Cornflower Books

Words from pictures

    In this short talk, novelist Tracy Chevalier explains why she is selective when it comes to studying pictures, how the 'what if ...?' questions those images spark open up possibilities, and thus how she finds the story inside a painting. Simple!

                                            ~~~~~

    Tracy Chevalier was the subject of a 'have you read ...?' post last year.

Three by Thirkell

    I have three of Angela Thirkell's books to read over the next few days, and having never read her before I am greatly looking forward to them.

    High Rising (1933) is the first of Angela Thirkell's "brilliantly satirical English comedies set in the fictional county of Barsetshire. Successful lady novelist Laura Morland and her boisterous young son Tony set off to spend Christmas at her country home in the sleepy surrounds of High Rising. But Laura's wealthy friend and neighbour George Knox has taken on a scheming secretary whose designs on marriage to her employer threaten the delicate social fabric of the village. Can clever, practical Laura rescue George from Miss Grey's clutches and, what's more, help his daughter Miss Sibyl Knox to secure her longed-for engagement?"

    Wild Strawberries (1934) is "a sparkling 1930s English romantic comedy, perfect for fans of Stella Gibbons, PG Wodehouse or EF Benson: Pretty, impecunious Mary Preston, newly arrived as a guest of her Aunt Agnes at the magnificent wooded estate of Rushwater, falls head over heels for handsome playboy David Leslie. Meanwhile, Agnes and her mother, the eccentric matriarch Lady Emily, have hopes of a different, more suitable match for Mary. At the lavish Rushwater dance party, her future happiness hangs in the balance . . ."

    They both sound delightful, and fifty or so pages into the first one, I'm hooked!

    Three Houses (1931) is not a novel but a memoir in which the author recalls "the three houses in which she grew up and the childhood memories their walls contain. Focusing first on ‘The Grange’, where her grandfather, the celebrated Pre-Raphaelite painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones, set the cultivated tone, Thirkell also reminisces over her parents’ home in Kensington Square and the Burne-Jones seaside retreat, where her cousin, Rudyard Kipling, lived across the green. Her elaborate portraits of the three houses and the lives within provide an invaluable insight into late Victorian life, while the personal recollections of Thirkell’s famous grandfather reveal a loving family man behind the renown. A tale of forbidden explorations, Punch and Judy shows, and adventures in the garden, Three Houses is beautifully evocative of the innocent quality of childhood. Providing a snapshot of history from the busy literary centre of London to the English coast, these stunning memoirs are both reminiscent of the golden days of youth and an interesting vision of a writer and the early influences that informed her later work."

    All three books look like real treats, and for those hungering for more on them, Geranium Cat and The Captive Reader have full posts on the novels.

Rook

   

     " ... the past is multilayered and shifting ... the passage of time and the surfacing of untold stories will reveal new histories, changing what was previously thought to be 'true'."

    Those lines from Jane Rusbridge's Rook are spoken with reference to the received version of history, but are just as applicable to the book itself. Set on the Sussex coast in the ancient village of Bosham, it is an exquisitely sensitive story of love and loss and of how the past seeps into the present. 

    Nora is a cellist who has abandoned her international career to return to her family home by the sea. She occupies her days with a bit of desultory teaching and keeping an eye on her elderly mother Ada who seems to live increasingly in a world of her own where her memories keep her company. While Ada barely acknowledges her daughter's existence, it's a fledgling rook Nora finds half-dead in a ditch which becomes both her protector and her solace as she nurses him back to strength, their bond intensifying over the hot months of a troubled summer.

    As Nora takes to the creek path at dawn each day, running to keep her sadness at bay and reconcile herself with what she has lost - for it's clear that fate has both given and taken away - so village life goes on around her. Bosham church is the focus of attention of a television producer who wants to make a documentary about King Canute's drowned daughter, believed to be buried in the church itself. Nora's late father, an archaeologist, had worked on the grave of this Saxon princess, and Jonny consults Nora as a source of accurate local knowledge, but theories as to the true identity of the occupants of the tombs under the chancel arch divide the people of the parish, and any exhumation must be the subject of a vote. A personal story of buried truths is played out alongside a wider one reaching back into legend and forward to conviction and belief.

    Spanning six months from early summer to winter, the narrative circles and spirals, shifts and settles like a flock of birds in a wheeling swoop before coming to rest. Its shape and texture lets the many layers of the characters' histories rise gradually to the surface, and every scene uses clear-sighted observation to raise the grain of its fabric to almost tangibly detailed effect. It is an affecting work, closely woven, beautifully tempered, and it bears out the promise of Jane's first novel, The Devil's Music, in fine style; it's a superb piece of writing.

Readers recommend - as do bloggers

    Good Houskeeping magazine is launching a Reader Recommended Books scheme. In association with publishers, copies of submitted books will go out to 50 GH readers who then decide whether or not they would recommend them to a friend. Sufficient recommendations result in a 'Good Housekeeping Reader Recommended' logo appearing on the book's cover, and coverage to that effect in the magazine.

    I'm all for helping readers find books they will enjoy but what puzzles me about this initiative is what the magazine's editorial director Lindsay Nicholson (as quoted here) says lies behind it: "It is very difficult to get independent, non-agenda-driven suggestions about what one would like to read and this is an authentic way of doing it." She goes on, "We’re constantly told to never judge a book by its cover but in some cases we don’t know if we can judge a book by its reviews either. This is why we’re calling on our trusted consumers to review a selection of books in their home to offer peer-to-peer recommendations.”

    I'd have thought that in these days of so many high-quality book blogs, the books pages (admittedly not what they were in terms of volume) in newspapers and magazines, 'staff choices' in bookshops, the proliferation of book groups, recommendations from the likes of Richard & Judy and The TV Book Club, (and not forgetting excellent publications such as this one), there was no shortage of easily-available advice and informed, unbiased comment on books, no matter what you like to read.

    I've said it often before but it's relevant here - one of the great strengths of book blogs is that they are written by individuals, and it takes very little time for a reader to see how far that individual's taste overlaps with their own, and thus whether the books a blogger rates highly are likely to appeal. Knowing that a book is 'Cornflower recommended', if you happen to share Cornflower's literary predilections, may be worth more to you than the consensus of a group on a magazine's mailing list. Granted, perhaps the target audience for the scheme are people who aren't drawn to blogs and specialist books pages but are more inclined to look at, for example, the supermarket book selection and see what catches their eye from what's on offer there, in which case they might find a 'sticker of approval' of one kind or another helpful in making their choice, but still, I'm surprised that the editor identifies a need for more independent advice.

    Would that I could have a 'Cornflower recommends' logo put on my favourite books, but that fantasy aside, it strikes me that while book jackets feature quotes from well-known writers or from newspaper reviews, publishers might do well to include bloggers' verdicts more often too. I am quoted from time to time both on covers and marketing material and on Amazon listings, and usually I've discovered quite by chance that what I've said in a review has later been used in this way - and of course my comments have always been spontaneous and genuine, never made to order or in terms of some agenda (as Lindsay Nicholson refers to above); but it would be lovely to see a little more prominence given to the opinions of bloggers - we are indepenedent, after all, and blogs do sell books!

Watching a book

    I've been watching the film From Time to Time - perfect Sunday evening viewing (half the cast of Downton Abbey is in it), a touching story, a lovely house* at Christmas, ghosts and more ... It's based on Lucy Boston's book The Chimneys of Green Knowe which I haven't read, but apparently it takes quite a few liberties with the story. Still, with Maggie Smith and a lazy Labrador at the heart of things, it's very enjoyable in its own right.

    It's a long time since I've read The Children of Green Knowe, the first of the series of which The Chimneys is the second, but as far as I recall it would make very good Christmas reading. Any fans amongst us?

*Lucy Boston's own house, in which she set her Green Knowe books is The Manor, Hemingford Grey.

Cornflower Book Group - The Glass Room

   

    Simon Mawer's The Glass Room is notable for its consistency. In its uniformity of pace and pitch it exploits its subject matter fully and perfectly; it's level, restrained, calm, even when the events it describes are dramatic ones. Was the ending (the reunion of Ottilie and Marika) perhaps a little too neat? If so, in terms of that consistency, I didn't mind.

    The house itself, based on Mies van der Rohe's Villa Tugendhat in Brno, is such a presence in the book, "a machine for living in" which is a family dwelling and piece of modernist self-expression, becoming a laboratory for experiments on racial characteristics and identity under the Nazis, suffering under Soviet occupation, and later being used as a gymnasium and centre for physiotherapy under the Communists. A place of light and space and purity and "the embodiment of reason" will never again be a home but instead becomes, eventually, a building notable in its own right - of itself, "it just is".

    The plot makes much of the strong contrast between the house's serenity and clean, clear lines, its open plan style of living, and the troubled, complicated lives of its owners. The Landauers' indiscretions, the infidelity, deceit, secrets, fear and longing clutter the expanses of near-empty space, and their unfortunate choices and the external events over which they have no control deny them what had seemed to be the limitless possibilities of the future. Their ultimate exile takes the house, der Raum as Simon Mawer explains it in his Afterword, from them forever. The way of life they had envisaged, the Glass Room or Glastraum emblematic of a place in which "democracy would prevail and art and science would combine to bring happiness to all people" was in the end no more than a trick of the light, an optical illusion; it was never to be.

    In what I thought was an excellent novel, the prose had its own glass-like quality - smoothly reflecting and refracting the characters' temperaments, translucent or opaque to match their moods, subtle but strong in revealing the emerging story. Reading it was an immersive experience, and I was sorry to leave this very fine book.

    What did you think of it?

 

Edited to add: there is now a cake (of doubtful quality, it must be said) for this book here.

Friday reads

    I have two fine books on the go just now, Jane Rusbridge's second novel Rook (which confirms the talent shown in her first one), and A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander which is just the thing to read if you're fancying going in for Grand Designs.
   
    Firstly the novel, and Rook is "a mesmerising story of family, legacy and turning back the tides, beautifully evoking the shifting Sussex sands, and the rich seam of history lying just beneath them". Jane's narrative is one of layers, each scene revealing a little more of her characters' past or present and what moves and motivates them, and similarly the network of connections - obvious or more deeply hidden - which informs them. More on it soon, but suffice to say for now that I'm loving it.

    I'm not very far into A Pattern Language (which was warmly recommended by a friend), but it's about the elements which go into making a building or room - whether a domestic one or for public use - a successful and harmonious place. For example, the pages shown above are on "entrance transition" - "buildings, and expecially houses, with a graceful transition between the street and the inside, are more tranquil than those which open directly off the street. The experience of entering a building influences the way you feel inside the building. If the transition is too abrupt there is no feeling of arrival, and the inside of the building fails to be an inner sanctum." It goes on to explain in detail why this is and how to achieve the optimum arrangement. It's all quite fascinating.

    Those are my 'Friday reads', what are yours?

Here's to the authors

    I was writing a short post about good service on the other blog and it occurred to me to continue the theme here and just say something by way of a thankyou to the authors whose books give us all such pleasure (and something to talk about!).

    For those of us for whom reading is an important part of life, a comfort or a source of inspiration, an entertainment or a spark of enlightenment, books are enriching, and the people who make them deserve our appreciation. When you consider what goes into a novel, say, from initial idea to finished piece - the months and years of painstaking work: the research, the drafting and re-drafting, the editing and polishing to develop plot and character, to fashion setting and express theme, to make a cohesive whole which will absorb and satisfy a demanding reader - what is involved amounts to a considerable achievement. Other art forms require equal skill and effort in the making and are similarly rewarding to experience, (and of course even where books are concerned not all are first class, and as a reader I often find cause for complaint), but to those authors who can really write, whose creative spirit and gift for words gives rise to simply wonderful literature, thankyou - you labour not in vain!

Books of the day, nos. 2 and 3

   

    As I said over on the other blog (where you will find Book of the Day No. 1), I've been looking at some of the books due to be published early next year - and more on them soon - and I've chosen one to put in the spotlight here today, On Writing by A.L. Kennedy:

"After six novels, five story collections and two books of non-fiction, and countless international prizes, A.L. Kennedy certainly has the authority to talk about the craft of writing books – it’s just a wonder she’s found the time. These are missives from the authorial front line – urgent and vivid, full of the excitement, fury and frustration of trying to make thousands of words into a publishable book. At the core of On Writing is the hugely popular blog that Kennedy writes for The Guardian – and we follow her during a three-year period when she finished one collection of stories and started another, and wrote a novel in between. Readers and aspiring writers will have almost everything they need to know about the complexities of researching, writing and publishing fiction, but they will be receiving this wisdom conversationally, from one of the funniest and most alert of our contemporary authors.

Alongside the blogs are brilliant essays on character, voice, writers’ workshops and writers’ health and the book ends with the transcript of Kennedy’s celebrated one-person show about writing and language that she has performed round the world to huge acclaim. Read together, all these pieces add up to the most intimate master-class imaginable from one of the finest – and most humane – writers in our language."

                                                  ~~~~~

   

    From writing to reading, and the good news today is that Linda Gillard's very popular novel House of Silence (click on the title for my post on it) is now available as a paperback, having previously been published in e-book form; US readers will find it here. The book was one of Amazon UK's "Best of 2011", and given its style and content - it's best described as "a country house mystery ... a family drama ... a gothic romantic comedy" - I'm not at all surprised at its success. I'm quoted on the back cover saying "it's one of those books you'll put everything on hold for", and I certainly found it compulsive reading.

A banquet for the thinking reader

   

    It's tremendously gratifying when someone takes up one of my recommendations and gets in touch later to tell me that they loved the book as much as I did. LizF did just that and she kindly left a comment today re. John Saturnall's Feast by Lawrence Norfolk (which I wrote about here); this is what she had to say:

"It is very rare that I get to the end of a book and want to go back to the beginning and start again but that was exactly how I felt when I finished this - just a shame that the library had to have it back! John Saturnall's Feast is one of those books that you inhabit and to think that I would have missed it if not for your review because I had struggled with one of Lawrence Norfolk's earlier books - thank you SO much for a real reading treat!! It is now on my Christmas list and if that fails I will just have to wait until it comes out in paperback and buy it myself (just hope they keep that gorgeous cover!)."

    Thankyou, Liz!

    It won't be long before I choose the 'Cornflower Blues' (my books of the year) - no prizes for guessing which title will be at the top of the fiction list.

My day in books - a meme

I began the day by Waiting for Sunrise

before breakfasting on John Saturnall's Feast

and admiring The Colour of Milk.

On my way to work I saw Four Hedges

and walked by The Knot

to avoid Mrs Robinson's Disgrace,

but I made sure to stop at The Magic Apple Tree.

In the office, my boss said, Touch Not the Cat,

and sent me to research The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds.

At lunch with A Kind Man

I noticed Archie

in The Glass Room

greatly enjoying Little Bones.

Then on the journey home, I contemplated The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life

because I have Patience

and am drawn to The Old Ways.

Settling down for the evening in The Music Room,

I studied Bel Canto

by Secondhand Daylight

before saying goodnight At Last.

    I did something very similar to this one last year, completing the sentences with the titles of books reads over the past few months. Please do have a go yourself and if you do so on your own blog, pop back and leave a comment here with the link to your post so that we can be sure to read it.

    (If anyone wants to to read more about any of the books listed, I've linked to their posts, where applicable, here: Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd, John Saturnall's Feast by Lawrence Norfolk, The Colour of Milk by Nell Leyshon, Four Hedges by Clare Leighton The Knot by Jane Borodale, Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace by Kate Sumerscale, The Magic Apple Tree by Susan Hill, Touch Not The Cat by Mary Stewart, The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds by Alexander McCall Smith, A Kind Man by Susan Hill, Archie by Domenica More Gordon, The Glass Room by Simon Mawer, Little Bones by Janette Jenkins, The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life by William Nicholson, The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane, The Music Room by William Fiennes, Bel Canto by Ann Patchett.)

Good lines - on happy endings

   

  “But the ‘consolation’ of fairy-stories has another aspect than the imaginative satisfaction of ancient desires. Far more important is the Consolation of the Happy Ending. Almost I would venture to assert that all complete fairy-stories must have it. At least I would say that Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of Fairy-story. Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses this opposite - I will call it Eucatastrophe. The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function.

    The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’ (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially ‘escapist’, nor ‘fugitive’. In its fairy-tale - or otherworld - setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

    It is the mark of a good fairy-story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the ‘turn’ comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality.”

From On Fairy-Stories, to be found in Tree and Leaf by J.R.R. Tolkien.

    This article by Salley Vickers explores a similar theme.

Gifted by Juxtabook

    Catherine at Juxtabook (and of course C.L. Hawley Books) has just set up a blog called Gifted by Juxtabook which will help find books for very bright 9-14 year olds.

    I think this is an excellent idea and will be, I'm sure, a very helpful service, flagging up well-written books for able young readers, but noting the 'watch points' - the age-appropriateness of content of various types. Follow the link above to read all about it.

Taking stock - 2

    Four dangerously tall and unstable TBR piles have become six smaller, more easily viewed ones. Trouble is, that's only the half of it. Where to put the rest?

Edited to add: it's time for a cull, and I shall have to be ruthless!

A good guide to good books

 

    A few years ago I took out a subscription to The Good Book Guide, and that was money well spent because countless issues later I still find an enormous amount of good reading featured within its pages, and its reviews have led me to many excellent books. Some time later, I got the opportunity to write for the Guide; I continue to do so every month and I recently filed my 250th. review for the magazine. 

 

   

    As a reader, though, what I love about it is not just the range of books covered in every issue, although that is pleasingly wide, but the clear and concise nature of the reviews; they do what I try to do here, that is get to the heart of a book - its subject matter and what makes it worth reading - in just a few sentences. Tell me succinctly what a book is about and what's good about it, and I'll just as quickly decide whether it's one I want to read; it's that sort of essential summary I want from any literary publication, and the Guide, which in addition includes book extracts, author interviews and editor's choice features, provides it in stylish form.

 

    The Guide has recently launched a new website and has taken to social media with both a Facebook page and a Twitter account. Do have a look, 'like' and follow should you wish to, and perhaps consider subscribing because even in these days of multitudinous book blogs and websites, The Good Book Guide is a very good guide to good books.

Have you read ... The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets?

    Eva Rice's novel The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets was a big hit when it first came out a few years ago. Set in 1950s England and featuring a young girl and her eccentric family, it drew comparisons with Nancy Mitford and Dodie Smith, reviews constantly referring to it as "charming" and "enchanting".

    I've had the book on my wish list all this time and have still not got a copy, but it came to mind today when I saw this short interview with Eva Rice in which she's talking about her next novel - a sort of sequel to The Lost Art ... - The Misinterpretation of Tara Jupp which is due out in January.

    So, have you read The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets? Does it indeed appeal to fans of I Capture The Castle and The Pursuit of Love? Do men tend to like it or is it very much a girls' book?

A room of one's own

 

    "Then it came to me .... a conservatory, the kind the Victorians had, lean-to, with white-painted brick up to waist level, and ornamental mouldings and gutterings. If I could have that, with a door at one end of it and an electricity supply for heat, a well-insulated, tiled floor, then I should have my room, private, inaccessible from the house, a room in which to work and sit and look out and think, and also where I could try to grow a fig and a vine, and have a lemon tree and some lilies in pots. I would put a bench along one side, for bringing on a few early beans and lettuces and other tender plants (though this was not going to be in any sense a greenhouse), and a desk-height table, running all the rest of the way round, for working at. A sloping roof, with slatted, bamboo shades, and careful ventilation everywhere, and all would be well in every season.... Such a room of my own... is the stuff of dreams."

    That passage is from Susan Hill's lovely The Magic Apple Tree: A Country Year, and while she doesn't tell us whether she achieved her dream study at Moon Cottage, I hope she did - I'd rather like something similar. How about you?

(The picture is of a glasshouse on a grander scale: yours - with a castle - for around £2,000,000.)

Lessons in creativity

   
    Just a quick link to Julie Burstein's warm and powerful TED talk 4 Lessons in Creativity, in case you haven't seen it. Needless to say, Julie's book Spark: How Creativity Works has gone on my wish list.

Brown paper packages tied up with strings

Click on the image to enlarge

    I was the lucky recipient of a brown paper package tied up with string today, and inside it was a book bag! My thanks for this gift go to kind Adam and Chloe at The Willoughby Book Club - my name came out of the hat in the monthly draw they hold for their Twitter followers and Facebook fans, so I've got the goodies.
   
    The Club itself is an enterprising idea designed to make the regular giving of books easy, particularly if you've little time to shop for or wrap presents yourself or if you're unsure what to get to suit someone's tastes; click here to see how it works.

    The Willoughby bag printed with Lewis Carroll's White Rabbit is a lovely addition to my small collection of book bags (there is this one, for instance, and one which matches the Alexander McCall Smith deckchair), and whether kept as a handy shopping bag, pressed into service as receptacles for knitting works-in-progress, or even used for actually carrying books around (I have a few which publishers have generously given me already packed with books - joy!), they are always welcome, so thankyou again, Willoughby Book Worms.

                                                     ~~~~~

    Still on the subject of gift-giving, the ever-creative Sarah has opened an Etsy shop, her first item for sale being a personalised reading and writing package - a great idea!

Ian Rankin and the Case of the Disappearing Detective

    You may remember the post from a few months ago, How do you begin a novel? Anyone who found that interesting (and the comments, particularly Linda's, were enlightening) may get a lot from watching the most recent programme in the arts series Imagine with Alan Yentob: Ian Rankin and the Case of the Disappearing Detective. Filmed here in Edinburgh and up in the north of Scotland during the writing process of the new Rebus novel Standing in Another Man's Grave, it shows how even this most seasoned of writers faces the fear of the blank page.