Cornflower Books

So many books ...

    Do you consider your book-lined home "dungeon or dreamland"? Could you ever put a book in the bin? Are books your slave or your master?

    These questions and others were raised in this morning's Radio 4 programme So many books, so little time. Mark Hodkinson's gently wry look at book collecting - whether you'd call it bibliophilia or bibliomania may depend on where you are on the 'few books or many' scale - encompassed chats with writer friends, a bookseller, and a bookcase-making carpenter. In conversation with a psychologist he explored the book-collector archetypes, discussed books as "carapace", and the gratification - both instant and deferred - that comes with their acquisition. "An investment in our future self" is a neat justification for book buying, and the associated optimism which necessarily accompanies the building of a large library probably no bad thing.

    Worth a listen.

Journalling

    A year ago I wrote about Ryder Carroll's The Bullet Journal Method; I duly set up my notebook, adopting a fairly uncomplicated version of the system, and off I went. I'm back now to say that twelve months on I wouldn't be without it.

    The journal itself is a squared paper Moleskine which easily serves the purpose. I write in pencil and don't use colour or decoration of any kind, but the utilitarian style is fine for recording daily doings, keeping lists (of books, present ideas, projects, for instance) in one place, noting commitments, jobs to be done, and so on. Over the months I've adjusted the way I use it as I discover what's most effective for my needs, and part of its appeal is that it is so customisable, but I'd say the system - whether pared down to its essentials or extended to more elaborate functions - is a sound and useful one.

The list so far

    I've taken the comments on the last post together with contributions on Twitter and Instagram and listed the books/authors mentioned so that we have any easily viewable list which might guide our future historical fiction reading:

The Lymond Chronicles, Dorothy Dunnett (3 votes)

The House of Niccolo series, Dorothy Dunnett

King Hereafter, Dorothy Dunnett

The White Company, Arthur Conan Doyle

The Aubrey/Maturin series, Patrick O'Brian (2 votes)

Hild, Nicola Griffiths

The Morland Dynasty series, Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

Wolf Hall & Bring up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel (4 votes)

A Place of Greater Safety, Hilary Mantel

The Eagle of the Ninth, Rosemary Sutcliff (3 votes)

The Silver Branch, Rosemary Sutcliff

The Lantern Bearers, Rosemary Sutcliff

The Woolpack, Cynthia Harnett

Stars of Fortune, Cynthia Harnett

Cue for Treason, Geoffrey Trease

Fire over England, AEW Mason

A Traveller in Time, Alison Uttley

The Norman Pretender, Valerie Anand

Heart of Midlothian, Walter Scott

Treasure Island, RL Stevenson

Georgette Heyer

Nicola Upson

Frances Brody

 

If any more nominations come in I'll add them here.

The nation's favourite historical novel

    The Walter Scott Prize, often mentioned here, is celebrating its 10th. birthday and is asking us all to nominate our favourite historical novels. We have until the end of November to suggest a book (which must be set 60 years prior to date of original publication and be written in English), and from those a shortlist of the ten novels with the most nominations will be published on the Prize's website in early December, and the poll will then open for voting. The novel with the most votes will be crowned ‘The Nation’s Favourite Historical Novel’ in January 2020.

    You can go straight to the nominations page if you wish and list your top books there, or you can leave a comment here and I'll collate them and forward a list of the titles mentioned to the prize administrators - sharing our favourites that way would give us a useful resource to broaden our reading.

    It so happens that my current read is a book which I shall certainly nominate: I'm only half way through Dorothy Dunnett's The Game of Kings, the first of her Lymond Chronicles, but it's an astonishing piece. I'd had it for ages, unread, until an enormously enthusiastic message from Alice, who has just finished it, made me pick it up and begin. I'm so glad I did.

    I'm off to scan my shelves (and the Cornflower Blues archive) for my best historical fiction, but do please tell us your favourites, and may the best book win!

Mick Herron postscript

    News today that Mick Herron's Slough House books are being adapted for (Apple) television with Gary Oldman playing Jackson Lamb, and The Catch, a third novella in the series, is to be published on 9th. January while The Drop - the previous novella - is to be serialised on Book at Bedtime.

Mick Herron

 

 

Mr. C. writes:

 

    If you leave the Aldersgate Street entrance of London's Barbican Tube Station, as I do a few times a year on my way to a meeting in the City, you probably will not have remarked, because they are so unremarkable, a group of rather scruffy Victorian buildings about fifty yards up the road. But for devotees of new spy thriller sensation Mick Herron, this is what 221b Baker Street was for Conan Doyle: the home of a remarkable new fictional world.

 

    Slough House, a building with a personality so distinct it is a character itself, is the home of a group of failed or discarded spies, an exile reserved by MI5 for those it wants rid of but doesn’t want the trouble of sacking. They are known collectively as the “slow horses”, the title of the first novel in a series to which I was introduced by a recommendation from Adèle Geras, and which I have devoured avidly. The stable master of the slow horses is Jackson Lamb, one of the great comic grotesques of our age, and Herron’s light, pacy prose is a perfect vehicle for the team’s adventures. This is writing of a high order, leavened with sly humour (“I flunked English GCSE - metaphor’s a closed book for me”) and sharp descriptions. At the edge of the slow horses’ world there is contact with another of Herron’s great creations: Zoë Boehm, a private detective based in Oxford, but not the “few acres of honey coloured stone” which the tourists know, but the Oxford of 60s office blocks in Headington.

 

    I warmly recommend both series, with a health warning: once you dive in, you will find it hard to resurface. Adèle, what have you done?

Late starters

    Anne Youngson's Meet Me at the Museum was one of my books of the year last year. In addition to the Costa First Novel Award it won the Paul Torday Memorial Prize, and in the video above you can see Anne in conversation with Paul's son Piers and his fellow judge Anita Sethi giving an interesting perspective on the publishing industry.

Friends old and new

    "If you cannot read all your books...fondle them - peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them, at any rate, be your acquaintances."

    I've taken those lines of Churchill's from Louise Penny's November newsletter; while "arranged" doesn't really apply to the shelves above, I do know where things are, and the mixture of the eagerly anticipated and the already loved is a comforting one - good old friends and attractive new acquaintances, side by side.