Cornflower Books

I must just point you towards ...

 .... this post on Adèle's forthcoming book.

    Adèle came up to Edinburgh a few months ago to do research for another novel (which will be out after the Rajah quilt one) which is inspired by Phoebe Anna Traquair. We got together for dinner, and had a delightful evening with her and her friend the illustrator Helen Craig, and I heard all about both books then - naturally I can't wait to read them.

A book isn't complete 'til it's read

Gift horse

    If you're minded to try Mick Herron's Jackson Lamb books (of which Mr. C. writes here), you might like to know that the first of them - Slow Horses - is one of today's Amazon Kindle deals at £0.99.

Compare and contrast

    

   Mr. C. has been whizzing through a range of novels lately, leaving me standing, so to take up the slack he has kindly offered his thoughts on a couple of recent reads. He writes:-

    Pickwick Papers and Middlemarch are both set in the years leading up to the Great Reform Act of 1832, in an England on the eve of huge changes not just in politics but in the stuff of everyday life, but in tone and content they could hardly be more different.

    Dickens paints in primary colours: plot is not absent, but comes a long way behind exuberant comedy, characters that any sitcom writer would love to have invented, and set-piece scenes that are now part of the national consciousness (even if you haven’t read the book), such as Christmas at Dingley Dell or the Eatanswill election.

    Eliot is by contrast a water-colourist; she follows the moral struggles of her characters with an exact, unsparing but sympathetic eye, and the dilemmas they face - essentially, variations on the theme of ‘doing the right thing’ - are ones which we would all recognise in our own lives.

    In summary: Pickwick Papers is more entertaining, but Middlemarch is a better book.

Nostalgia

    We've been sorting through books this week, re-arranging shelves which house much of what our children read when they were young, and a huge number of my own childhood books - they'd been double-stacked for a while so I couldn't remember quite what was there. Going through the piles I was delighted to see so many old friends, stories I'd read and re-read countless times, favourites to do with dogs and horses (early passions), Ladybird nature books, crafts, and so on.

    There's a poignant passage along these lines in Artemis Cooper's biography of Elizabeth Jane Howard. Returning for a while, when suffering from dreadful morning sickness, to her family's country home, "Jane was given a bare little room of her own, and wanted to furnish it with the things she had left in her room in London. But the house in Lansdowne Road had been cleared, and her mother told her that she had got rid of everything: her collection of theatre programmes, her gymkhana cups, her Delft candlesticks - only a few books remained. 'The feeling that all, or nearly all, of my childhood had been stripped away without any consultation kindled an urgent need in me that still lasts now, to make the places that I live in wholly mine.' "

    How they take you back, old books, and how glad I am that so many of mine (Little Grey Rabbit's Valentine included) remain.

Sitting down, standing up, and staying in

     "The light lasts past tea-time in February, and because of that there comes a day sometimes when it is possible to achieve a mixture of firelight, daffodils, open windows and tea. Delectable. If to this is added an optimistic bird singing outside, and the people sitting round the fire know each other well enough to be able to sit back and say little if they feel like it, then one can forgive February for everything. For about half an hour it can be my favourite month."

    Stella Martin Currey, One Woman's Year.

    We can't run to daffodils yet but we do have snowdrops, birdsong, and light until five, so that's all good.

    With my tea and an agreeable companion I've been reading Major General Paul Nanson's book Stand Up Straight: 10 Life Lessons from the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst which is not as 'niche' as it might sound and offers some solid principles by which to live. I knew something of the rigorous training Sandhurst gives its cadets (as this post will explain) but the Academy's Commandant presents here - succinctly and very readably - the ethos and reasoning behind it and explains how that might apply to civilian life.

    I've now moved on to Artemis Cooper's biography Elizabeth Jane Howard: A Dangerous Innocence which has been on the shelf, unopened, for a disgracefully long time. I enjoyed EJH's memoir Slipstream very much indeed, likewise many of her novels, so this should be a satisfying read for what is forecast to be a very stormy weekend.

A good aim in life

    "It was one of Mr. Beebe's chief pleasures to provide people with happy memories."

      E.M. Forster, A Room with a View.

      Thanks to all the London friends we saw last week who gave us such an excellent time and thus very happy memories. Here's to our next trip south!