Cornflower Books

It's been an odd reading year ...

   

    ... in that usually, around this time, I can produce a list of a dozen or so books read over the preceding twelve months which deserve to be put centre stage again and from which two get the laurels, but this year has somehow been 'off'. Whether it's that my interests have changed - and I think that is so - or whether the novels I've read have simply not elicited the deeper feeling of connection I look for over and above their technical merits, there are few I'd award a Blue, so 2015's is a very short list.

    Elizabeth Goudge comes closest to what I've been seeking with The Dean's Watch and The White Witch almost but not quite matching The Runaways for sheer enjoyment. In non-fiction, James Rebanks gets an honourable mention for The Shepherd's Life, while Linda Lear's detailed biography of Beatrix Potter impressed me enormously and held my attention throughout. And that's it - not many, but distinguished nonetheless.

    As the year nears its end, I'm looking forward to heading in a new direction reading-wise, for some of the time, at least. I think the journey will be both fascinating and fun.

Just arrived ...

    ... The Scribbler: A Retrospective Literary Review.

I bought it thanks to Barbara's post and am greatly looking forward to reading it.

Re-jacketed

 

    I mentioned in passing in this post that I wasn't keen on the current covers for my favourite Nancy Mitford novels. Happily for those sharing my opinion and looking to buy them now, the books have been re-jacketed to mark the 70th. anniversary of publication of The Pursuit of Love, so that novel along with Love in a Cold Climate and Don't Tell Alfred (among others) will be available from tomorrow in much smarter livery*.

    This page gives a flavour of NM's jackets through the ages.

    *Edited to add: designed by Luli Sanchez.

Now, there's a book I can recommend

   

    Following an Instagram mention of Stoner by John Williams just now I was prompted to look up my post on the novel. I'm astonished to see that I wrote it five years ago to the day, but I thought I'd link back to it now, not just because that's a neat anniversary, but because it is such a good book, and if you don't already know it I'd urge you to get hold of a copy. I've read very few novels lately that I can wholeheartedly recommend (hence the comparative dearth of posts), but Stoner is worth shouting about: it's a very fine work indeed.

Dare I ...

    ... read this book?

    I've written before about the significance to me of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, and it's a book in a category all of its own. So special is it that I don't know if I dare read Go Set A Watchman, the novel Miss Lee wrote before it but which features Scout and Atticus in later life - a book that has never been published, was thought to be lost, has been rediscovered and is now to come out in July.

    What to do? Let the reviews decide me?

The nicest book of the year

   

    A few words on The Runaways (also known as Linnets and Valerians) by Elizabeth Goudge, which is as the post title says, the nicest book I've read all year.

    Quite simply, this was a delight - a story of 'setting right', of coming into one's own, of happy endings. It's about four siblings who find themselves at the home of their rather marvellous Uncle Ambrose and who thus become agents for change and a power for good prevailing over ill will, so that all becomes well with their somewhat magical world in the village of High Barton.

    It's full of delicious food, beautiful gardens, quirkily characterful houses, and a charming collection of people (and animals), all vividly drawn and described, but it's its warmth and joyousness which make it special.

    A book to lift the spirits and gladden the heart.

Old books of the year

       
   
    My post of a couple of weeks ago was concerned with new books, but some 'old' ones have given as much pleasure or more and have earned their Cornflower Blue too.

    In no particular order then come Cynthia Harnett's The Wool-Pack (I read it here), Mary Stewart's The Crystal Cave (it turns out I knew Lady Stewart's editor), The Silent Traveller in Oxford by Chiang Yee (a man after my own heart), Rumer Godden's In this House of Brede (which many of us enjoyed), and although I've yet to finish it, The Runaways by Elizabeth Goudge. Each is special in its own way.

Delightful!

       Just a quick post to follow up on this one from a few months ago and to say that I am at long last reading a novel of Elizabeth Goudge's - The Runaways (also known as Linnets and Valerians) - and it is a joy, every page a delight!

        Thanks to everyone who left a comment on that earlier post; they show in no uncertain terms that EG was a writer who touched people's hearts and made a deep and lasting impression on her readers, and even at this early stage I can see why that is.

Here and there, this and that

   

    - Apart from the stock, Parnassus Books' shop dogs would be a major draw for me, if I lived in Nashville; booksellers of Britain, take note!

 

   

    - From Tennessee to the neighbouring state of Alabama, and today is the 54th. anniversary of the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird. I've written before about the book's significance to me, but by any standards it is a very special novel, so I'm glad to hear that it has now been released as an e-book. If you have never read it you are in for a wonderful experience, and if you have, re-readings only enhance it.

 

    

    - Lastly, posting has been sporadic of late as other things have claimed my time and attention. That's set to continue for a while, so apart from popping in to update my current reading and the like, I'm going to take a wee break.

    See you anon.

 

Have you read ... Catherine Gaskin?

    Alice has, but I haven't - yet!

    Catherine Gaskin's is a name I know from years ago as I have a feeling my mother and grandmother read her books. I have never done so but I do now have The Property of a Gentleman waiting on the Kindle, and judging by Alice's post this "poignant, thrilling tale, full of intrigue, mystery and romance" is great fun, so I must get to it soon.

    I have done a little reading around, finding out a bit about this bestselling author, and I learn that although she was born in Ireland she grew up in Australia; despite early ambitions to become a pianist she wrote her first novel when she was only 15; it came out when she was 17 and sold 50,000 copies in its first two months, so her path was set. She moved to London shortly afterwards, married an American, and lived in the US, Ireland and the Isle of Man before returning to Australia in her later years. She died in 2009 at the age of 80. You can read more about her here, and do listen to her Desert Island Discs on which, in conversation with Roy Plomley, she comes across as a very vivacious lady.

    What of the books, though? There are 21 novels, published between 1946 and 1988, and despite the very high profile she had while active, selling 40,000,000 copies, Catherine Gaskin said that she "was resigned to becoming obsolete in her own lifetime". She's been proved right, as far as I can gather, in that "the girl with the golden pen", as she was once called, is now out of print here except for the recently released The Property of a Gentleman.

    A popular success, dubbed "the queen of storytellers"; have you read her?

R.I.P. Mary Stewart

   

    It's a day for sad news, it seems, as I've just heard that Mary Stewart has died.

    I know her books are great favourites with a lot of us and are often taken up when some escapism or comfort reading is needed, and although it's been some years since she published her last novel - and at the age of 97 that's not surprising - I am so sorry to hear that she's gone.

    I have linked to this television interview with her once or twice before, but if you haven't seen it, do give it a look and discover the lovely lady behind the books.

    Most recently I've read Touch Not The Cat and Thornyhold and enjoyed both enormously, and happily I have others still to read including The Crystal Cave, the first in her acclaimed Merlin series, as well as some re-reads first encountered as a teenager. As her books have been so spread out for me I couldn't pick a favourite, but if you have one, please let us know.

Cornflower Book Group - In this House of Brede

  

    Rumer Godden spent five years writing In this House of Brede and she said they were "among the richest and most rewarding" of her life. Her close and very personal contact with the Benedictine community at Stanbrook Abbey meant that she gained access to many of the nuns on her regular visits, and was given permission to observe all services and ceremonies. Her research into Benedictine history, tradition, liturgy and music was detailed and extensive, and the book is the richer for it.

    When asked why she chose the religious life as the subject for a novel, she recalled, "My writing self, which is the more truthful, answered: Because nuns are dramatic. Theirs is the greatest love story in the world." It is a dramatic and utterly gripping story she has told, one which sheds so much light on a way of life about which we perhaps know a little, or have certain preconceptions, and which illuminates with great empathy, not to mention the novelist's skill.

    As a story, I felt it was at its most successful when within the abbey walls, the narrative strands which took us into the outside world seemed, in comparison, rather less assured and more contrived on occasions, but in its depiction of a life underpinned by simplicity, humility, clarity, selflessness and common purpose it was masterly.

    What did you think of it?

Friday reads

   

    I'm about a quarter of the way through Rumer Godden's In this House of Brede (our April book group book) and am quite enthralled by it - and learning so much. If you're swithering about reading it, do give it a try, if not for the group read then at some point; it's insightful, respectful of its subject matter without being precious, and I'm finding it hard to put down.

    What are you reading this Friday?

Have you read ... Elizabeth Goudge?

    I'm just approaching the end of my first Elizabeth Goudge book - her autobiography The Joy of the Snow - and I'm coming away from it quite charmed and thinking what an unusual and interesting lady she must have been!

    Although she says little about them in the memoir, I'm keen to read some of her novels now and I know there are Goudge experts among you, so which books would you particularly recommend, or where would you suggest a new reader might start?

Cornflower Book Group - April 2014

   

    Having just read a biography of Rumer Godden I thought a novel of hers might be a good choice for the Book Group. The one with which she made her name was Black Narcissus, but it's a later book I've chosen, also a huge popular success, and a critical one, too.

    First published in1969, In this House of Brede was the product of five years of painstaking research and writing, and is its author's longest and most complex book. Here's the blurb:

    "Bruised by tragedy, Philippa Talbot leaves a successful career in the Civil Service for a new calling. She joins an enclosed order of Benedictine nuns. In this small community of fewer than one hundred women, she soon discovers all the human frailties: jealousy, love, despair. But each crisis of heart and conscience is guided by the compassion and intelligence of the Abbess and by the Sisters' shared bond of faith and ritual. Away from the world, and yet at one with it, Philippa must learn to forgive and forget her past."

    Here's a passage from Anne Chisholm's biography:

    "Brede did seem to be blessed: everyone who read it before publication was impressed by it. A hint of amazement is sometimes discernible behind the compliments... [Rumer's] agent told her it was a triumph; Macmillan were delighted, and [the editorial director of her American publisher] wrote from New York to tell Rumer he found the book 'absolutely extraordinary ... I would have been incredulous had anyone told me how terribly involved with and concerned for a community of Benedictine nuns I could become ...' "

    Rumer's US advance was $150,000, the equivalent, apparently, of just under $1,000,000 today, and her publishers' faith in the book was justified by its sales. Structurally, it is her most ambitious work - Anne Chisholm tells us - spanning nearly twenty years and dealing with two dozen major characters (it's satisfyingly chunky at around 500 pages in the Virago paperback edition). Although it was made into a film starring Diana Rigg, that "has not worn well" (AC again), and Rumer did not care for it. I hope our reaction to the book will be a positive one, and I've slotted it into the calendar for discussion from Saturday, 26th. April.

    Details of our February and March books are given here, and I hope you'll join us to read some or all of our next three titles; you'd be very welcome.

Bargain of the day

    My internet connection is likely to be very patchy today, so I'm nipping in while I can to flag up one of today's Kindle deals, Mary Stewart's Thornyhold, which I read last year and loved - pure escapism!

    "Thornyhold is a house deep in a wild wood like somewhere out of a fairy tale. To Gilly, it is an enchantment. Her very own enchantment, left to her by the cousin whose occasional magical visits had brightened her childhood. And as she explores, she discovers more about the woman who had come to seem like a fairy godmother for her: her herbalists's skills, her still room, her abilities to foresee and to heal. She discovers also that the local people believe that Gilly has inherited not just the house but the magical spell-weaving powers that live on in the house and garden. Slowly, quietly, she comes to realise that they are right."

    For those who haven't seen it, may I recommend again this video interview with Lady Stewart.

Waterstones Book of the Year

   

    This is rather lovely: Waterstones Book of the Year, 2013, is Stoner by John Williams, which was first published in 1965, quickly fell out of print and was almost forgotten, but has in the last year or so become a word-of-mouth success. You can find the award's shortlist here, and as you'll see there the winner had competition from the likes of Julian Barnes and Kate Atkinson, not to mention Nina Stibbe's Love, Nina: Despatches from Family Life about which I've heard great things.

    For more on Stoner itself, here's my interim post to give you a flavour of it, and here's my summing up; as I say there, its beauty and clarity mean it is a joy to read.

Cornflower Book Group - The Shooting Party

 

    Exactly one hundred years on from the events of the novel, we look back to the period in which Isabel Colegate's The Shooting Party is set - the Edwardian era immediately before the First World War - with an even greater sense of perspective than that summed up so eloquently in the book's opening passage.

 

    In the light of what we know was to come, the book is a sharply delineated commentary on its time. Its focus is narrow - a small group of guests gathered at Sir Randolph Nettleby's Oxfordshire estate for the most important shooting party of the season, on the last weekend in October 1913 - and yet through that prism it shows much. Historic and impending social and societal change, attitudes, beliefs and mores, all are there in the background, almost as allegorical tapestries adorning a wall, in front of which is played out the central drama, that of a sporting rivalry which leads to a death.

    Precise, evocative, economical and controlled, it places vivid pen-portraits of its major characters within the narrative and then balances them in the final few pages with equally brief but nonetheless full and fitting accounts of what was to become of them in the years ahead. There's more to that than just a simple tying up of loose ends, for an important subtext is that of legacy - in the widest sense, what will be left and to whom. Sir Randolph is preoccupied with the decline of the rural way of life and of estates such as his own on which so many people rely for their livelihood; Lionel Stephens, barrister and romantic idealist, looks to war or some other "great trial" as a cleansing force, one that would rid society of its baser habits and make for a better world. Bob Lilburn and Gilbert Hartlip, men of lesser conscience, are more concerned with form and self and reputation; and then there's Tom Harker, poacher turned if not gamekeeper then beater, a fulcrum of sorts for the plot, Cornelius Cardew, the outsider, and his proselytising, Dan Glass and his scholarly ambitions, even young Osbert and his concern for his duck; all, in their way, are spokes in a wheel, even though some question their purpose.

    There were some lovely lines such as the Downton-esque, "He is the eldest son, and there is coal beneath the Park," and "... he was a good gardener and good gardeners were known to be on the despotic side", also the references to Olivia's reading, including "frivolous novels" such as the works of E.F. Benson; but one of the most telling, I think, was again to do with Olivia when she and Cicely and Aline are following the guns and she feels an unexpected and unexplained sense of excitement and in noticing every detail of her companions and of their progress "to the front line" wonders, "are we really all so beautiful and brave, or do we just think we are?".

    How did you find the book - too slow and studied, or a perfect portrait of a time and place?

    Did you feel its prefiguring of the slaughter to come was too obvious, or was that point well-stated?

    What of the mix of characters - were any too stereotypical, did you think?

    Have you read anything else by Isabel Colegate, and on the basis of The Shooting Party, would you seek out her other novels now?

    Any more impressions, thoughts, likes and dislikes?

 

The 'Books and Cakes' post for The Shooting Party is here.

Cornflower Book Group - Crusoe's Daughter

 

    Jane Gardam's novel Crusoe's Daughter takes its epigraph from Virginia Woolf's* The Common Reader:

"The pressure of life when one is fending for oneself alone on a desert island is really no laughing matter. It is no crying one either",

and this book is a life story, but both sad and funny, and it's a life in moments, observations, remembered details, 'keys' to a history, each one proffered in sentences which vary from the long to the short, the blunt or the busy, almost like so many pictures hung in a gallery.

    Polly Flint, whose story it is, is marooned by family circumstances and fate at Oversands on the north-east coast, and then as she grows up chooses to remain all but cut off, "sitting out" her life at the yellow house, working on her book "clothing [herself] in armour, hiding in a lair, hiding from pain."

    I loved so much about it: the many deft word-sketches which speak volumes; the running thread of Crusoe-comparisons with which Jane Gardam treats the themes of loneliness and isolation and the solace to be found in books; the household at Thwaite and Lady Celia with her Tennyson and Lewis Carroll much like Mrs. Fisher in The Enchanted April; the sheer verve of the narrative - there's nothing formulaic about it. It's a story of disappointments, hopes unrealised, expectations never met, but also of consolations of a sort, of pragmatism, of living as best one can. I found it a thoughtful and entertaining book and a heartening one. How about you?

 

*And Woolf, of course, makes a cameo appearance in the novel.

    (For what to eat while reading Crusoe's Daughter click here.)

Cornflower Book Group - our Autumn books

   

    The Cornflower Book Group already has its September book, that is Crusoe's Daughter by Jane Gardam (full details here), but I thought it might be helpful to plan ahead and choose something now for us to read and talk about in October and November, and I hope you'll feel well-disposed towards the books I have in mind.

    October 2013 seems the most fitting month in which to read The Shooting Party by Isabel Colegate for it is set in October 1913. It's about a shooting party at Sir Randolph Nettleby's Oxfordshire estate: "opulent, adulterous, moving assuredly through the rituals of eating and slaughter, [the guests] are a dazzlingly obtuse and brilliantly decorative finale of an era." And from a review: "Threads of romance, social comment, country lore and intrigue both above and below stairs are cunningly worked together to create a brilliant tapestry ... I have seldom enjoyed a book so much."

    If anyone baulks at the £12.99 UK cover price of the paperback (and I'm sorry that it is comparatively expensive), The Book Depository is selling it for rather less, and there are cheap secondhand copies available at Abebooks. For those in the US, your edition is more reasonably priced. Libraries should have the book, too, of course, and I hope no-one has any difficulty getting hold of a copy, whatever their preferred source.

    On now to our November book which is something a bit different. A work of non-fiction, written in Japanese 1000 years ago, it is The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon. The author was a Court gentlewoman whose dates were c.966-1017; she wrote the book for her own amusement but it is "one of the greatest works of Japanese literature. A fascinating exploration of life amongst the nobility at the height of the idyllic Heian period, it describes the exquisite pleasures of a confined world in which poetry, love, fashion and whim dominated, and harsh reality was kept firmly at a distance. In sections ranging in size from brief reflections to longer, lyrical tales, Shōnagon moves elegantly across a wide range of themes including nature, society and her own flirtations and frustrations, to provide a witty, unique and deeply personal insight into a woman's life at Court in classical Japan."

    So there are our three Autumn books and their discussion dates are below; please join us in reading them.

Crusoe' Daughter - from Saturday, 28th. September

The Shooting Party - from Saturday, 26th. October

The Pillow Book - from Saturday, 23rd. November.