Cornflower Books

Cornflower Blues 2013 - the best of the best

  

    We've had the books of the year parts one and two, and now to conclude, here are the best of the best in fiction and non-fiction.

    Hermione Lee proves the art of literary biography is alive and well in her superb life of Penelope Fitzgerald, and Kate Atkinson has given us a tour de force in her complex, highly original novel Life After Life.

    Thank you, ladies, for such rich reading.

Cornflower Blues 2013 - the books of the year, part 1

   

    Decisions, decisions.

    Separating the cream of this year's reading from 'the top of the milk' is a tough job, and inevitably there are at least a handful more books I could add to the list, there's so little to choose between them, but I have chosen and I give you the 'Cornflower Blues', my books of the year:

 

    Best biographies:

Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life by Hermione Lee

C. S. Lewis: A Life - Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet, The Story of the Man who Created Narnia by Alister McGrath

 

    Best 'old' novels:

The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim

The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham

The Heir by Vita Sackville-West

The Shooting Party by Isabel Colegate

Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier

 

    Best first novels:

The Night Rainbow by Claire King

Amity & Sorrow by Peggy Riley

Meeting the English by Kate Clanchy

The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon

Mr Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

 

    Best non-fiction:

The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase by Mark Forsyth

Magical Tales: Myth, Legend and Enchantment in Children's Books edited by Carolyne Larrington & Diane Purkiss

 

    Best new novels:

Motherland by William Nicholson

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

The Promise by Ann Weisgarber

Last Friends by Jane Gardam

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

Bellman & Black by Diane Setterfield

 

    Still to come, the best of the best.

While the wind blew, and the rain lashed the window ...

    ... I was in the warmest place.

    This is the cosiest reading spot in the house, and I have just the right books for it in this wild weather: I finished Tom's Midnight Garden yesterday afternoon (do read it, if you haven't already done so), and began D.E. Stevenson's The Two Mrs. Abbotts - charming!

    I hope everyone else is warm and dry, and has some suitably satisfying reading.

The books we've left behind

   Talking about discovering a history of psychoanalysis in the 'Land of Saints', i.e. Morocco, in French, in a down-at-heel bookshop in Casablanca, Alexander McCall Smith* goes on:

 

    "This book was irresistible. It is a mistake not to buy books as unlikely as that; I once spotted a large tome on monastic sign language in a used books store in Toronto but caviled at the outrageous price. Returning to Scotland, I regretted my failure to buy the book: of course I would have loved to have had it, with its lengthy photographic section showing Trappist monks signing their various messages: 'The Abbot says that bell must be rung ... We must plant potatoes again this year.' That sort of thing.

    I returned to Toronto the following year and made my way to the bookstore in question. Going up to the desk, I asked the proprietor whether by any chance - and I said I knew it was a remote one - they had in stock a book on the sign language of monks. He looked at me in astonishment that shortly became delight. 'As it happens,' he began ..."

 

    Have you ever had a similar experience, coming upon something delightfully recondite or special, leaving it behind, regretting not buying it, perhaps even returning to find it again?

 

*In What W. H. Auden Can Do for You

Did Santa bring you any books?

    Santa was more than generous to me this year, but where books are concerned he must have paid heed to various members of my family who think I have enough, for I got but two*!

    How about you?

 

*A biography and 'a picture book', and I'm thrilled with both, and no doubt they'll feature here or on Cornflower in due course.

Wishing you a happy Christmas!

    Festive books from the Bodleian to brighten your virtual mantelpiece, to thank you for visiting Cornflower Books, and to wish you a very happy Christmas!

Cornflower Book Group - January, 2014

    

 

    The Cornflower Book Group read a well-known children's book last year in December/January, and at this dark time of year (at least in the northern hemisphere) when many of us are inclined to settle down round the fire and pick up something familiar to read, I thought another children's classic might not go amiss, so I've chosen the Carnegie Medal-winning Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce, first published in 1958.

    "Lying awake at night, Tom hears the old grandfather clock downstairs strike . . . eleven . . . twelve . . . thirteen . . . Thirteen! When Tom gets up to investigate, he discovers a magical garden. A garden that everyone told him doesn't exist. A garden that only he can enter . . ."

    If you have already read the book I hope you will welcome a re-read, and for anyone coming to it for the first time, its should be a most pleasant discovery. Philippa Pearce's books are marked by their "extreme sensitivity and consummate writing skill", and this is her best known, the critic John Rowe Townsend commenting: "I have no reservations about it. If I were asked to name a single masterpiece of English children's literature since [the Second World War] . . . it would be this outstandingly beautiful and absorbing book."

    That's good enough for me and - I hope - for you, too, so please seek out a copy and read it ready for discussion from Saturday, 25th. January.

    The book should be easily obtainable in paperback, there is a Kindle edition, and an audiobook, libraries should have it, US Amazon stocks it, and there may already be a copy on your children's bookshelves! I always mention The Book Depository in these posts because they offer free worldwide delivery, so in case of any local difficulty getting hold of it, they may be a solution.

    If you haven't read along with the group before you are more than welcome to join us. It's open to everyone and is all very informal and good-natured - there are no rules, no commitments, you simply read the book and leave a comment on it in the discussion post, and you can be as brief or as expansive as you wish, picking up others' points in subsequent comments if you want to answer them in the 'thread' format. I apologise for being a bit later than usual with this selection, but it's a short enough work for us to read and digest by the due date, so despite the busy-ness of this time of year, I hope you'll feel moved to pick up Tom's Midnight Garden, perhaps in the post-Christmas lull, and above all, I hope you'll enjoy it.

In Victorian Edinburgh ...

 

     ... bluff, solitary Inspector James McLevy is investigating a murder.

    "When he encounters Robert Louis Stevenson, author of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, the two recognise each other as fellow travellers, observers of the dark side of human nature and both hopeless insomniacs.

    Glimpses of the murderer indicate a slender, androgynous figure with a silver cane, which is used to lethal effect. A dancing killer not unlike Mr. Edward Hyde."

    That's David Ashton's highly engrossing novel Nor Will He Sleep, and it's on sale today (Friday) very cheaply in the Kindle edition. I read it recently (I quoted a line or two here) and loved it - it's witty and vivid and rich, and I'm keen to read more of the series.

                                                    ~~~~~

    As I write, Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch is on offer at the bargain price of £1.99, and another big book, Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things (which I wrote about here) is just £1.59.

Paul Torday

    Sad news last night of the death of Paul Torday. He was my guest for a Cornflower in conversation feature a couple of years ago, and we spoke on the phone for that interview and had a lovely talk about books and writing, dogs and fishing. I've read several of his novels (this one, for example) and enjoyed them all very much indeed, though if I had to pick a favourite it would probably be that for which he is best known, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen.

    Paul Torday struck me as a reserved gentleman who was perhaps less than fully comfortable with the public side of fame, but as this article explains, there were two driving forces behind his writing, and now that I know that illness was one of them, I appreciate even more his giving me his time and graciously answering my questions.

A complete world

    When I was in Oxford last month I took a look at the Bodleian's Barbara Pym display, and I apologise for the quality of the photographs, but if you follow that link to the website you'll see the exhibits much more clearly.  The Library holds her literary papers and put on show a selection of letters and notebooks, including a draft of Excellent Women (see below).

    On this morning's post on Cornflower, Lucille mentioned she had a copy of Plat du Jours by Patience Gray and Primrose Boyd inscribed 'Barbara Pym' on the title page, so I hope that these examples of the Miss Pym's handwriting match the signature in that book!

     On that post I was quoting from a letter from Philip Larkin to BP, and he was - famously - her fan and champion. Extracts from many of their letters appear in Hazel Holt's biography, including the following exchange which I found very interesting:

PL writes: "... my feeling is that Angela Thirkell, for instance, vitiated her later books by mentioning everyone in every one, and I think it's a device needing very sharp control if this danger is to be avoided. I realise of course you are using a different method - coincidence rather than Barchester - but it has its pitfalls, to my mind, all the same. ..."

BP: "It can be a tiresome affectation. With me it's sometimes laziness - if I need a casual clergyman or anthropologist I just take one from an earlier book. Perhaps one should take such a very minor character that only the author recognises it, like a kind of superstition or a charm."

Hazel Holt comments, "The fact was that she had created such a complete world that it was perfectly possible for a character from one book to move about easily in another. And, of course, many of her friends and readers simply wanted to know 'what happened next' to their favourite characters after the book had ended."

    There's a lot of food for thought there.

    As to that 'complete world', Antonia White observed (in a review) how it was created:

"... working in petit point, she makes each stitch with perfect precision. She keeps her design so perfectly to scale, and places one mild tint in such happy juxtaposition to another that this reader ... derived considerable pleasure from it."

Cover-age

    I'm admiring the covers of Penguin's new Legends from the Ancient North. They have been designed by Petra Börner who writes, "The challenge has been to capture a sense of the grandeur, ferocity and wildness of these five legendary tales, whilst retaining the truth of my artistic processes", and you can get a glimpse of that process here. Do also take a look at Petra's website, where in the archive (here and here) you'll find some familiar and beautiful book jackets.

                                                    ~~~~~

    If you have time to spare, you may like to have a go at We Love This Book's Got It Covered competition, identifying 100 books from small cover details alone. I've managed 74 so far and hope a bit of brain-racking will yield a few more.

                                                    ~~~~~

    Can you think of any books you've come across recently which have particularly apt or attractive covers? I'm soon to read one which is lovely, and I hope the design is indicative of the book's style (and content) for if so, I think it will be very 'me'.

Worth visiting:

    Simon, to read his lovely bookish tale,

    Deborah, for a glimpse of Gwen Raverat's Cambridge,

    Sarah, to see the books which made her a writer,

    Bookish Nature, for a treasure-hoard of a post,

    Pamela, for her Books at Christmas lists,

    Geranium Cat, for a little crime,

and Dark Puss, for helpful advice when it comes to those Christmas 'thank you' letters!

Good books x 3

   Kim at Reading Matters has had the lovely idea of putting together a Book Bloggers' Advent Calendar with daily posts linking to bloggers' favourite books of 2013. As you'll see if you click here, I'm up today, and I've chosen William Nicholson's Motherland (recently released in paperback). Alongside me, Sam at Sam Still Reading has nominated Kate Forsyth's Bitter Greens which I bought recently and am greatly looking forward to reading. Many thanks to Kim for inviting me to take part and join such all-round excellent company.

                                                ~~~~~

    To a couple more good books now, but from the biography/memoir shelf this time:

    Ann Patchett's This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage is a collection of essays and articles representing all stages of her career so far. She explains in the foreword that before she became a novelist she learned her craft as a writer of non-fiction, meeting deadlines and word counts, shaping topics to fit column inches, and she is adept at writing clean, clear, succinct prose. She is also wise, funny, candid, observant, and clear-sighted in her treatment of many subjects ranging from the personal - her difficult first marriage and happy second one, her lately-acquired love of opera (see the wonderful Bel Canto) and long-time love of dogs, her recent experience of opening a bookshop in her home town - to the more universal.

    I've already posted extracts from two of the books's essays - they are here and here - and they are good examples of Ann Patchett's style, good sense, and warmth. I never tire of her voice, whether she is talking about books in all their infinite variety, or people (ditto), writing or life, and if you're a fan of her fiction, I'm sure you'll find a great deal to enjoy here.

                                                ~~~~~

    Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life by Hermione Lee needs no introduction and is an excellent biography. Highly readable, perceptive, comprehensive, setting all its subject's novels and biographies in context and tracing their themes throughout a long life, it benefits from its author's acquaintance with Penelope Fitgerald and many conversations with those who knew her well.

    This is, famously, the story of a late-starter, someone whose working life was spent mostly in teaching, who published first when she was 60, won the Booker Prize soon afterwards, but did not achieve real fame until she was 80. Often overlooked or underestimated in their own time, her novels are now seen as "strange and original masterpieces", and their author is, as Hermione Lee says in the opening sentence of her Preface, "a great English writer who would never have described herself in such a commanding way."

    Penelope Fitzgerald came from a family whose motto was "do the difficult thing", and in both professional and domestic terms she lived up to that. Her personal life was often fraught, and when she finally came into her own career-wise, it was once there was space in her life for "her half-century of reading, thinking and learning to be shaped into the books she had always known she would write."

    A fascinating biography which I recommend without reservation.

Woman reading

 

    Following on from yesterday's post, I eventually settled on Hazel Holt's biography of Barbara Pym, and it's coming along nicely.

    The image here is officially called A Lady in White by J.D. Fergusson, though I've seen it given the title Woman Reading. I'm posting it in order to point you in the direction of the Colourists/Fergusson giveaway on the other blog - do please throw your name into the hat there.

A quick question

    Do you ever find it hard to decide what to read next?

    I ask that because I often do, usually when I've just met a reviewing deadline and am suddenly free for a bit to read anything I want. I have a great deal to choose from - and thus you'd be forgiven for rolling your eyes heavenward and saying that I'm spoilt for choice - but it's finding the right book for the moment and the time I have available that can be tricky. I've spent ages today considering the options and as I write I'm still not sure, though I am toying with a re-read.

    I was going to say that perhaps Alex's Book Jar is the solution for future indecision, but then it's not so much a case of indecision as of a simple search, scouring the shelves until the perfect book pops up.

The Elements of Eloquence

   

    Mark Forsyth's The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase is a fun book, and perfect for anyone who loves to analyse language, to see how lines 'work' - what makes them dramatic, poetic, or otherwise memorable.

    It's a bright and breezy run through "the formulas, flowers and figures of rhetoric", or figures of speech, in 39 short chapters (that's including "a divigation concerning versification", or a quick look at metre). Every figure is explained or illustrated with quotations from great literature and popular culture, so for instance, we discover that Yoda is the master of hyperbaton - that is using words in the wrong order; "Bond. James Bond" is one of the most famous examples of diacope, or the verbal sandwich; Tom Jones was employing litotes when he sang "It's not unusual ...", as was Queen Victoria when an off-colour remark aired at dinner caused her to say "we are not amused".

    Alongside the familiar such as alliteration, hyperbole, assonance, personification, and transferred epithets ("disabled toilet''), are figures which are just as often used but whose names are less well-known. Lawyers* are fond of merism - words for words' sake, as in naming the parts of things rather than the whole, so "ladies and gentleman", instead of "people", Cole Porter's "Night and Day" rather than "always". Lawyers also love hypotaxis, that is using many subordinate clauses. This infuriates the rest of humanity leading to lines such as Shakespeare's earliest memorable one: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" (Henry VI Part 2), which is itself an example of prolepsis, or using a pronoun before the noun to which it refers.

    Lennon and McCartney get as much of a look in here as do Churchill, Kennedy, Dickens, and sundry poets. "I do not believe," says Mark Forsyth, "that The Beatles had any idea what anadiplosis was [it's the repetition of the last word of one clause as the first word of the next], any more than I believe that the Rolling Stones knew about syllepsis [one word used in two or more incongruous ways]. They knew what worked, and it did," and so as the book examines each rhetorical figure it is "a looking glass, in which you can see the best of your words," for we all use these figures of speech, all the time, and this funny, sharp, clever little volume reveals the formulae behind all the best lines.

*I speak as one...**

**(aposiopesis, or becoming silent).

Good things

    May I commend to you, again, those excellent literary publications Slightly Foxed and The Good Book Guide, and suggest that a subscription to either one or both would make a lovely Christmas gift for a bookish person.

 

    I've just been through the latest issue of the Guide and earmarked several books I'd like myself - and this from someone who is fairly well-versed on what's new in the book world ,and has an enormous library already! I never fail to discover within its pages interesting things I haven't come across before, or to find its reviews suddenly 'opening up' a book of which I was only vaguely aware. Linked to this is the breadth and depth of the Guide's range as it covers, among other subjects, cookery and gardening, natural history and science, philosophy, arts, history, children's books and travel, as well as biography, crime and thriller, and a great deal of general fiction. You'll find recently released titles there, books which have just come out in paperback, old favourites, and new names; something for all tastes. While you might accuse me of bias because I write for it, I would point out that I subscribed to it long before I ever penned my first review.

 

   

    Slightly Foxed is a quarterly magazine (whereas The Good Book Guide publishes ten issues a year), and its elegant essays celebrate individual books and writers and the joy of reading itself. To mention a few from the current volume (no. 40, Winter 2013), there's Melissa Harrison (author of Clay, which is soon to be out in paperback) on Ronald Blythe, Hazel Wood, one of Slightly Foxed's founders and editors, on Gwen Raverat and her marvellous memoir Period Piece, and Linda Leatherbarrow on Tove Jansson and her tiny island in the Gulf of Finland. On through Ursula Buchan on Margery Allingham's account of an English village at war, Ysenda Maxtone Graham on reading aloud - or being read to, and Maggie Fergusson on Tom's Midnight Garden, there is so much to enjoy. Slightly Foxed also hosts events at which you can meet the magazine's staff and contributors, and talk books to your heart's content; I reported on their most recent readers' day here.

    I hope I've whetted your appetite for these two; no-one has asked me to write about them, I do so simply because this site exists to help spread the word about good things, and these publications are just that.

Intrigue, adventure, romance ... stationery!

    I like this video from Penguin's Hamish Hamilton archive.

For the avoidance of doubt ...

... the book I was talking about in yesterday's post is not The Luminaries! As you will see here, I thought it was terrific.

Quality control

    Simon S's post today is about books we couldn't finish or ones which we've put down, mystified as to how they've got to where they are in the first place. I came upon one of the latter recently and would like to talk about it - obliquely - to make a point.

    I picked up the novel in question with high hopes as it sounded my sort of thing, and I anticipated a good read. What I found was a patchwork piece of writing: some very competent passages which showed that the author had a flair for a sentence, knew how to make a detail work, could sketch a scene and colour it well, but elsewhere, I could follow the writer's tracks, as it were, and I could see that at various junctures they had lost their way, and when that happened the scenes which followed were at best 'random', at worst irrelevant and pointless, and this was where the patchwork aspect came in, the darning, the 'stick that bit there to cover the join and no-one will be any the wiser'.

    More importantly than that, the entire plot was undermined because at best a weak case was made for the central character's actions - actions and decisions on which the whole book hinged - and at worst no case at all. Nothing would stand up to scrutiny. The story, such as it was, was fundamentally and fatally flawed.

    It strikes me that the author, whose debut this was, has been very poorly served by their agent, in the first place, and their editor, in the second. A careful reading should have shown up all the book's weaknesses (which I and others have spotted), and a sympathetic and diligent agent/editor should have sent back the manuscript with a view to making the whole thing much stronger and tighter, something which I'm sure the writer could have done.

    Why am I mentioning this? It bothers me. It bothers me that readers - and here I mean the professionals - should be so lax and undemanding, because the book has attracted a certain amount of favourable attention, an amount out of all proportion to its worth as it stands, in my opinion, and from quarters from which I'd have expected much greater discernment. I know others share my views on this, so it's not just a case of my being unduly pernickety. Regardless of genre, target audience, projected place on the 'literary ladder', a novel should meet certain standards, it should be good of its kind, however unpretentious or ambitious that may be; it's disappointing when a book falls short.

    One step in the manufacturing process for Harris tweed is the close examination of the fabric against the light to ensure the weave is even and there are broken threads. Similarly, as last night's documentary on Liberty showed, 'draft'* lengths of Tana lawn will be sent back for re-printing so that the colour balance can be re-adjusted and a harmonious design achieved. Why is the same care and attention to detail and overall quality not being paid to books within the publishing process? Why is 'unfinished' work being put out? Do readers, i.e. the public, just not care?

*Edited to add: this article contains more information about the Liberty design process, including "strike offs" or "fents".