Cornflower Books

August's books

    Seven books, all good.

    I picked up The Sword in the Stone because Monty Don quotes a beautiful and moving passage from it in Nigel: My family and other dogs, (and I recalled Laura Freeman also mentioning it in her excellent The Reading Cure). Very much in the same vein as John Masefield's classics, it's funny, poignant, and shows very vividly TH White's deep relationship with the natural world.

    Shirley McKay's Fate and Fortune gets a little post here, and Helen Humphreys' The Evening Chorus is here.

    The two Persephones are Dorothy Whipple's High Wages and The Rector's Daughter by FM Mayor - both excellent. 

    Last but not least is nature writer John Lewis-Stempel's La Vie, a very enjoyable account of life on his farm in the Charente region of France through a calendar year. This excerpt will give you the flavour.

The summer was over at last ...

    "... and nobody could deny any longer that the autumn was definitely there. It was that rather sad time of year when for the first time for many months the fine old sun still blazes away in a cloudless sky, but does not warm you, and the hoar-frosts and the mists and the winds begin to stir their faint limbs at morning and evening, with the gossamer, as the sap of winter vigour remembers itself in the cold corpses which brave summer slew. The leaves were still on the trees, and still green, but it was the leaden green of old leaves which have seen much since the gay colours and happiness of spring - that seems so lately and, like all happy things, so quickly to have passed. The sheep fairs had been held. The plums had tumbled off the trees in the first big winds, and here and there, in the lovely sunlight too soon enfeebled, a branch of beech or oak was turning yellow: the one to die quickly and mercifully, the other perhaps to hold grimly to the frozen tree and to hiss with its papery skeletons all through the east winds of winter, until the spring was there again."

    T.H. White, The Sword in the Stone.

Friday reads - it's a dog's life

 

 

    Monty Don writes beautifully, no matter the topic, and his deep love for dogs is well known; the two combine in Nigel: My family and other dogs in which the author wears his heart on his sleeve on every page.

     Sadly, the eponymous Nigel - the real star of Gardeners' World, many (including Monty) would say - no longer walks the paths of Longmeadow, tennis ball or two in mouth, but this book, published when he was still going strong, is a delightful portrait of him and of many of the other dogs with whom Monty has shared his life, and an examination of the unique bond which exists between man and canine.

Friday reads - a long time coming

    Have you ever read a book you enjoyed so much that you wanted to go more or less straight on to the next in the series or another by that author, and then found that your reading took you far off that intended path?

    That is what happened to me with Hue & Cry, the first of Shirley McKay's Hew Cullen mysteries. I loved it, got two or three more in the series, and have only now picked up where I left off an astonishing nine years ago!

    Here's the post on Hue & Cry, and as for Fate & Fortune which is set mostly in Edinburgh in 1581, and which I've just finished, it's every bit as good: very flavoursome of period and milieu, rich in detail, clever and convincing. If you don't already know these books I'd warmly recommend them.

Books in brief: The Evening Chorus

    Helen Humphreys' The Evening Chorus is set during and after the Second World War. It features just a handful of characters: prisoner of war James, finding solace in observing birds at his camp in Germany, his wife Rose, solitary and regretful in a cottage in the Ashdown Forest, Enid, James' sister, bombed out of her London flat and job, and Toby, Rose's lover, each one pivoting between hope and heartbreak. 

    Humphreys' style is very spare, taut, and blunt; she is adept at letting the silences speak. This restraint makes this short book understated but powerful.

                                                ~~~~~

    In addition to this novel I've enjoyed The Lost Garden, and her non-fiction The Ghost Orchard, while firmly on my wish list is And a Dog called Fig: Solitude, Connection, the Writing Life.

A new literary festival

    Something readers (and writers) in or near Edinburgh might enjoy: the Edinburgh Women's Fiction Festival, 6th and 7th October, 2023, full programme here.

Whipples

    I've just been reading High Wages, Dorothy Whipple's second novel (1930) set in a Lancashire town before and after the First World War. It follows the fortunes of Jane Carter, a living-in shop girl in Chadwick's the haberdasher's, who with a clear head, a flair for the job, and a great deal of hard work, makes good for herself as fashions - and society - changes.

    As with Mrs. Whipple's other novels, the book's style is unfussy, marked by acute observation, a way with a telling detail, and a sympathetic understanding of human nature; it's a jolly good read!

    This leaves me with only Young Anne and the short stories still unread, though there's much re-reading pleasure to be had in the pile pictured above.