Cornflower Books

The enchanted armchair

    I've stolen my post title today from Bloomsbury Books. In their latest 'Editor's Picks' newsletter they draw attention to several recent publications which they've listed under headings such as 'humour pick', 'history pick' and my favourite, the 'enchanting armchair pick'. The novel they've selected for that is Lawrence Norfolk's John Saturnall's Feast, and that's an apt choice indeed (I certainly was enchanted by it), but I thought I'd just tweak the category name slightly and ask you all to suggest a book to suit 'the enchanted armchair' - that is, something which utterly engrosses, delights and transports you, and lifts the spirits too, perhaps.

    There's a passage in Touch Not the Cat which is getting at something similar, I think. Bryony is in the old schoolroom at Ashley Court and she sees the familiar things of her childhood:

"A white-painted shelf still held the beloved story books, the Andrew Langs and the Arthur Ransomes and the C.S. Lewises, their battered covers containing each its bright autonomous world, those magical kingdoms one is made free of as a child, and thereafter owns all one's life."

    So yes, I'd expect some children's books to be nominated for our enchanted armchair, but which adults' ones would you put there? I'm looking for spell-binding reads here, not necessarily set in other worlds but which so take you out of yourself that you feel as if you are in a very special place. Curl up in a comfy chair and away you go! Any suggestions?

Have you read ... Philip Pullman?

   

    I've been watching the BBC documentary, The World of Philip Pullman. First broadcast in 2001 and written and narrated by novelist and bographer D.J.Taylor, it's an incisive appraisal of the work and beliefs of a man who, from a garden shed in Oxford, conjured another world. I'm referring, of course, to His Dark Materials, the trilogy for which he is best known, children's books which have found an enormous adult readership.

    Northern Lights, the first book in the series, was recommended to us by a publisher friend not long after it came out. I read it avidly, unable to put it down, and went straight on to volume 2 The Subtle Knife. Then we had to wait for the third book The Amber Spyglass, but when eventually it was published it was one of only a handful of novels I've bought in hardback on the day of release - I had been so captivated by the earlier ones that I was impatient for the conclusion. That it went on to be the first children's book longlisted for the Booker prize, and is a work which "bridged the divide between age and gender", says much.

    The documentary refers to Philip Pullman's range, likening it to that of Beethoven in moving from "the delicate and light to the hugely tragic and enormous", and it praises the sophistication of his writing. Interestingly, Pullman describes himself as a realist, not a fantasist, interested in how real people behave but finding "the mechanism of fantasy useful".

    It's been 12 years since I turned the final page of the trilogy and I'd love to read it again. Have you read Philip Pullman - any of his books - and if so, what did you think?

And the winner is ...

 

    ... Alison Morris!

    My thanks to everyone for entering the draw for a copy of Eowyn Ivey's The Snow Child and for taking the time to describe what for you are the particular pleasures of the colder months of the year - they make lovely reading in themselves.

    The trusty random number generator produced the number 49, which meant Alison's position as 49th. commenter (not counting Ruthiella who has read the book so didn't want to be entered) wins her the prize.

    I hope you will enjoy it, Alison.

Friday reads - where's your reading taking you?

   

    Reading-wise, I am in Kenya on safari with the charming members of the The Asadi Club (motto Spero meliora) thanks to Nicholas Drayson's A Guide to the Beasts of East Africa which I hope to finish today, then I'm off to Colombia with the "comic, surreal and startling" Good Offices by Evelio Rosero, "a novel that will linger long in the mind." After that I'll be in and around "the lovely crumbling old house on its moated island" which is the focus of our current CBG book Touch Not the Cat, and if I have time before I go there for real I'll be in Venice on the page with Jan Morris.

    Where's your reading taking you this Friday? What's the climate like? Are the natives friendly? Does it appeal so much you want to stay there? And one more thing - if you'd like to brave the harsh Alaskan winter, put your name into the hat for that copy of The Snow Child I'm giving away, and I'll draw the winner first thing tomorrow.

Creative Minds, Jubilee Lines, and staying in a library

    Here's something for all those interested in creativity and in mental wellbeing: the Creative Minds podcast, part of the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival. It features novelist Linda Gillard whose books are loved by so many of us here at Cornflower Books, and it's certainly worth listening to. If you're short of time and can't stay for the whole programme (around 25 minutes), you can catch Linda's segments at 4.07, 14.13 and 20.00, and as you'll hear she talks about how writing gave her the 'mental breakthrough' she needed, how it has helped her live with bipolar disorder and how her first novel Emotional Geology has inspired others to acknowledge and further their own creativity. The book Linda refers to as being enormously valuable to her in showing her the importance of valuing and responding to the creative impulse is Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives by Louise DeSalvo.
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    If you're in the market for a stimulating literary retreat, how about Gladstone's Library (pictured) at Hawarden in Wales? Among the events on their programme next year are a creative writing workshop with writer-in-residence Vanessa Gebbie (author of The Coward's Tale which I greatly admired), and the short course, Looking Back: Introducing Neo-Victorian Fiction which explores "our enduring fascination with the Victorians, both on the page and on the screen [and] offers the chance to examine not only why readers and viewers love the Victorians so much, but the many ways in which they are brought back to life.’ More details here.
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    To mark National Poetry Day, Faber are giving away the audio download of Carol Ann Duffy's anthology Jubilee Lines which features the work of sixty contemporary poets to mark sixty years of the Queen's reign. The work will be available from 7.00am today (4th. October) and you can download it here.

Chilling tales

    I know that lots of us are great fans of Susan Hill's books and will be glad to hear that Susan's latest ghost story is now out. Here is the blurb for the chilling-sounding Dolly:

    "The remoter parts of the English Fens are forlorn, lost and damp even in the height of summer. At Iyot Lock, a large decaying house, two young cousins, Leonora and Edward are parked for the summer with their ageing spinster aunt and her cruel housekeeper. At first the unpleasantness and petty meannesses appear simply spiteful, calculated to destroy Edward's equanimity. But when spoilt Leonora is not given the birthday present of a specific dolly that she wants, affairs inexorably take a much darker turn with terrifying, life destroying, consequences for everyone."

    There's a suitably atmospheric video trailer for the book here, and my post on Susan's last excellent ghost story, The Small Hand, is here.

The face behind the character

    Click here for a post on the real people behind famous literary characters, and you'll see a range of photographs of individuals on whom authors based their creations.

    The young woman pictured is a Gibson Girl called Evelyn Nesbit. L.M. Montgomery cut her photograph out of a magazine and used her as the 'model' for Anne Shirley - Anne of Green Gables!

To be read: Flight Behaviour

    "A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture. Or so it seemed for now, to a woman with flame-coloured hair who marched uphill to meet her demise. Innocence was no part of this. She knew her own recklessness and marvelled, really, at how one hard little flint of thrill could outweigh the pillowy, suffocating aftermath of a long disgrace. The shame and loss would infect her children too, that was the worst of it, in a town where everyone knew them. Even the teenage cashiers at the grocery would take an edge with her after this, clicking painted fingernails on the counter while she wrote her check, eyeing the oatmeal and frozen peas of an unhinged family and exchanging looks with the bag boy: She's that one ..."

     That is the powerful opening of Barbara Kingsolver's new novel Flight Behaviour. The book's central character is Dellarobia Turnbow, a young mother impulsively seeking out an affair. "As she hikes up a mountain road behind her house toward a secret tryst she encounters a shocking sight: a silent, forested valley filled with what looks like a lake of fire."

   

    What Dellarobia takes to be a cautionary miracle gives rise to other explanations from scientists, religious leaders and the media, and brings Appalachian farmers into close contact with journalists, opportunists, sightseers and a biologist with his own stake in the outcome.

    "A captivating, topical and deeply human story touching on class, poverty and climate change", Flight Behaviour will be published here in the UK early next month.

Edited to add: Barbara Kingsolver talks about the book in this brief video.