dovegreyreader scribbles

By George

Yesterday's walk was completely in keeping with my current read, Adam Bede by George Eliot. I felt quite sure I would bump into Adam and Seth carrying a coffin with Gyp, panting at their heels, as I rounded each bend, or glimpse Hetty as I strolled into the churchyard.

Though Eliot didn't use Devon for her location there can be little difference from the village of Hayslope. I am magically enthralled by Eliot's writing again, Her masterey of characterisation and influence on her reader has me falling into all the old traps. Not quite half way through I have developed the intended dislike for Hetty Sorrel and her vanity and am wondering whether Eliot will pull her masterstroke. I should have learnt my lesson reading Middlemarch as I grew to loath Casaubon and felt sorry for poor Dorothea, only to have Eliot turn the tables on my judgement and take me to task mercilessly.
I think this may be different.
Reading Eliot's biography by Kathyrn Hughes in tandem with Adam Bede it is abundantly clear that Eliot is on her soapbox on the subject of beauty. This in the face of so much spite and malice levelled at her own, less than photogenic looks, makes me think she will find it hard to allow us to feel even a shred of heart rending emotion in Hetty's direction.
It is clear the poor girl is in for trouble, I shall need my wits about me if Eliot is not to snooker me again.

They don't come much smaller

Here's the interior of St Mary's, Sydenham Damerel taken on last week's sunny day walk and in Adam Bede mode I have to say Hetty Sorrel would be hard pushed to avoid the gaze of Captain Donnithorne in a church this tiny, let alone be in any doubt as to whether he was there or not.

Yet for all its compactness this Church does have a fully functional, change ringing bell tower with a peal of 6 bells and a 9cwt tenor. Campanologist I am not but we love to hear them ringing the changes across the valley on occasional Sundays and for much rarer weddings. Once in a while a visiting team will grab the tower and we will be treated to an entire Saturday afternoon peal of call changes when you can clearly hear the rise, the changes at the top followed by the lower as they work through the sequences. A Plain Bob Minor is possible on 6 bells but that's a step too far and now you know I've cheated and looked all this up. The fact that it is possible to ring 720 changes on 6 bells will therefore completely give the game away; either that or I have been reading my Dorothy L. Sayers diligently.

Virtual stroll

  A glorious day here in the Tamar Valley and surely must have been a day like this when it was ajudged to be designated an area of outstanding natural beauty and therefore to be preserved for the nation? They surely can't have been to look on a cold wet January day?
Took a few photos on my morning yomp and thought I'd share a few in lieu of writing about my reading. I have such a backlog of finished books to talk about but the ones that have followed are too good to put down. Soon.
So meanwhile enjoy a virtual stroll through the lanes of Devonshire.

                                                       

The lane

The neighbours

The view

The destination, the 15th century church of St Mary's Sydenham Damerel

Mortified but cheered

 

nay...mortified and distraught to find that one of the best Independent bookshops I have ever had the pleasure of walking into has had to close its doors.
Seccession Books in Bath is no more and what a tragedy that is. I have never seen such a fantastically broad and must- have selection of real books on real shelves and it was one of the highlights of any trip to Bath. I even bought their beautiful shopping bag, presumably now a collector's item? Add in the warm, friendly welcome even to an infrequent traveller from further West such as I and you realise that a very good thing has been lost.
Pointless to even go into reasons why as it is painfully obvious what the overheads must be on a shop in an expensive city like Bath, coupled with the dilemmas of the retail book trade when you have Waterstone's around the corner and the internet at home. It's not in quite the mess the NHS is, but almost.

Cheered because all hopes must now lie with the mysteriously embryonic new independent bookshop about to be born at a top secret location somewhere in Oxfordshire and you can follow the birth pangs here at the Mostly Books blog. They are in the first stages of labour as I write and seem to be coping well with low levels of pain relief and some deep breathing but may need to move onto something stronger as the second stage kicks in. It's going to be a big bouncing baby with masses of potential if they do the right thing.

My bet for success would be to cultivate your local community with book groups, village/town reading programmes, reader's days and the rest. A bookshop, to my mind, should reach out to its clientele across the age range and the social class divide and get it reading. I love my children dearly but I'd have given my eye teeth for a book group that had a creche facility so that I could have some intelligent conversation on something other than Postman Pat. Why should that be so impossible ? Link in with some bibliotherapy resources, local health services, books on prescription. Why pay £6.75 for prozac when you could have a good book and a reading group that may help just as much?

I have already offered helpful ideas about what not to do based on my local experiences and here's a selection

• Don't swaddle my books whilst answering the phone and eating a pastie simultaneously, my credit card is slippery enough without the greasy finger prints and as for the books...well it all annoys me. I've paid for a book in good condition.
• Why do they have to wreck every book by sticking an irremovable electronic security tag inside the back cover? OK so some will walk that's life.
• Don't gossip behind the counter about people that I know, this has to be a fatal error in a small market town. I've heard some pretty slanderous and embarrassing stuff in there.

and I'm sure they'd welcome your list of "don'ts" plus suggestions about what this baby should  wear when it's born? Books on the shelves, there's the dilemma.

Readaholics anonymous required

The reading has spiralled out of control again. I was doing so well with just two fictions on the go,until a bookshop visit that means I finally have the six Hogarth Press volumes of Virginia Woolf's letters on my shelves. These will be a long term project to read alongside the five volumes of diaries but already fascinating as Woolf sits with her father Leslie Stephen through his final illness. This in 1903-4 from stomach cancer and Woolf spares her friends from much of the detail. I can only begin to imagine what "father had a bad night" must really have been like.
Also found  a biography of Elizabeth Gaskell by Winifred Gerin and the Kathryn Hughes biography of George Eliot. I started to read the latter in the shop and had to have it once I'd read that poor Marian was considered the ugliest woman in London and therefore well matched with Lewes the ugliest man. Ouch, but my style of biography. The book jacket features a rather flattering portrait of Eliot as if to contradict.

Thought for the day

And I must give due credit for this picture to Mary Azarian from Vermont, and send you to the most wonderful website to look at more of these glorious woodcuts.

Playing tag

A peaceful Easter weekend and a great deal of work done on my librarything catalogue. This continues to develop and I am now tagging and cross-referencing to make it work for me and so far this is looking good.
I have years and years worth of literary journals sitting gathering dust and with no clue to the contents. Beyond revealing an immoral lack of willpower over subscribing to these in the first place it has been good to go back through and tag the contents for reference and this should build into a useful resource for someone like me who doesn't have ready access to an academic library.

Mission accomplished

Some interesting finds today.

I'm currently enjoying Old Filth by Jane Gardam, my first read of hers and her books were plentiful so stocked up. There are one or two duplicates of unusual books which I buy if I see them to pass onto friends, Winter's Child and The Bookshop both come into this category. I am also currently reading Elizabeth Strout's second novel Abide With Me and so was delighted to find her first one Amy and Isabelle. A nice hardback copy of The Underpainter too good to leave behind, as was the pristine NYRB edition of Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner. Good Behaviour is one I've been meaning to read for years and found a couple by Angela Carter who is on my list to explore soon. Joyce Carol Oates comes too highly recommended to ignore much longer but only one to be found.

The book at the very bottom was only £1 but what a fascinating and unusual subject.

Tough assignment...

...but someone's got to do it. We plan a day trip here tomorrow. Being of lapsed and long  dormant religious affiliation but still with that instilled sense that Good Friday is a day one should stay at home and be quiet and reflective and miserable, we plan to go out and be two out of those three here instead.

                                                                           

A Bonnie House: A Good House by Bonnie Burnard

In my haste to blog about The Secret River I completely forgot to mention A Good House by Bonnie Burnard.

                                                             

This had been recommended by a Canadian reader and spans 50 years in the life of the Chambers family living in Ontario. With chapters taking quantum time leaps, you know that much will have happened and Burnard often only hints at the changes before she eventually elaborates. It's a bit like catching up with friends after a long gap and gradually piecing together the news and being just as surprised at the turn of events. Apart from getting slightly confused from 1977 to 1986 when a glut of grandchildren had materialised and it had been all change in the spouse department, I really enjoyed this saga of a read. These were normal lives made interesting with excellent characterisation and emotional depth.

Reading resume:Helen Dunmore & Carol Shields

Just two books in progress at any one time at the moment and as I finish one I start another usually with the other one half read, then when I finish the half read one I'm halfway into the other one I've started (are you keeping up here?). It does avoid the void of a book finished and that empty feeling that has you flitting through a stack of books and settling on nothing. Suits where I am right now.

So this week as follows

House of Orphans -Helen Dunmore 3*

I was so enthralled with this book especially after the rigours of Three Day Road. It's set in Finland in the early 1900's and pre-Russian revolution. Eeva an intelligent daughter of a revolutionary is orphaned and after some time in the orphanage is sent to work as a maid at the house of the local, recently widowed doctor. Thomas is essentially a good man and Eeva's enigmatic presence unsettles him to the point where he realises he is in love with her. But Eeva has a past life that she needs to reconnect with and it will of course lead to danger and uncertainty. My only caveat is the ending where it seems as if Dunmore inexplicably moves from a wonderfully engaging narrative style to something post-modern and mildly ambiguous focusing on the demise of minor characters in whom I was not the least interested.
It puzzled me and marred an otherwise excellent book

Unless - Carol Shields 4*

Perfectly and beautifully written book. Norah, the daughter of a respectable, normal middle class family heads off to university and then inexplicably drops out and sits in silence on a street corner wearing a sign that says "goodness" around her neck. In their search for a reason Norah's parents also have to face the fact that having bought up their children to be true to themselves they may do just this and use fairly non-conformist means in the process.

Mary Swann - Carol Shields 4*

Another winner. Mary Swann is a latter day Emily Dickinson who having submitted a paper bag full of poems to a local newspaper is then brutally murdered by her farmer husband (and chopped up and put in the silo for good measure; we never find out why) Undiscovered for years suddenly a cult surrounds her work and four people come together to piece together the "story". Story becomes the operative word here as Shield's deftly examines the nature of biography and truth and how the boundaries become blurred and exaggerated to serve the needs of those who create the myth. I was expecting a diatribe on domestic violence; nothing could be further removed. This book is by turns funny and poignant with the final denoument cleverly written in the unusual form of a film script.

In progress

A Good House - Bonnie Burnard

A Secret River - Kate Grenville

Next Up

Away - Jane Urquhart

Old Filth - Jane Gardam

We were here first: The Secret River by Kate Grenville

A run of fantastic fiction continues apace and the latest glued to fingers book has been The Secret River by Kate Grenville. Recent winner of the 2006 Commonwealth Writer's Prize and a deserving winner at that.

                                                            

In many ways this book connects with recent reads in its telling of a version of the truth that is often neglected. More insight into first nation people and this time in Australia. As William Thornhill and his family are deported there in 1806 "for the term of his natural life" Grenville places us alongside William and his wife Sal and their growing family as they take on the land and its native people. Both sides of the story are told with a balanced and non- judgemental depth and compassion. We live and breath William's need to find himself a piece of land and make his home but Grenville also homes in on the native way of life and just how rightfully bound to the earth itself the indigenous people are. There is inevitably horror and cruelty in what follows but as a reader you leave the book with a clear vision that in the end there were no winners and crystal clear vision on just how presumptious an act colonisation was.

Ecriture feminine

Take a look at this article in today's Independent

It would seem that all these writers must have visited my blog and thought she's talking sense but not very clearly, let's help her out. Just one writer ,who shall be nameless , who still thinks to categorise women's writing as such is to ghettoize it , but apart from that people far more articulate than I have clearly defined exactly what I was thinking.

Rocky's Nature Diary

The sunshine has arrived today along with the swallows. Now have to endure 7 months of being dive bombed as they nest above me here on the verandah.  Will try and make it look as if I was here first.

Ecriture Masculine

I am in the mood for making outrageous and sweeping statements today and having finished travelling Three Day Road and moved into The House of Orphans by Helen Dunmore it is clear to me that there is "men's" writing and "women's" writing, full stop. I know lit, theory abounds on ecriture feminine etc but at a basic level I feel sure there are some books that only a man could write and Three Day Road is one of them.

It is a brutal and painful book and had to be written but it is a book that has left me with only the tiniest  shred of comfort, more a sense of unease and again, yes books have to do that. It is punishing and shaming and connects you with so much that you'd rather it didn't. Not a book that you look forward to picking up and finishing, yet like holocaust reading you know you must.

I feel the wrath of the "gender equality for authors brigade" descending on me from on high but as I sink gratefully into the very different writing of Helen Dunmore and her feminine eye for the detail that interests and involves me I realise that a book is equally capable of conveying disturbing subject matter from a woman's point of view and giving you as much to think about in the process as the in your face, boys own stuff.

Does any of this make sense?

Not for the delicate: Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden