Cornflower Books

A simply lovely read

    A Cotswold village in the 1950s, the May Day fair, a handful of characters populating this bucolic stage.

    Miss Read's Thrush Green is comfort reading: gentle, wise, attuned to the beauty of the natural world and to the cares, concerns, and joys of the human one. If you're looking for a 'nice' book, go no further.

                                                  ~~~~~

    For more about the author, her obituary is here, and her Desert Island Discs here.

Friday reads

 

  Thrillers don't often feature in my reading, but Lisa Jewell's new book None of this is true sounded too good to miss. While celebrating her birthday at a local pub, the well known podcaster Alix Summers meets fellow diner Josie Fair; it's Josie's birthday, too, and as the two women chat they discover that they were born on exactly the same day and in the same hospital.

    The 'birthday twins' bump into one another a few days later, and Josie suggests to Alix that she might be a good subject for a future podcast episode: she has an interesting backstory to tell and is about to make big changes in her life. Alix agrees to a trial interview and finds the whole experience unsettling but intriguing. As Josie divulges the secrets of her past - and present - Alix gets drawn into a dark web; the consequences will be devastating.

    This will have you compulsively turning the pages as the grim truth of the women's situation is gradually revealed.

    Now to Hannah Rothschild's first novel, a tightly-plotted romp that's fun and funny, but with a very serious side too. This is set in the art world and concerns a long-lost painting, the eponymous The Improbability of Love by Antoine Watteau. Formerly the property of royalty, the picture has been found in a London junk shop by impoverished chef Annie McDee. Her impulse purchase - it's a gift for a lover who then stands her up - takes her into the rarefied world of multi-millionaire collectors and experts who are not all that they seem.

    Will Annie escape the troubles of her past and finally find her feet? Will the picture be authenticated and recover its starry status? Will terrible wrongs be righted? Suffice to say that it's a wild ride, but it's also a rich book, studded with scholarship worn lightly (the author is a former Chair of Trustees of the National Gallery), illuminating and hugely enjoyable. I loved it!

Of Human Bondage

    A Bildungsroman in 700 pages, Maugham's most autobiographical novel - a classic tale of wrong turnings - will have you silently shouting 'No!' at the page at all too regular intervals in an effort to keep its main character Philip Carey from self-inflicted harm.

    An orphan brought up by his stultifying and remote uncle and aunt in a vicarage in coastal Kent, Philip leaves school to rattle around Europe, studying in Heidelberg and Paris, savouring life 'in the raw', but with an eye on an ideal future which is always just beyond his grasp. Back in London, and now a medical student, he meets a woman over whom he loses all sense. How will he survive the spiral of misfortune into which his ill-judged association with the dreadful Mildred takes him, and how, ultimately, will he ever find contentment?

    My favourite Maugham so far is The Razor's Edge (the book group's thoughts on it are here), but this one comes a close second. I was quickly engrossed in Philip's story, willing fate to treat him kindly and hoping he would find an accommodation with life. I picked up the book because Abraham Verghese cited it (and A.J. Cronin's The Citadel) as the two novels which drew him to a medical career; I wanted to see in what way it was so formative, and I found that part particularly interesting.

    I've yet to read The Summing Up (on the shelf above) "a classic avowal of a professional author's ideas about style, literature, art, drama and philosophy, but also an illuminating insight into this great writer's craft", and Selina Hastings' biography of Maugham which I'm sure will similarly analyse and illustrate his gift, but I look forward to both.

The most delightful habit in the world

    "One day a good fortune befell him, for he hit upon Lane's translation of The Thousand Nights and a Night ... Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment."

    From Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham.