Cornflower Books

Magic casements

   

    " In the home of my childhood there was a room we called 'The Little Bookroom'. True, every room in the house could have been called a bookroom. Our nurseries upstairs were full of books. Downstairs my father's study was full of them. They lined the dining-room walls, and overflowed into my mother's sitting-room, and up into the bedrooms. It would have been more natural to live without clothes than without books. As unnatural not to read as not to eat.

    Of all the rooms in the house, the Little Bookroom was yielded up to books as an untended garden is left to its flowers and weeds. There was no selection or sense of order here. In dining-room, study, and nursery there was choice and arrangement; but the Little Bookroom gathered to itself a motley crew of strays and vagabonds, outcasts from the ordered shelves below, the overflow of parcels bought wholesale by my father in the sales-rooms. Much trash, and more treasure. Riff-raff and gentlefolk and noblemen. A lottery, a lucky dip for a child who had never been forbidden to handle anything between covers. That dusty bookroom, whose windows were never opened, through whose panes the summer sun struck a dingy shaft where gold specks danced and shimmered, opened magic casements for me through which I looked out on other worlds and times than those I lived in: worlds filled with poetry and prose and fact and fantasy. [...]

    When I crept out of the Little Bookroom with smarting eyes, no wonder that its mottled gold-dust still danced in my brain, its silver cobwebs still clung to the corners of my mind. No wonder that many years later, when I came to write books myself, they were a muddle of fiction and fact and fantasy and truth. I have never quite succeeded in distinguishing one from the other [...] Seven maids with seven brooms, sweeping for half-a-hundred years, have never managed to clear my mind of its dust of vanished temples and flowers and kings, the curls of ladies, the sighing of poets, the laughter of lads and girls: those golden ones who, like chimney-sweepers, must all come to dust in some little bookroom or other - and sometimes, by luck, come again for a moment to light."

    Eleanor Farjeon, from her introduction to The Little Bookroom.

Recent acquisitions

   

    Postmen all over the country must be finding their bags weighed down with Persephone Books' latest releases, if my Instagram feed is anything to go by. I daresay no one reading here will be unaware that Tirzah Garwood's autobiography Long Live Great Bardfield, and Every Good Deed and Other Stories by the much-loved Dorothy Whipple have just been published, and doubtless many of you already have your copies and are well into one or other of them as this is book post of the best kind.

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    Ian Rankin's latest Rebus novel, Rather Be The Devil, will be out next week; Mr. C. read it in an afternoon and promises a review, but for now says it does not disappoint.

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    Diana Athill is still going strong at 98 and is about to publish A Florence Diary, an account of a trip she made just after the war:

    "In August 1947, Diana Athill travelled to Florence by the Golden Arrow train for a two-week holiday with her good friend Pen. In this playful diary of that trip, Athill recorded her observations and adventures - eating with (and paid for by) the hopeful men they meet on their travels, admiring architectural sights, sampling delicious pastries, eking out their budget and getting into scrapes. Written with an arresting immediacy and infused with an exhilarating joie de vivre, A Florence Diary is a bright, colourful evocation of a time long lost, and a vibrant portrait of a city that will be deliciously familiar to any contemporary traveller."

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    When Pete Brown's The Apple Orchard: The Story of Our Most English Fruit came out last month I read an associated article and snapped up the book. Here's the blurb:

    "An orchard is not a field. It's not a forest or a copse. It couldn't occur naturally; it's definitely cultivated. But an orchard doesn't override the natural order: it enhances it, dresses it up. It demonstrates that man and nature together can - just occasionally - create something more beautiful and (literally) more fruitful than either could alone. The vivid brightness of the laden trees, studded with jewels, stirs some deep race memory and makes the heart leap. Here is bounty, and excitement.

    Taking us through the seasons in England's apple-growing heartlands, Pete Brown uncovers the magic and folklore of our most familiar fruit, showing its place at the heart of our lives."

Sleuths, Spies, & Sorcerers

    Thanks to Callmemadam for flagging up Andrew Marr's new series Paperback Heroes: Sleuths, Spies, & Sorcerers in which he uncovers the conventions and rules of three popular literary genres. I watched the two episodes currently available last night (Spies is on next week) and like Barbara, found the fantasy one even better than the detective fiction programme, in fact it is so good that I shall watch it again to make sure I didn't miss a detail.

    The programme website is here (there are clips and whatnot), and the episodes here.

    More series like this, please, BBC!

Bargains to be had

    If you're looking to load up your Kindle there are some good books to be had at bargain prices just now. In no particular order:

    Wolf Winter by Cecilia Ekbäck; I wrote about this highly accomplished first novel here, and it's just won the 2016 Historical Writers' Association's Goldsboro Debut Crown.

    A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth; this is such an enormous book that in physical form it's unwieldy so the electronic version will be easier on the wrists! Size apart, it's a tremendous piece of work.

    Remarkable Creatures by Tracy Chevalier; I haven't read this novel about Mary Anning and fossil hunting in early 19th. century Dorset, but I admire Tracy's work very much.

    Any Human Heart by William Boyd; another one I've yet to read, but I saw the television dramatisation of this, Mr. C. read it and gave it high praise, and Boyd is jolly good!

    Dark Matter by Michelle Paver; perfect for this time of year, there's a review of this excellent ghost story here, and good news for Paver fans, Thin Air - set in the Himalayas in 1935 - has just been published.

    The Travelling Bag by Susan Hill; more ghost stories, and if these are anything to go by, they should be good.

    Toast by Nigel Slater; there's a snippet from this culinary memoir here.

    Hue & Cry by Shirley McKay; there's a post on this, the first of a mystery series set in 16th. century St. Andrews, here.

I'm astonished ...

   

    ... to see that I haven't posted here for almost a month. Life has been busy - in a good way - and I've done little reading, though that's certainly not due to any lack of interest in current books.

    On a trip to Suffolk last week I took Eleanor Farjeon's The Little Bookroom which was a gift from a kind friend. It is quite delightful and has kept me fully absorbed, even on flights*. It's a collection of Miss Farjeon's stories chosen by herself and illustrated by the wonderful Edward Ardizzone, and what I love about it - apart from the typically expressive drawings and the imaginative trajectory of the tales - is the tone and the spirit of the book: it's fun and uplifting, light and brisk and breezy, and the stories have a joy to them which draws me back like a magnet.

    While away we went to Sutton Hoo, the Anglo-Saxon royal burial site. Although the grave goods themselves are now in The British Museum, there's an informative exhibition to see, the burial mounds themselves to view, and you can tour a few of the rooms in the home of Mrs. Edith Pretty, the landowner at whose instigation the dig took place. On the back of this visit I bought The Dig by John Preston, a novel about the excavation which I have long had on my wish list, and which a friend who was with us at the site warmly recommended. Here's the blurb:

    "Summer, 1939. While Britain is busy preparing for war, on farmland around Sutton Hoo House in sleepy Suffolk Mrs. Pretty has asked local archaeologist Basil Brown to excavate the enormous earth mounds on her land. And what Basil finds proves earth-shattering. His discovery brings an invasion of academics and busybodies from London. Each wants to run the dig and no one wants Basil or Mrs. Pretty around. Peggy, newly married to her university teacher, surprises everyone by making the first discovery of fabulous treasure, but away from the dig her world is falling to pieces. Why is her husband behaving so coldly towards her? While the clouds of war thicken and jealousy vies with ambition to muddy everything below, a battle for the right to unearth an invader from another age begins in earnest ..."

    Now that I've been to Sutton Hoo and learned, in situ, more of its story, this sounds even more appealing.

    

    

*The Edinburgh/Norwich run is in small, propeller-driven planes, where on the outward journey at least, Mr. C. and I constituted half the passengers.