Cornflower Books

Dinner (and a sleepover) in a bookshop

    Click here to read all about Waterstones' recent dinner and auction in aid of Booktrust's Children's Reading Fund. The event was held in Waterstones' Piccadilly store where guests "sat down for a unique dining experience", and the auction lots included marvellous things such as a sleepover for 25 children in the shop itself with a bedtime story read by Jacqueline Wilson.

    If you read on there you'll see that the successful bidder most generously gave the prize back to the charity so that they can arrange for 25 children in care to have that experience, but all the money raised during the evening will go to providing books for disadvantaged children who don't have access to the reading resources so many of us enjoy. A worthy cause.

Good lines - the literary landscape

 

    "Mulholland looked at [Stevenson] with a curiosity that he made no effort to conceal.

    The Irish have always admired writers, unlike the Scots, who regard them with deep suspicion, and the English who try to pretend they don't exist."

    !

From Nor Will He Sleep by David Ashton (which I warmly recommend); and see also this by Pont:

 

and there's more Pont here.

                                            ~~~~~

    Speaking of literary landscapes, and going back for a moment to Thursday's post on Iceland, if anyone shares my interest in the sagas, do listen to the edition of Radio 4's In Our Time which is devoted to them (click there and scroll down for a reading list, even!), and watch this beautiful short film about the programme contributor Dr. Emily Lethbridge's research trip to Iceland and to the saga locations themselves.

Cornflower Book Group - Crusoe's Daughter

 

    Jane Gardam's novel Crusoe's Daughter takes its epigraph from Virginia Woolf's* The Common Reader:

"The pressure of life when one is fending for oneself alone on a desert island is really no laughing matter. It is no crying one either",

and this book is a life story, but both sad and funny, and it's a life in moments, observations, remembered details, 'keys' to a history, each one proffered in sentences which vary from the long to the short, the blunt or the busy, almost like so many pictures hung in a gallery.

    Polly Flint, whose story it is, is marooned by family circumstances and fate at Oversands on the north-east coast, and then as she grows up chooses to remain all but cut off, "sitting out" her life at the yellow house, working on her book "clothing [herself] in armour, hiding in a lair, hiding from pain."

    I loved so much about it: the many deft word-sketches which speak volumes; the running thread of Crusoe-comparisons with which Jane Gardam treats the themes of loneliness and isolation and the solace to be found in books; the household at Thwaite and Lady Celia with her Tennyson and Lewis Carroll much like Mrs. Fisher in The Enchanted April; the sheer verve of the narrative - there's nothing formulaic about it. It's a story of disappointments, hopes unrealised, expectations never met, but also of consolations of a sort, of pragmatism, of living as best one can. I found it a thoughtful and entertaining book and a heartening one. How about you?

 

*And Woolf, of course, makes a cameo appearance in the novel.

    (For what to eat while reading Crusoe's Daughter click here.)

Book-buying, Icelandic style

 

    It's fascinating to hear about the place books and reading have in other countries and cultures, and Madeline's post here - following her recent visit to Iceland - links to a very interesting article about the Jolabokaflod or Icelandic Christmas Book Flood.

    According to the article, not only does Iceland publish more books per capita than any other country, "the culture of giving books as presents is very deeply rooted in how families perceive Christmas as a holiday", and by the sound of it, no set of presents would be complete without a bookish element. While in the UK and US, "very few people buy lots of books", and thus many people buy few or no books, book-buying in Iceland is much more widespread with most people buying several books a year. If you read on through the article you'll also see mention of the Bokatidindi or book catalogue which is distributed free to every home by the Icelandic Publishers Association - and crucially is read - and which thus starts the annual 'book flood' around this time of year. More power to you, sensible Icelanders!

    I couldn't leave this subject without at least a token reference to Icelandic books themselves, though the only one I've read at all recently is Sjón's The Blue Fox, but that post links back to the great sagas - which could be said to have forged the Icelandic literary tradition - which I lapped up as a student, and I do have two novels by Jón Kalman Stefánsson waiting to be read.

To be read soon

    Here's what I'll be reading over the next week or so:

a new novella by Susan Hill (hurrah!), Black Sheep is set in a mining village;

Nor Will He Sleep, an Inspector McLevy mystery by David Ashton in which, in the dark streets of Edinburgh in 1887, the inspector encounters Robert Louis Stevenson ...;

Gavin Maxwell's first book, Harpoon at a Venture, "packed with anecdotes and beautiful evocations of the Hebrides ... a real eye-opener";

Jamie Ford's Songs of Willow Frost, a novel about a young boy's search for his mother, "his attempts to confront the mysteries of the past and his connection to an exotic film star";

but for now I'm in the closing, nail-biting pages of Simon Sebag Montefiore's One Night in Winter, and also greatly enjoying Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things.

Lost in a book

    I do hope this advert hasn't been scripted and is really all the children's own words, but either way it's a great reminder of how a young reader can be 'lost' in a book.

    Mr. C. tells a story of his childhood: at school during break one day he was so taken up with The Hobbit that he was completely oblivious to the fact that a classmate had dropped and smashed a bottle of milk right beside his desk. Does this capacity to enter a fictional world - and leave the real one - inevitably diminish as we grow older, I wonder.

    When were you last lost in a book - and what was it?

Reading in a churchyard

    Bronze statue of St. Edmund of Abingdon by Rodney Munday, St. Edmund Hall, Oxford. There are more views of him here, and apparently students are often to be found keeping him company, reading on the seat beside him.

N.B.

 

     Just a little reminder that next Saturday (the 28th.) is Crusoe's Daughter day, so there's still time to read it if you feel like it; (I won't pre-empt the discussion other than to say that I loved it). Looking ahead to October and November, the CBG books for those months are listed here.

                              ~~~~~

    Changing the subject, there's an interesting exchange of views and observations on bookshops going on in the comments on this post, and they include some very helpful and illuminating contributions from Blackwell's staff - do have a look.

A process rather like knitting

 

     "One of the most distinctive features of the Golden Age is the fact that its longest lasting and best remembered writers were female. Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngiao Marsh – the four Queens of Crime – came, at least in retrospect, to dominate our picture of crime-writing in the 1930s.

    Why did these women come to the fore, and why are they still read today more often than their brilliantly talented male counterparts Nicholas Blake and G. K. Chesterton?

    In part, it could have been the subject matter towards which they leaned: the detailed and the domestic, stories with lots of female characters, the layering up of a densely constructed plot through a process rather like knitting."

    That's Lucy Worsley talking about 'The Queens of Detective Fiction', and you can read the rest of her short article here. I like the knitting analogy - no loose ends, no dropped stitches, just the right amount of ease, and an even tension throughout ....

Literary locations

    I spent a happy time browsing in Blackwell's in Oxford last week (and then went on their lovely Inklings walking tour), but I was pleased to see the shop had some very interesting and eclectic displays in the main ground floor area - which was as far as I got in the time available. Among them were shelves of fiction arranged according to location, both countries and cities, (they had magnanimously even given Cambridge some representation, I noticed), and I was all set to choose one of their Oxford-set novels when it was time to go and I didn't manage to get back later in the day as I'd planned.

    If a book's setting is one of the characteristics to which you pay attention, take a look at The Book Globe where Nick Sidwell and Maddy Melrose are busy putting virtual pins in a map of the world so that anyone can find a book set in a particular location. They have begun with all the Booker Prize winners and shortlistees (that's 267 novels so far) but they plan to go on to include as many books as they can so that, as they say here, users can "find a novel set in a place they are about to visit. See which ones take place close to home. Explore a city through its varied fictional counterparts. Discover a new country. Or simply bask in the fact that great storytelling is defined by an unbreakable connection, however intangible it sometimes feels, to the world we live in." It's a lovely idea, I think, and I'm looking forward to seeing the map's population of books grow.

    Since we're on the subject of literary locations, here's an Oxford one for you, and from a very recently published book: above is the Founder's Tower, Magdalen College, where Paige is taken to live with Warden in Samantha Shannon's The Bone Season.

    And one last thing, seeing The Book Globe has reminded me that another reading map is long, long overdue! I shall have to give it some thought.

Bookish stationery

    The 'Collectable Books' Notecard Set, exclusive to C.L. Hawley Books - get yours here!

If you can't go to the festival you can always read the books

    The Blenheim Palace Literary Festival opens tomorrow, and while I'd love to attend many of the events taking place there over the next few days, I shall have to content myself with adding to my wish list on the basis of their programme, and here are a few things which caught my eye:

    Kari Herbert, daughter of explorer Sir Wally Herbert, will be appearing at the Festival on Thursday to talk about her book Heart of the Hero: The Remarkable Women Who Inspired the Great Polar Explorers which looks at - among others - Kathleen Scott, Emily Shackleton, and Kari's mother Marie Herbert. Incidentally, turning the subject round to look at women inspired by polar explorers, if you don't already know it, do take a look at Susanna Jones's novel When Nights Were Cold.

    Also on Thursday, Ruth Rendell will be in Woodstock to discuss the latest in her Inspector Wexford series, No Man's Nightingale. In this the 24th. book, Reg comes out of retirement to help his former colleague Mike Burden investigate the murder of an unpopular vicar.

    One of my best books of the year so far is William Nicholson's Motherland, and one of the ones I'm most looking forward to reading is D.J. Taylor's The Windsor Faction, so Friday's event which sees those two authors in conversation on the art of writing fiction based around the events of World War II sounds like a real treat, and a must for me had I been able to go.

    I've long been meaning to read something by Rachel Hore (D.J. Taylor's wife) and still haven't done so, but her latest book The Silent Tide, set in the world of publishing in both the present day and the late 1940s/early '50s looks good. Rachel's Sunday morning event is billed as "an intimate chat about books and writing over coffee" and sounds fun.

    Virago have been republishing Rumer Godden's novels, and as the only one I've read so far has been Black Narcissus I have a lot to look forward to. At Blenheim on Sunday, Rumer Godden's daughter will be in conversation with her mother's biographer, Anne Chisholm, looking back at the author's life and writing, and Anne Chisholm's book, Rumer Godden: A Storytellers's Life, is one I'd like to read.

    Incidentally, I've linked to this before but it bears repeating, and that is Jenny Brown's television interview with Rumer Godden, and another from the same series - and on this her 97th. birthday, too - that featuring the much-loved Mary Stewart; (and fans of Lady Stewart's will no doubt be flocking to take part in Anbolyn's Mary Stewart Reading Week!)

Magical Books

    If you should be in Oxford up to the 27th. of October, and you have time to take in a small exhibition, then do visit Magical Books at the Bodleian Library.

    The website to which I've linked there gives a comprehensive summary of themes and images of many of the exhibits, but among them are Shakespeare's First Folio, a dinner plate which inspired Alan Garner's The Owl Service, C.S. Lewis's map of Narnia, and an alethiometer commissioned by Philip Pullman and based on that which Lyra reads in His Dark Materials. Papers belonging to the 'Oxford School' of fantasy writers, i.e. Tolkien, Lewis, Garner, Susan Cooper, and Pullman are on display next to many very ancient books from the library's collection in which appear the myths and legends on which the modern authors have drawn for their own work.

What the bird said early in the year

I heard in Addison's Walk a bird sing clear:
This summer will come true.  This year.  This year.
Winds will not strip the blossom from the apple trees
This year, nor want of rain destroy the peas.
This year time's nature will no more defeat you,
Nor all the promised moments in their passing cheat you.
This time they will not lead you round and back
To Autumn, one year older, by the well-worn track.
This year, this year, as all the flowers foretell,
We shall escape the circle and undo the spell
Often deceived, yet open once again your heart,
Look, look, look, look! the gates are drawn apart.

C.S. Lewis

    This plaque in honour of C.S. Lewis is in Addison's Walk, Magdalen College, Oxford, and although now in September we are not 'early in the year', I took the photograph a few days ago on my birthday, and - 'one year older' - thought that a particularly appropriate time to read the poem; (you can find the 14-line version, Chanson d'Aventure, here).

    Speaking of birthdays, I share mine with some illustrious souls, as you'll see from this splendid 50-word story which my 'twin' Sarah wrote for us!

Books are my bag

    I've been away this week (of which more soon), hence the lack of posts and general radio silence, but I'm back home now and went this afternoon to Blackwell's (Edinburgh South Bridge branch) for a bit of book shopping as today sees the launch of Books are my bag, a campaign to promote bookshops.

    I'd been expecting to find signs of what the website describes as 'The Big Bookshop Party' - balloons, bunting, or banners, say - but unless I missed it somehow there was nothing out of the ordinary going on, and little evidence of the campaign. Nevertheless, I had a pleasant browse and bought Laura Thompson's biography of Agatha Christie (and got the 'Books are my bag' bag, as you can see).

    Anyone else been doing any book buying (or bookshop visiting) lately?

Apple trees and doggy devotion

   

    I've just discovered that Susan Hill's lovely book The Magic Apple Tree - from which comes this passage - has recently been re-issued as an ebook for Kindle (and it's a bargain, too). Mine was a library copy, so I'm glad to know it's more widely available again.

 

    Nothing to do with that, but Abebooks have a nice article here, The Dog and the Novel: Loyal Companions, to which I've linked before but which you may not have come across. Interesting to note the contemporary novels which feature dogs, including The Story of Edgar Sawtelle which Pam Ayres chose when she appeared on My Life in Books. 

   

    And speaking of dogs, has anyone read Elizabeth von Arnim's memoir All The Dogs Of My Life? It opens thus: "I would like, to begin with, to say that though parents, husbands, children, lovers and friends are all very well, they are not dogs ...Once [dogs] love, they love steadily, unchangingly, till their last breath. That is how I like to be loved. Therefore I will write of dogs."

Book of the day - The Novel Cure

 

 

    You may have seen this post from a couple of years ago which referred to 'bibliotherapy'. Well, the ladies behind that service have now put their knowledge and advice in book form, and with a copy of The Novel Cure: An A to Z of Literary Remedies by Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin to hand, anyone can take a 'literary tonic' for whatever ails them.

    This is a welcome addition to my 'books about books' shelf, and something with which to have a lot of fun, so I'll give you the blurb first and then we can play with the book!

    "Are you weary in Brain and Body? Do you desire a Positive Cure for your Pessimism? Do you require Brontë to re-boot your Broken Heart? Do you despair of your Nose? Can Fielding open your Flood Gates? Or Pynchon purge your Paranoia? May we administer Austen to curb your Arrogance? Hemingway for your Headache? An injection of du Maurier for your low Self-Esteem? Are you Shy, Single, Stressed or Sixty? Are your Vital Statistics in need of some Spark? May we massage you with Murakami? Ease your pain with Woolf or Wodehouse? Do you require the Very Book to lessen your Loneliness?...

    This is "a new approach to fuelling your reading list and a chance to see the books on your shelves with fresh eyes". It's pretty comprehensive, too, featuring both classics and contemporary novels (and it's right up to date for I notice Peggy Riley's Amity & Sorrow is one of the 'prescriptions'), and while it's arranged alphabetically by general ailment, it also has a separate list of 'reading ailments', and then an index of lists, and one of novels and authors so that you can see at a glance what a particular book would be good for.

    To give you an idea, I'll take a few examples of the above at random.

From the A-Z of Ailments: boredom; friends, in need of; regret; extravagance; bad back; confrontation, fear of; brainy, being exceptionally.

From the index of Reading Ailments: guilt, reading associated; skim, tendency to; hype, put off by; new books, seduced by; book-buyer, being a compulsive.

From the index of lists: the ten best - audio books, novels for duvet days, escapist novels, novels to make you laugh, novels for seeming well-read.

    The index of novels and authors is self-explanatory, but I thought that if you have a particular favourite and you'd like to know whether it is prescribed for some ailment or other, then leave a comment and I'll look it up for you. For instance, my much-loved To Kill a Mockingbird is in under "coward, being a" and "single parent, being a", each entry giving me just enough synopsis and comment to have me picking up the book, so please name a book or an author and if they are listed I'll tell you what you should 'take them' for.

Looking forward to reading ...

 

 

     ... Ammonites and Leaping Fish: A Life in Time by Penelope Lively, out next month:

    'This is not quite a memoir. Rather, it is the view from old age. And a view of old age itself, this place at which we arrive with a certain surprise - ambushed, or so it can seem. One of the few advantages of age is that you can report on it with a certain authority; you are a native now, and know what goes on here.'

    "In this charming but powerful memoir, Penelope Lively reports from beyond the horizon of old age. She describes what old age feels like for those who have arrived there and considers the implications of this new demographic. She looks at the context of a life and times, the history and archaeology that is actually being made as we live out our lives in real time, in her case World War II; post war penny-pinching Britain; the Suez crisis; the Cold War and up to the present day. She examines the tricks and truths of memory. She looks back over a lifetime of reading and writing. And finally she looks at her identifying cargo of possessions - two ammonites, a cat, a pair of American ducks and a leaping fish sherd, amongst others."

    A few years ago I read and enjoyed Penelope Lively's A House Unlocked, her 'biography' of  her grandparents' Somerset house, Golsoncott, and items within it, each of which unlocks a memory or charts a social change or a transforming moment of the 20th. century.

    And while we're on the subject of biographies and Penelopes, may I remind you about the forthcoming biography of Penelope Fitzgerald by Hermione Lee.

Writers' portraits - Robert Louis Stevenson

Click to enlarge

    This is the Robert Louis Stevenson panel from The Great Tapestry of Scotland. It includes the door knocker from the Stevenson family's house at 17, Heriot Row*, Leerie the Lamplighter, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Fidra, the island in the Forth on which RLS is said to have based his map of Treasure Island, The Land of Counterpane, his Samoan name Tusitala, that is Teller of Tales, and other references.

*There's more at RLS in Edinburgh: his homes and haunts.

    Here is RLS painted by John Singer Sargent, and here the same painter has captured him in an informal scene with his wife Fanny. Sargent said "he seemed to me the most intense creature I had ever met."

    There are two portraits of Stevenson by Count Girolamo Nerli, and the sitter said of them "the oil [above] represents me as I am, the pastel as I would like to be”.

    This last is a sad picture, I think, because it seems to speak of what might have been; it was painted two years before his death at the age of only 44.

    Although he was a literary celebrity in his day, RLS's writing was greatly out of fashion for much of the 20th. century, but according to this article, critical interest has been increasing and "reading this Mozartian and mercurial writer remains for many as for Borges, despite critical neglect, quite simply 'a form of happiness'."

Cornflower Book Group - our Autumn books

   

    The Cornflower Book Group already has its September book, that is Crusoe's Daughter by Jane Gardam (full details here), but I thought it might be helpful to plan ahead and choose something now for us to read and talk about in October and November, and I hope you'll feel well-disposed towards the books I have in mind.

    October 2013 seems the most fitting month in which to read The Shooting Party by Isabel Colegate for it is set in October 1913. It's about a shooting party at Sir Randolph Nettleby's Oxfordshire estate: "opulent, adulterous, moving assuredly through the rituals of eating and slaughter, [the guests] are a dazzlingly obtuse and brilliantly decorative finale of an era." And from a review: "Threads of romance, social comment, country lore and intrigue both above and below stairs are cunningly worked together to create a brilliant tapestry ... I have seldom enjoyed a book so much."

    If anyone baulks at the £12.99 UK cover price of the paperback (and I'm sorry that it is comparatively expensive), The Book Depository is selling it for rather less, and there are cheap secondhand copies available at Abebooks. For those in the US, your edition is more reasonably priced. Libraries should have the book, too, of course, and I hope no-one has any difficulty getting hold of a copy, whatever their preferred source.

    On now to our November book which is something a bit different. A work of non-fiction, written in Japanese 1000 years ago, it is The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon. The author was a Court gentlewoman whose dates were c.966-1017; she wrote the book for her own amusement but it is "one of the greatest works of Japanese literature. A fascinating exploration of life amongst the nobility at the height of the idyllic Heian period, it describes the exquisite pleasures of a confined world in which poetry, love, fashion and whim dominated, and harsh reality was kept firmly at a distance. In sections ranging in size from brief reflections to longer, lyrical tales, Shōnagon moves elegantly across a wide range of themes including nature, society and her own flirtations and frustrations, to provide a witty, unique and deeply personal insight into a woman's life at Court in classical Japan."

    So there are our three Autumn books and their discussion dates are below; please join us in reading them.

Crusoe' Daughter - from Saturday, 28th. September

The Shooting Party - from Saturday, 26th. October

The Pillow Book - from Saturday, 23rd. November.