Cornflower Books

Recently read

    Simon Parkin's extensively researched book on the the Isle of Man's WWII Hutchinson internment camp, The Island of Extraordinary Captives, explores an often overlooked area of wartime history about which I knew a very little. It is truly eye-opening.

    In In Other Words, Jhumpa Lahiri examines - briefly but yet in depth - the barriers and boundaries inherent in acquiring another language, and chronicles her long-term immersion in Italian which led her to write this book in that language itself. 

    Rumer Godden's novel A Fugue in Time overlays past and present in a multi-generational story, the technique she used later to great effect in China Court. These and many other books are discussed in her second volume of autobiography A House with Four Rooms which blends the personal and professional in charmingly anecdotal, discursive style. I loved it.

Putting pen to paper

    "My flymark handwriting is small because I am so secretive when I write books that I make it small so that no-one can read it. To me the writing of books should be secretive, the moment it is talked about it loses its virtue which is why all the things that are pressed on authors to make writing easier, quicker - dictaphones, word processors - for me would simply be impediments coming between me and what I hope to achieve. I believe, too, as the Chinese and Japanese calligraphers believe, that there is a mystique between the brain, the hand and the tool, pen, brush or scalpel; sometimes a flow is established between them, bringing a strange power ..."

    Rumer Godden, A House with Four Rooms