Cornflower Books

Five favourites

    Looking back at Mrs. Delany prompted me to go through my reading journal to see what I was reading on this day in each of the last ten years. I've chosen five favourites from the ten, and the links below will take you to posts on them, should you not already know the books or want to find out more:

    The Reading Cure by Laura Freeman - a superb debut.

    The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse - there's no post on it, but let this one stand instead.

    Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon - which reminds me I have The Woman in White on the TBR pile.

    The Cunning Man by Robertson Davies (and see also). Must read more of RD!

    The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley - and here's Alan at the writing desk.

Charlotte's web

       

    "It is salutary to discover that her novels, for all their stormy emotionalism, their troubling atmosphere of psycho-drama, their sense of a life lived on the edge of the nerves, are also full of fun, and of a wonderfully sensuous response to landscape, music, painting, and to the small, domestic pleasures of a warm fire, hot tea, the smell of fresh-baked bread."

    Angela Carter on Charlotte Brontë, from Writers as Readers: A Celebration of Virago Modern Classics.

Book of the day - After Alice

    "What happened to those left behind when Alice went to Wonderland?

    When Alice fell down the rabbit-hole she found Wonderland as rife with inconsistent rules and abrasive egos as the world she left behind. But how did Victorian Oxford react to Alice's disappearance?

    Gregory Maguire turns his imagination to the question of underworlds, undergrounds, underpinnings and understandings old and new, offering an inventive spin on Lewis Carroll's enduring tale, this year celebrating its 150th. birthday. Ada, a friend mentioned briefly in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, sets out to visit Alice, but arriving a moment too late, tumbles down the rabbit-hole herself.

    Ada brings to Wonderland her own imperfect apprehension of cause and effect as she embarks on an odyssey to find Alice and bring her safely home from this surreal world below the world. The White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, and the bloodthirsty Queen of Hearts interrupt their mad tea party to suggest a conundrum: if Eurydice can ever be returned to the arms of Orpheus, or if Lazarus can be raised from the tomb, perhaps Alice can be returned to life.

    Either way, everything that happens next is After Alice."

    After Alice by Gregory Maguire, out later this month; jacket illustration by Perrin.

Cornflower Book Group - Jane Eyre

    Reader, I loved it.

    Jane Eyre was longer than I'd remembered, better than I'd recollected; Jane was more complex, had more spirit; Mr. Rochester was just as appealing in his quieter moments, less so in his bluster and braggadocio scenes - though as it was necessary for plot purposes to give him 'a past', we had to see that side of his character, too. Creepier by far than I'd recalled was St. John Rivers with his conscientious blackmail and manipulative ways, made all the more powerful by his sanctimoniousness.

    Rochester is abrupt, sarcastic, commanding, a "fierce falcon", a "rough-coated keen-eyed dog" - and given what's to come, there's irony in that description. Jane makes of him an idol, and he falls. She, on the other hand, is unshakeable, moved by heart but ruled by head, a true product of Mr. Brocklehurst's Lowood regime designed to render his girls "hardy, patient, self-denying."

    The aspect which perhaps made the greatest impression on me, reading the book now as opposed to in my teens or early twenties, was its depiction of - as my edition has it - "a woman's passionate search for a wider and richer life than that traditionally accorded to her sex in Victorian society." To that end, I'll quote a passage which must represent Charlotte Bronte at her most direct:

    "It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. [...] Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced for their sex."

    So, a very rich book with themes of proto-feminism, atonement, self-actualisation, among others; elements of the gothic and heroic; subtle power play; a highly romantic novel. How was it for you, if you were reading it for the first time, and how did you find it this time round if it was a re-read? While you're pondering, do pop over to Cornflower for a virtual cup of tea and slice of cake.

Cornflower Book Group - April 2015

   

    Thanks to everyone who responded so enthusiastically to my suggestion that we pick up the threads of the Book Group, and here at last I am doing just that.

    Having said before that our aim is to explore both the highways and byeways of literature, our next book is most definitely in the former category to the extent that we have probably all read it, but maybe not for some time.

    A chance mention of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre yesterday* set me thinking that it might be a good choice for us: if you read it when young, what will your more adult self make of it, and if you haven't ever read it, then I hope this "work of genius" (as it's described on the back of my Penguin edition) is a treat in store.

    "Orphaned into the household of her Aunt Reed at Gateshead, subject to the cruel regime at Lowood charity school, Jane Eyre none the less emerges unbroken in spirit and integrity. How she takes up the post of governess at Thornfield Hall, meets and loves Mr. Rochester and discovers the impediment to their lawful marriage are elements in a story that transcends melodrama to portray a woman's passionate search for a wider and richer life than that traditionally accorded to her sex in Victorian society."

    I wrote a dissertation on the romantic hero in the novels of the Brontë sisters in my final year at school, but I don't think I've revisited any of the books since then. Once it came to mind, I was immediately very keen to re-read it, though I'm curious as to how I'll feel about this classic so many years on; I hope you won't take much persuading to pick it up, either.

    As it's quite a long book, and I don't want anyone to feel under pressure, I've given us about ten weeks to read it, and set the discussion date as Saturday, 25th. April. That's when I'll put up a brief post here, and everyone can have their say in the comments, then or in subsequent days or weeks. No-one should have any difficulty getting hold of a copy, assuming you don't already have one on your shelves.

    I hope you approve of this choice and will be happy to join in, whether you're a long term member of the group or will be participating for the first time.

 

*See Ichigoknitter's (knitting) podcast.

Have you read ... Wilkie Collins?

    Born on this day in 1824, William Wilkie Collins is best known for his novels The Woman in White, No Name, Armadale, and The Moonstone, all published in the 1860s. The Moonstone is regarded as the first detective story in English, while The Woman in White, his 'must read text', began the vogue for 'sensation' fiction which "peered beneath the surface gentility of Victorian domesticity and revealed a world of bigamy, madness, murder and violence supposedly lurking there," (Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide).

    "Make 'em laugh, make 'em cry, make 'em wait", is the serialist's motto, attributed to Collins (according to John Sutherland's Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives), and he did all that and more, becoming a great popular success in the process, and in Dickens' view, writing one of the two best scenes in English fiction with the opening of The Woman in White.

    The Moonstone has been nominated as a book for the beach, "its unhurried episodes perfectly paced for stints on the sand," while readers here put Collins in the 'fireside reading' category.

    Have you read him, and if so, which book would you especially recommend?

Cornflower Book Group - The Warden

   

    Why has it taken me until now to read Trollope? I don't know the answer to that, but I'm so glad to have discovered him at last.

    I was charmed by The Warden, the first of his Chronicles of Barsetshire; I loved its humour, its good-natured unpretentiousness, the authorial voice and commentary, the gently caricatural portraits, the moral 'meanderings' of the story, its handling of a political subject with grace and human understanding. There were small riches of one kind or another on every page, and if you're a collector of great names, the book has more than its share, so add to your list those of Sir Abraham Haphazard Q.C., Dr. Pessimist Anticant, the social critic, and Mr. Popular Sentiment, the influential novelist (about whom we heard yesterday)!

    This was a soft and comfortable book, a few hours of pure pleasure, and it's surprising - or perhaps not, in the light of yesterday's post! - to read that when it was first published it sold so slowly to begin with that Trollope made only £20/9/3 from it in the first two years: "as regarded remuneration for the time, stone-breaking would have done better". Happily, his fortunes changed, and the rest, as they say, is history.

    There were many eminently quotable lines, but let's have a couple for good measure:

    "You might pass Eleanor Harding in the street without notice, but you could hardly pass an evening with her and not lose your heart." Aw!

    Then, and I'm digressing now with reference to this post, here is the opening paragraph of the Conclusion:

    "Our tale is now done, and it only remains to us to collect the scattered threads of our little story, and to tie them into a seemly knot." Interestingly, he goes on "... were it not for the custom of the thing, we might leave it to the imagination of all concerned to conceive how affairs at Barchester arranged themselves." So custom - or expectation on the part of the reader - requires the neat finish.

    Back to the main point - was this your first Trollope (and if so, are you now inclined to read more), or are you an old hand, happy to revisit the book? Either way, do give us your thoughts.

Breakfast at Plumstead Episcopi

    "... The tea consumed was the very best, the coffee the very blackest, the cream the very thickest; there was dry toast and buttered toast, muffins and crumpets; hot bread and cold bread, white bread and brown bread, home-made bread and bakers' bread, wheaten bread and oaten bread; and if there be other breads than these, they were there; there were eggs in napkins, and crispy bits of bacon under silver covers; and there were little fishes in a little box, and devilled kidneys frizzling on a hot-water dish; which, by-the-by, were placed closely contiguous to the plate of the worthy archdeacon himself. Over and above this, on a snow-white napkin, spread upon the sideboard, was a huge ham and a huge sirloin; the latter having laden the dinner table on the previous evening. Such was the ordinary fare at Plumstead Episcopi."

    Feeling peckish now? That passage comes from Trollope's The Warden which our very informal Cornflower Book Group is reading this month. There's still plenty of time to pick up the book if you'd like to read it, or if you already know it well, do join in the chat about it from Saturday the 29th. (I've just finished it and found it completely charming.)

Cornflower Book Group - The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde

   

    "... all human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone, in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil."

    That line seems to get to the nub of the thing, and what an interesting thesis RLS proposes in his Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. The introduction (by Jenni Calder) to my edition stresses Stevenson's Calvinist upbringing and its influence on his work, and it's his exploration of what he sees as the duality of human nature - the evil side, always present but usually suppressed by the good - that is at the heart of the book.

    His Dr. Jekyll is an upstanding man, respected, liked and admired, and thus his 'fall' - his unleashing of the dark side - is all the more chilling than if he'd been of lesser character. In choosing the path of temptation, corruption and depravity, he experiences a liberation as disquieting as it is dramatic. The morality by which he has lived a life "of effort, virtue and control" is set aside in favour of "the undeveloped, unexercised evil side of his nature", and "the greater the aspirations towards good of Jekyll, the greater the monstrosity of Hyde."

    At 70 pages, this is a very short book but one which can be read on several levels; however, it's the moral analysis which is so fascinating. As Jenni Calder says, "[RLS] had experienced directly the iron grip of Calvinism and of bourgeois morality on human behaviour, and he recognised that it could be destructive, destructive because it affirmed that good for the majority was something external, artificial, not intrinsic to human nature: men could not be good unless they were told how to be good. Stevenson himself recognised a rather different kind of morality, a morality that came from within, that depended on a sensitive understanding of human relationships and responsibilities, that was flexible, individual, spontaneous. And it was this that made him so attractive, as man and writer, to so many, for at the time he was writing there was a certain weariness with the heavy-handed moral and religious principles of Victorianism."

    There we have it.

    What did you think?

 

    (The 'books and cakes' post for the novel is here.)

Cornflower Book Group - February & March 2014

 

    As you know, the Cornflower Book Group is reading Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce as our January book (we'll talk about it from next Saturday), but today let's look ahead to our February and March titles as a bit of advance notice is helpful. I hope you'll approve of both novels I've chosen and will be as keen to read (or re-read) them as I am.

    In February, a short, dark book for what will still be quite short, dark days (at least up here in the northern hemisphere): Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, first published in 1886, a classic which really needs no introduction.

    For the lighter, brighter March days, I've taken Julie's prompt (see her comment here) and decided to offer Anthony Trollope's The Warden (1855), the first of his Chronicles of Barsetshire, as a group read, and if that goes down well, we might even cover more of the series in future months.

    The chances are you'll have copies of both books already on your shelves, but if not they should be easy to come by. There are numerous paperback editions, audiobooks (for example here and here), Kindle versions are available free (and should you be so inclined you could go the whole hog and get the Complete Works of Anthony Trollope - all 47 novels, stories, notes, biographies, criticism and so on - for £1.39, and the slighter but nonetheless comprehensive Stevenson canon too), and if libraries don't have them to hand then sharp words are in order!

    Let's say we set our discussion dates as from Saturday, 22nd. February for Dr. Jekyll, and Saturday, 29th. March for The Warden.

    I'm looking forward to some good reading with these two, and I hope you'll join in and read them with me.

Good lines: good men

   
    "As she heard the brougham draw up in the wet street before the door Mrs. Warren allowed her book to fall closed upon her lap, and her attractive face awakened to an expression of agreeable expectation, in itself denoting the existence of interesting and desirable qualities in the husband at the moment inserting his latchkey in the front door preparatory to mounting the stairs and joining her. The man who after twenty five years of marriage can call, by his return to her side, this expression to the countenance of an intelligent woman is, without question or argument, an individual whose life and occupations are as interesting as his character and points of view."

From The Making of a Marchioness by Frances Hodgson Burnett.
   
    Should you have watched last night's dire television adaptation (and see Elaine's post on it here), please don't let that put you off the book. 

The Heritage Collection

 

    This neat bundle of books was in the pile waiting for me on my return from holiday. It's the first group to be published as part of John Murray's new Heritage Collection, paperback reissues and ebooks designed to bring a new audience to "forgotten classics by great authors of the past".

 

    George Bernard Shaw's work is represented by two novels: An Unsocial Socialist features Sidney Trefusis who is "determined to overthrow a society riddled with class and sexual exploitation. But when he goes to work as a gardener at a girls' school he meets his match in the form of Agatha Wylie, a new kind of woman ... Galloping, exuberant, and irresistibly entertaining, a brilliant satire on social prejudice."

    Then comes  Love Among the Artists, the story of three wayward geniuses (two pianists - one said to have been suggested by Beethoven - and an actress of great self-made charm) which offers "shrewd insight into the nature of the artistic temperament with its needs for a kind of commitment that overrides the everyday claims of the heart."

    

    The second pair, which like the others is due out in mid-August, comprises what is "widely acknowledged as one of the greatest novels in the Irish comic tradition. The Crock of Gold by James Stephens is a wise and beautiful fairytale for grown-ups. Fantasy, satire and delicious humour propel the magical narrative through a world peopled by policemen, philosophers, tinkers and leprechauns. Yet, the intent of it all is serious. Or is it?"

    Last of the bunch is The Return by Walter de la Mare, a darkly thrilling tale, and one of de la Mare's finest occult stories, which tells of Lawford, "a dull suburban man who falls asleep on a grave and wakes up possessed by the spirit - and face - of somebody else. Denounced by his family and friends as an impostor, Lawford's struggle to free himself of this possession leaves him a thoroughly changed man", while the book encompasses domestic trauma, unrequited love and philosophical reflection.

    This series will continue later in the year with The Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett by Compton Mackenzie and The Brickfield by L.P. Hartley.

Monday miscellany

   

    Another miscellaneous post for Monday, catching up with bits and pieces which may be of interest.

    My goodness me, that Dickens passage gave rise to a wealth of wonderful comments! To answer a few, I don't know why I've never read him - it's certainly not down to deliberate avoidance. There have always been many of his books on our shelves, but for some reason I have yet to read them (and they are on this 'list' - with which I've yet to make any progress, I admit). No, he wasn't studied at my school, and nor was Scott read (we did, as far as I recall, no Scottish literature and no Scottish history), but we did read a lot of Shakespeare, much poetry, Austen and Hardy. (By the way, and in case you haven't seen them, the Dickens commemorative stamps are now available.)

    I gave a brief introduction to Jane Rusbridge's new novel Rook yesterday. It won't be published until the beginning of August, but you can be in with a chance of winning one of five copies of the book by 'liking' and sharing this Facebook post or re-tweeting @circusbooks' tweet on it. Get in quickly, though, as the competition closes at 5pm today.

    

    Next, Sandy at Scone: Alexander McCall Smith will be launching Sunshine on Scotland Street, the latest in his very popular 44, Scotland Street series, in the lovely surroundings of Scone Palace on Thursday, 2nd. August at 7pm. Ticket details here.

 

    Any more entries for our Shadow of Night draw? Get your comments in as I'll be picking the winners soon, and if you haven't read the first book in the series - A Discovery of Witches, which is tremendous fun - then this clip of the author Deborah Harkness leading a walking tour of the book's Oxford locations might whet your appetite.

 

    Speaking of walking tours, currently in progress is The Sillitoe Trail, a literary journey through the Nottingham locations of Alan Sillitoe's 1958 novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning via app, web, and so on - more details here.

What Dickens did

    I've referred here before to the book The Pleasure of Reading, edited by Antonia Fraser. When I picked it up this evening for an idle browse, it happened to fall open at Germaine Greer's piece, an essay in which she describes how as a child she became a compulsive reader, "gobbling up one book so that I could gobble up another." Her reading was then a displacement activity, she says, and a book her "fantasy interlocutor", her friend.

    She read on indiscriminately, "gorging on print, reading rubbish with the same appetite as I read the best", and then she brought home a badly foxed copy of Bleak House (chosen for its length), and read:

'London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes - gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foothold at street corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since day broke ...'

 

    "By the time I finished that first paragraph I was reading in a different way, letting the phrases swing me along, bouncing through arcs of history, spinning as a hawk's eye to a point of view at once lofty and minute. The rhythm of the writing imposed itself on the rush of my compulsion. I knew that this was an appetite that would not sicken. I would be reading this book for the rest of my life. Dickens had rescued me ... I knew real pleasure at last."

    That's quite a reaction, quite an effect, and not one I can say I've ever experienced (but then ... I've never read Dickens!!!).

 

Illustration from The Pleasure of Reading by Katie Lester.

Cornflower Book Group - Lady Audley's Secret

 

    I'm not surprised that Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon has been in print since publication in 1862, when it was an immediate success, and that it became one of the best-selling novels of the nineteenth century, for it's a cracking tale!

    Yes, its prose is at times florid and over-written and its authorial voice is often quite 'chummy' in its commentary, and of course we know from early on what it is that the eponymous Lady Audley is keeping secret, but it's the very gradual dénouement which makes the reader turn the pages as Robert Audley "learns the business of life" by acting detective and discovering what really happened to his friend George Talboys who disappeared on a visit to Audley Court.

    There are some very convenient clues to keep the plot moving, and although "whatever the mystery may be it grows darker and thicker at every step", events do slot into place rather neatly; but I think that's part of the book's charm, so that while Robert is dashing about the place, jumping on and off trains, and feeling that "a hand that is stronger than my own is beckoning me onward upon the dark road", we have grown to trust the author to give us the ending we want - and so she does.

  As to the calculating, manipulative Lady Audley, the woman who has fashioned a new identity and plays the part she has written for herself, her step-daughter Alicia's appraisal of her is spot on:

"'She is a vain, frivolous, heartless little coquette,' said Alicia, addressing herself to her Newfoundland dog, Caesar, who was the sole recipient of the young lady's confidences; 'she is a practised and consummate flirt, Caesar; and not contented with setting her yellow ringlets and her silly giggle at half the men in Essex, she must needs make that stupid cousin of mine dance attendance upon her. I haven't common patience with her.'" Caesar, it must be said, shared this opinion, showing he had more sense than George and Sir Michael! (The picture is Lion: A Newfoundland Dog by Landseer, by the way).  

    What did you think of the book? Was it just a little too pat for you, or were you comfortable in it, and glad to be along for the ride? After a slowish start, did you like the ending which "leaves the good people all happy and at peace"?; a deliberately popular move on the part of the author, I should think. Are you now inclined to read more by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, for example The Doctor's Wife, her version of Madame Bovary?! I certainly am.

                                            ~~~~~

    The cake to go with this book is here.

Friday reads x 4

 

   The 'current reading' list there on the right is slightly over-populated at the moment, but each book is a real pleasure, so I'm not complaining.

    I'm racing to the finish with Lady Audley's Secret and am quite gripped! There is still time to read it for our book group discussion which begins next Saturday, so if you haven't already done so, grab a copy of this Victorian page-turner and join in.

    As a non-fiction contrast, I'm in Italy with Tracey Lawson's A Year in the Village of Eternity, discovering - as the villagers of Campodimele have done - how to live well, and hoping to adopt as much of their modus vivendi as is possible in my very different environment.

    Back to fiction, and William Nicholson's The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life which has come highly recommended. I'm not far on with it yet but am so enjoying this portrait of modern marriage and mores, and I'm glad to know that there is a 'sort of sequel' to it, i.e. All the Hopeful Lovers.

    Last year when I reviewed Peter May's The Blackhouse (one of the Cornflower Blues of 2011), I said I hoped that he was well on with writing volume 2 of the series because I  - and a lot of other readers, as it's been hugely popular - couldn't wait for more of this trilogy. Happily, the second book, The Lewis Man, is now out and I've just begun it. An unidentified corpse has been discovered in a peat bog and the only clue to its identity is a DNA sibling match to a local farmer, but this elderly islander, now suffering from dementia, has always claimed to be an only child. When the man's family turn to detective Fin Macleod for help, he feels duty bound to solve the mystery.

    So there are my four this Friday; what are you reading, and do you typically have more than one book on the go at a time?

Cornflower Book Group - January 2012

 

    Mary Elizabeth Braddon's novel Lady Audley's Secret has never been out of print since its publication in 1862 and has been described by the critic John Sutherland as "the most sensationally successful of all the sensation novels". 

    Thanks to Oxford University Press I have an advance copy of their new edition which will be out in early January, and from which the blurb is as follows:

"When beautiful young Lucy Graham accepts the hand of Sir Michael Audley, her fortune and her future look secure. But Lady Audley's past is shrouded in mystery, and to Sir Michael's nephew Robert, she is not all that she seems [shades of My Cousin Rachel?]. When his good friend George Talboys suddenly disappears, Robert is determined to find him, and to unearth the truth. His quest reveals a tangled story of lies and deception, crime and intrigue, whose sensational twists turn the conventional picture of Victorian womanhood on its head. Can Robert's darkest suspicions really be true?"

    I thought this book sounded just the thing for a leisurely read by the fireside over Christmas and into the New Year, and to get us into the spirit of it straightaway I've posted the opening passage here. Being a classic which is available in many editions, copies should be easily obtainable in libraries, shops and online (including through Amazon US and with free international delivery from The Book Depository), while the e-book version is free. If I set the discussion date as Saturday, 21st. January, that will give us more than eight weeks to get hold of it and take our time over it it, so please do join in with the group read, whether you're a first-timer or a regular, as the more, the merrier!

Cornflower Book Group - The Picture of Dorian Gray

 

    If you didn't know that Oscar Wilde was a playwright you could certainly guess it was so on the basis of his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. There are many declamatory passages, 'stage-y' scenes, melodramatic, 'back of the hand to the forehead' moments, and enough epigrams, aphorisms and sharp, barbed wit to keep an audience engaged throughout three acts.

    If it were a play, the sets and costumes would be beautiful (see, for example, the description of the little library in Lord Henry's Mayfair house at the beginning of chapter IV, and Sibyl's clothes as Rosalind in ch. VI), and noticeably, given so many exquisite details of dress, objets and decor, there is rather a lack of food - again, is this the dramatist's mind dwelling on what is most effective on stage and eliminating that which can't be easily done? Just by the way but on the subject of things, I was amused at Dorian Gray's interest in what I suppose was an early form of aromatherapy and crystal therapy in chapter XI!

    Those are the externals, while the internals - the aestheticism, the faustian pact, the corruption and immorality, make the familiar story, one set in a world in which everything is deceptively simple: "The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming." Everything leads back to that, it seems.

    Throughout the book there is a disconnection between narrative and reader, in the sense that as with a play in a conventional theatre, the reader watches and listens from a certain distance in the stalls and the circle - there's that proscenium divide, and thus none of the immediacy and close involvement that an apron stage or viewing in the round would provide. This is Wilde's natural habitat, both professionally and personally, and every word, every detail is arranged just so, to attract and retain the reader's attention. This artifice is almost like looking at the most beautifully dressed shop window - the passer-by may have no interest in the merchandise on show, but the display itself is arresting.

    I'm glad I've read the book, although at times doing so was a bit like sipping a particularly potent and somewhat bitter liqueur - enough was quite enough. What did you think of it?

(Edited to add: this book's cake is here).

Cornflower Book Group 2011: Volume 4

 

     This coming Saturday the Cornflower Book Group will be discussing the first of Ellis Peters's Brother Cadfael series, A Morbid Taste for Bones, but for our April book we shall be moving far away from a 1970s depiction of twelfth century monks, going instead to late Victorian England, the aesthetic movement, and the scandalous Oscar Wilde, with his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.

     "Enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian Gray exchanges his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Influenced by his friend Lord Henry Wotton, he is drawn into a corrupt double life, indulging his desires in secret while remaining a gentleman in the eyes of polite society. Only his portrait bears the traces of his decadence."

   

    A Faustian pact, hedonism, gothic horror clad in silken draperies ... there will be lots here to interest us, I should think! I've chosen the Penguin Classics edition pictured above as it comes with two introductions - one of them by Peter Ackroyd - and contemporary reviews, but any copy you can get hold of will be fine. The novel should be widely available (though in case of difficulty, The Book Depository will send it anywhere in the world, post-free), and at just over 200 pages, it shouldn't take us very long to get through, so how about we set our discussion date for Saturday, 23rd. April.

    I say this every month, but the group is open to all who care to read the book and give us the benefit of their thoughts on it, on or after the set date. A few words will suffice, or a much longer analysis - regardless of length, your contribution will be welcome, so I hope Mr. Wilde and his Mr. Gray will not disappoint.

Cornflower Blues 2010 - part 1: a breath of fresh air

    It's time to choose my best books of the year, the Cornflower Blues 2010. This is always a difficult process as there are more strong contenders than space here allows, but tough as it is to exclude some gems, I have to make the cut.

    I shall be listing the books over several posts but I'm beginning today with my first category which I've called "a breath of fresh air" as the three books in it are vibrant, invigorating, original, and are all written in a major key, if you see what I mean.

    I'll start with Michael Faulkner's The Blue Cabin: Living by the Tides on Islandmore which I read back in February - that post will tell you all you need to know, but Mike's account of his and his artist wife Lynn's major life-change is warm, open and engaging, and it may make you want to find your own island hideaway.

    A book which went down very well with the CBG was John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley: In Search of America. I loved Steinbeck's voice and his perceptive portrait of the American landscape he saw and the people he encountered on his journey, as also the view of himself and his canine companion which his distinctive narrative affords the reader.

    My third book today is not unrelated to the other two - there are similarities in tone and mood, sometimes in subject matter, also in location. Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs (post on it here) was a real pleasure to read and as I noted, one of its strengths seemed to be the author's feeling for the inner life that informs so much of human character and behaviour.

    All three books here are good-natured, respectful, considered, and there's an integrity to them which appealed to me strongly.