luis Rey

 

   Linked stories given a fable-like telling, an investigation into the 'science' of theology, a desire to find a plan, a pattern, a cause or reason for what happens to us, and a meditation on love. That, I suppose, is the essence of Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey and I had great hopes of it as the premise was so interesting and it came strongly recommended, but it failed to make an impact on me, I'm afraid. I found myself feeling glad it was short, and that I'd had enough when I reached the end.

    Why was that? I can't love every book I pick up, though I can certainly appreciate the beauty and precision of the writing here, the economy of the prose, the intellect behind it. Is it because it reads like a collection of short stories rather than a novel and thus my appetite for something more substantial, something with more marked rhythms was not satisfied? Maybe that's it, or perhaps I just read it on the wrong day, in the wrong mood.

    I'll say no more and hand it over to all of you in the hope that you fared better than I did.

Calling all authors - and readers, too

     The discussion on the book business earlier this week has been both wide-ranging and fascinating and my thanks to all who have taken part (comments are still coming in as I write this, and Litlove refers to the subject, too). I don't want to leave things there, so let's see if we can explore this a little further, and take a different retail model as a possible example.

    You may have seen Mary Portas's Queen of Shops series in which she advises struggling retailers on how to boost their business. Some of the changes she advocates are cosmetic, but she also looks crucially at what they stock and how that fits with what customers - or potential customers - want or would buy if they had the chance. One memorable example was the bakery which was failing to meet the needs of the affluent locals who were keen to spend their money on quality, artisan products.

    How does this relate to writers and readers?

Readers:  Surely the market for books is bigger now than ever before. Book festivals exist in every small town and reading groups are fashionable; the internet - the online retailers and book blogs - mean we can browse to our hearts' content at home, read reviews, make informed decisions before we buy, or be part of a reading community with cross-recommendations, joint reads, etc. This must surely boost sales and borrowings and mean that readers on the whole are discerning, we are the equivalent of the buyer of artisan bread - though of course there is still a co-existing market for 'sliced white' and the like.

Writers:  For many people, writing is the dream job. The comments show the reality is less dream, more nightmare, but nevertheless, writing groups abound, creative writing workshops, courses and degrees are everywhere, so being a writer is seen as an 'accessible' career if in fact it is not a lucrative one. More people are competing for market share, whether unknowns or those with a track record, but there you all are, willing to supply us, the consumers, with your 'bread', whether pap or finest sourdough.

   So, we have big demand on the one hand and potentially big supply on the other, but what is actually on offer is smaller in terms of variety than it used to be; writers are not finding an outlet, readers are being denied the products they like and want more of, and it is with retailers, it seems, that the problem lies. The comments illustrated the power of the major ones (both chains and supermarkets) to influence publishing decisions and determine what makes it to market, and market share figures for 2009 (as quoted here: dedicated bookshops 26%, book & stationery stores 24%, supermarkets 20%, internet 18%, direct mail booksellers 12%) would seem to support those assertions.

    What can we do to boost the publishing/bookselling business and correct the imbalance? Writers: there are some very helpful, creative marketing ideas in the comments on the earlier post - do check back as one or two have only just come in - so there's food for thought for you there. Readers: can we make our voices heard? Can we contact booksellers, supermarkets, publishers, and ask for what we want if it's not on offer? Can we get in touch with writers via their websites and give them some support? Can we buy and borrow more books, talk about them on blogs and to friends, join reading groups or hold charity bookswaps at work (anything to get books moving). Above all, can we treat books as the work of art or craft they are and not the homogenous commodity they are being made out to be?

Eta: STOP PRESS! Many thanks to David for giving me the link to a new initiative, just launched, designed to promote midlist authors. Here is an introductory piece on the Guardian books blog and here is the Fiction Uncovered website where you can read all about it. I've signed up for the newsletter and shall follow this with great interest - having just been dubbed "Great Conduit of the Ether" (thankyou Mr. Faulkner!!) how could I not?

The iceman cometh - now

    

     I'm not in the habit of re-publishing posts, but I'm making an exception for this one on Michelle Paver's Dark Matter as the book is now out, and it deserves to be in the spotlight again and not just the subject of a quick link ~

     A ghost story of terrrific menace written with consummate skill, Dark Matter takes the form of the diary of physicist Jack Miller who joins a scientific expedition to the Arctic in 1937, and it tells of what befalls the small group when they land at Gruhuken on Spitsbergen (Svalbard) and prepare to overwinter.

   Jack is a loner, a man without family or friends. His academic ambitions have been sacrificed to the need to make a living, but his job as a clerk leaves him bored and dissatisfied, so when he gets the chance to be the meteorologist and wireless operator in a team which will study High Arctic biology, geology and ice dynamics, he accepts this new beginning and determines to go where it leads him.

   The group make camp in August when there's almost constant daylight, and the vastness of the place, its solitude and remoteness, touch Jack and lift his spirits. He comes into his own and relishes the task ahead, despite the curious wariness and unease of the Norwegian skipper and crew who will shortly bid farewell to the men for the winter, and a strange feeling as of something sinister around the part of their camp where once stood an abandoned trappers' hut.

   But it's when Autumn draws perpetual darkness down and illness forces Jack's companions to leave while he stays on alone to man the instruments and take the survey readings, that the unsettling sights and sounds he has experienced become inexplicable, truly frightening ones. Ever rational, Jack refuses to believe that Gruhuken could be haunted - such a notion defies logic, and surely if there is 'anything' there at all it is only some kind of echo, a 'place memory', which he, a man of sensitivity and acute perception has happened to pick up?

   I can give you no more of the plot than that, but Michelle Paver has drawn the strands together in a tightly written story of stark contrasts: a book of dark deeds in a white wilderness, of the unthinkable becoming horribly manifest, of the strength of companionship and the desolation of being utterly alone. It is genuinely chilling, perfectly paced and fittingly resolved, and with its very fine focus it is an intensely atmospheric, concentratedly gripping novel.

Back to books

 

   My thanks to everyone who took the time to read the comments on the last post and to those who contributed to the discussion - there's a lot there to take in, and please do continue to have your say, but I hope to be able to return to the points raised later and condense them for further debate, as that might be useful.

    But for now, back to books themselves, and a few recent arrivals which I hope to read soon.

 

   First up, Amanda Vickery's Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England. "The Georgian house is a byword for proportion and elegance, but what did it mean to its inhabitants? In this brilliant new work, Amanda Vickery unlocks the homes of English men and women, from the Oxfordshire mansion of the unhappy gentlewoman Anne Dormer in the 1680s to the dreary London lodgings of the bachelor clerk and future novelist Anthony Trollope in the 1830s."

Living in a Georgian house myself - albeit a Scottish one, so outwith the book's direct ambit - I have a particular interest in reading this.

 

    "The perfect companion for the gardening year", Anna Pavord's The Curious Gardener is a collection of her best writing on all aspects of gardening which forms " a treasury of practical advice and an inspirational companion for the entire year." I've flicked to the start of the October chapter and found the essay "The Answer Lies in the Soil" which begins "Soil isn't sexy. It's sad but true". (You could always make your own - scroll down!).

 

    "A delightful book - a bit butterfly-ish itself with magical moments of metamorphosis and exquisite precise detail; informative, lovely and unexpected, about obsession and learning and adventure and joy..." That's Patrick Barkham's The Butterfly Isles: A Summer in Search of Our Emperors and Admirals, his account of his summer's quest to find the 59 species of butterfly to be seen in the British Isles. From the Devon coast to the Scottish Highlands, this book ranges widely but is obviously suffused with enthusiasm and "infectious delight".

     To fiction now, and again illustrating the influence of the blogs, I've just bought Tales Of Protection by Erik Fosnes Hansen on the strength of Juxtabook's review. (For more fiction, please come back later).

Calling all authors

     The entire publishing/bookselling process is one that fascinates me, and I'd love to know more about it. From my position as consumer of the end product but also, to give it a grander title than it deserves, 'commentator', I'm in touch with lots of people at various points along the publishing chain and so I'm aware of some of the exigencies but I'm often surprised and mystified by perceived breakdowns or missing links in that chain, or indeed what can seem like disproportionate insertions⁽ⁱ⁾.

    Mike Faulkner highlighted this in an excellent post the other day - do read what Mike has to say, but his gist is that the writer's voice is the one least heard or most easily ignored:

"... the author, who will eat, breathe and sleep his creation and who will have made it his business to acquire as good a knowledge as anyone as to who his market is and how to reach it, is too often an undervalued resource, perceived as an interfering amateur, and sidelined, patronised, even bullied by a cabal of industry insiders who sometimes go on the basis of Doctor knows Best: 'We're the professionals, leave it to us.' "

    I know that lots of writers visit here, so I wondered what you all felt about this⁽ⁱⁱ⁾. Having delivered your manuscript, how much say do you have about the rest of the process? Cover design is often a bugbear, I know, but what about other links in the chain - promotion, for example? Is your voice heard whenever you feel the need to raise it, or are you drowned out by those who can, by virtue of their position, shout louder than you?

 

⁽ⁱ⁾Did not the publishers change the predominant colour of a book in response to pressure from a television programme?

⁽ⁱⁱ⁾By all means comment under a pseudonym if you feel the need to do so.

Good lines: on fashion

 

     "The Queen is the leader of fashion. Her dresses - about 150 each year - are made by Rose Bertin, an expensive but necessary modiste with premises on the rue Saint-Honoré. Court dress is a sort of portable prison, with its bones, its vast hoops, its trains, its stiff brocades and armoured trimmings. Hairdressing and millinery are curiously fused, and vulnerable to the caprice du moment; George Washington's troops, in battle order, sway in pomaded towers, and English-style informal gardens are set into matted locks. True, the Queen would like to break away from all this, institute an age of liberty: of the finest gauzes, the softest muslins, of simple ribbons and floating shifts. It is astonishing to find that simplicity, when conceived in exquisite taste, costs just as much as the velvets and satins ever did. The Queen adores, she says, all that is natural - in dress, in etiquette. What she adores even more are diamonds; her dealings with the Paris firm of Böhmer and Bassenge are the cause of widespread and damaging scandal. In her apartments she throws out furniture, tears down hangings, orders new - then moves elsewhere.

'I am terrified of being bored,' she says."

From A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel.

Cornflower Book Group 2010: Volume 11

 

     "During summer games of hide and seek Harriet falls in love with Vesey and his elusive, teasing ways. When he goes to Oxford, she cherishes his photograph and waits for the letter that never comes. Years pass, and Harriet stifles her imaginings; with a husband and daughter, she excels at respectability. But then Vesey reappears, and her marriage seems to melt away. Harriet is older, it is much too late, but she is still in love with him."

    That's Elizabeth Taylor's 1951 novel A Game of Hide and Seek, said by many - her biographer Nicola Beauman included - to be her finest work, and the one I've chosen for the Cornflower Book Group to read in November.

    Recognising that some of us had trouble with Troubles, and without wishing to pre-empt next week's discussion, that The Bridge ... could fall a bit flat, as it were, I thought that for our next book we might return to the sort of territory occupied by Elizabeth Jenkins' marvellous The Tortoise and the Hare which went down so well last year.

    This "story whose theme is love" and which "has something of the lucid delicacies of Persuasion together with, at moments, more than a touch of the fiery-icy strangeness of Wuthering Heights" (Elizabeth Bowen), may already be well known to many of you; it will be new to me (though I recognise the cover of this edition from my mother's bookshelves!).

    Let's come back here to talk about the book from Saturday, 20th. November - copies should be easily found through shops, libraries, and online (The Book Depository has it at a very competitive price and offers free worldwide delivery). If you haven't read along with us before but would like to join in now, please do!

Catching up

 

- Thankyou to everyone who took part in our informal poll the other day - your comments were very much as I expected. According to your answers, blogs have a great influence on your book buying (or borrowing), far moreso than do print reviews, so let no-one say we don't sell books!

 

- Howard Jacobson was interviewed about his Booker win: "It’s not a prize for effort. It’s not a prize for youth, it’s not a consolation prize for me”, he says vehemently. “It’s a prize for bloody writing. We desperately need it because fewer and fewer people know what writing is. They are not taught it any more. They are not taught to read."

I agree.

 - There were so many lovely comments on cross-generational reading, and my thanks to all and especially to Diane Meier for her contribution. If you read Diane's novel The Season of Second Chances you'll meet the Henry James she refers to in her comment (poor chap!), what she says reminds me that I do like the American way of referring to a dog by both given name and surname; that gets the paw-print of approval from Mollie Howlett, too.

The alchemist

   The dour Lancashire village of Fetherhoughton; the austerity of the 1950s. At the presbytery, Father Angwin has lost his faith, his housekeeper Miss Dempsey seeks solace in her domestic duties - "There was always something one could polish. And if ingenuity were really exhausted, one could turn mattresses" - and the Bishop ("His Corpulence") comes meddling in church affairs. Up the road is the convent, grim to say the least, where poor young Sister Philomena does her best but cannot fully submit to the life her vows entail.

   In her prize-winning 1989 novel Fludd, Hilary Mantel takes the theme of transformation and applies it to her unsuspecting characters with dazzling effect. With the arrival out of a storm of the 'curate', Fludd, far-reaching change is begun and lives are touched and opened: "falseness can no longer be endured, truth must out. There must be new combinations within the heart: passions never witnessed, notions never before formed." As soon becomes clear, Fludd is no ordinary cleric, and while he's not Mary Poppins, in Fetherhoughton 'til the wind changes, nonetheless he has work to do and unusual powers with which to do it (his self-replenishing whisky bottle reminded me of Cary Grant and Monty Woolley's sherry in The Bishop's Wife!).

    I discovered this book by reading Juxtabook's review (what were we saying about the influence of blogs?), and it is every bit as good as Catherine says it is. Funny, magical, touching, wise, intelligent - the list of its attributes is long; here you'll find writing of great poise and style, a comic's gift for timing and a dramatist's ear for dialogue, but its unusual charm lies in the way in which Hilary Mantel treats her transformative theme. "The real Fludd (1574-1637)," she tells us in a note, "was a physician, scholar and alchemist. In alchemy, everything has a literal and factual description, and in addition a description that is symbolic and fantastical." However you choose to apply that to the story, whoever or whatever you think Fludd may be - and the book leaves the reader to make up their own mind about things - I found it a marvellously entertaining, clever work and I enjoyed it hugely.

Cross-generational reading

   It's lovely when you can share books among the generations, and I find I pass on a lot of mine in one direction or another. For instance, I usually have a pile of books waiting for my mother which I add to whenever I've read something I think she would enjoy. She's just had Diane Meier's The Season of Second Chances and loved it (as did I), likewise Rosy Thornton's The Tapestry of Love (another delight, and just out in paperback), and Stone's Fall (post here) was a hit with her, too. Traffic comes the other way with Mum giving me her Susan Hill Simon Serrailler novels, for instance.

   Of the children, it tends to be Harriet (14) who takes most interest in the books I'm reading, and to her I hand over Alan Bradley's Flavia de Luce mysteries ( The Sweetness at ... and The Weed that Strings ...), Alexander McCall Smith's Mma Ramotswe series, and Henrietta's War (another great favourite), while in turn she lent me her copy of I Capture the Castle when the Book Group read it recently. She's away on a school trip just now with Carl Hiaasen's Scat- which happens to be about a school trip, though the book is set in the Florida Everglades while H. and co. are in swamp-free Rome.

    While some books have cross-generational appeal, there are others which one suspects are most fully appreciated by a very specific age group - I'd suggest that Lord of the Rings might be one of them, appealing mostly (though not exclusively!) to people below their mid-20s, say. What do you think?

The Man Booker Prize 2010

     And the winner is ...

The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson: "transfixing", "plangent, forthright, subtle".

Do blogs sell books?

    I've heard it said by people who supposedly speak with authority that blogs don't sell books. Now, I know that even the most popular book blogs won't have a readership to rival that of the newspaper book pages, but even so, I'll wager that we have greater influence among our own, smaller readership than do the reviews in the press - that is, you may be more likely to listen to the views of Blogger A or B, whose tastes are similar to yours and who feels more like a friend recommending a book than those of the (perhaps anonymous or less familiar) reviewer in the paper. That point has topical relevance, too, in that tonight sees the announcement of the 2010 Man Booker Prize winner, and a huge upsurge in sales for that book, whatever it is, is guaranteed, but some readers who instinctively shy away from Booker books and the like may yet be drawn to them by a blogger's having paved the way, as it were - by a post along the lines of "I enjoyed it, so you may, too."

    I am still a regular buyer of books, despite being sent so many by publishers, and while I read the newspaper book pages, most of the books I end up getting are those I've read about on blogs. Often the acquisition is months after I've first seen the post in question, but I keep a note of titles I want and will either get them myself, as and when, or put them on my Christmas and birthday lists as suggestions for the family when they ask me what I'd like. No-one would be able to trace the eventual purchase of Book X back to a review by Blogger Y, but that is where the sale arose. Furthermore, when I in turn come to talk about the book here, others will read it, and that viral effect shouldn't be underestimated.

    To go back to publishers for a moment, I'd love to know something about their policies on sending out review copies, but judging from the multitude I am offered and the number of individual houses or publicists within the big houses who are regularly in touch with me, they must see the blogs as a worthwhile means of spreading the word about their books.

    So, let's have an informal poll:

1. Have you ever bought a book or borrowed one from the library (I'm including borrowings as library requests must have some trickle-down effect on sales) as a result of reading about it on a blog or blogs?

2. If you blog about books yourself, have any of your readers ever come back to you to tell you that they've read a certain book because of your post on it, or have you been aware of such a purchase through affiliate links?

    My answers to these questions are "yes" and "yes", but I'd love to know yours if you have a moment to spare.

Living inside a book

    I remember when Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall won last year's Man Booker prize, Adèle said it would have the consequence of boosting sales of large handbags as you'd certainly need something capacious to carry it around!

    I'm in Mantel mode again now, having just finished Fludd (which is absolutely marvellous) and then - unusually for me - going immediately to buy another of her books to follow on with. As the Wolf Hall sequel is still some time off, I chose the enormous, 880-page A Place of Greater Safety. No large handbag required for this one, though, as I've got it on the Kindle and can carry it anywhere without walking lopsidedly and straining my shoulder.

    In the introduction to this epic of the French Revolution, Hilary Mantel says "I have tried to write a novel that gives the reader scope to change opinions, change sympathies: a book that one can think and live inside". As the little progress bar at the bottom of the screen tells me that after one evening I have read a mere 5% of the text, it looks as though I shall be living in it for quite some time - and that's a cheering thought, don't you think? I mean, if the book suits the reader, it's a pleasure prolonged to stay with it for a lengthy period.