dovegreyreader scribbles

Interlude

I think I've mentioned before that, on my working days, I share a large office with the local District Nursing team.There are four of them and one of me and they are now called Community Nurses and there is a clear demarcation boundary in the room.
My side is the happy health visitor side and, apart from my work station and drawers of records, it's full of toyboxes and nice pictures of Bob the Builder and Balamory, Charlie and Lola books and my baby changing area and scales.Mobiles for babies to look at, a nice clock with a bee that buzzes around, Bookstart packs and little table and chairs and all the toys I use for developmental checks and things.
It's lovely, a sort of warm welcoming, relaxing child-friendly zone.
The other side of the room is terrible, there's no getting away from it.
Therein rest unwelcome daily reminders of what may be in store,as if you needed reminding but I'm going to tell you anyway.Incontinence pads prevail, then there's catheters and leg bandages and dressings and ...no, enough, I can't go on.
As if the visuals weren't enough, marginally more taxing are the nurse's phone conversations because there's no getting away from it, the elderly are rightly very exercised about their bowels.
They are usually hard of hearing too so the conversations are high decible and inescapable.
It would seem that if you put the Hogwarts sorting hat on these poor patients they fall between two stools  houses, they've either got the slytherins or the hufflepuffs and it all causes a great deal of distress.(on reflection, JKR might not like that comparison, please don't tell)
Today it was all enough to bring on a bout of the voldemorts and so I took my lunch up to a very young and sprightly 81 year old Tinker, we got out some old photos, fell about laughing at pictures of me in a mini-skirt and didn't talk about bowels once that I can recall.

Exacerbation of Rothmania

So if Peter Owen were kind enough to send me some books the least I could do was read them.
I have to own up to a bit of a backlog of reading "books sent".I am always very grateful and I get there eventually, when the right mood strikes, but they aren't all by Joseph Roth and I was in complete mittel-European mood last weekend so I just opened one and that was me done for.
Flight Without End first published in 1927 and things are ambiguous from the off.
Is it, as Joseph Roth would have us believe,
"the story of my friend, comrade and spiritual associate, Franz Tunda...in part his notes in part his narrative.I have invented nothing, made up nothing.The question of 'poetic invention' is no longer relevant.Observed fact is all that counts"
or is it a novel masquerading as fact?
Part way through we learn that there could be some element of invention and elaboration to Tunda's notes so there lies the confusion, who's actually writing what?
Perhaps this is Joseph Roth's method of writing one step removed from real events and now I'm confusing myself. All cleverly ambiguous, full marks to Joseph.
The book follows the journey of Franz Tunda a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army returning to his old life in Europe after captivity in Siberia following the 1914-18 war.En route he gets caught up in a bit of revolution in Russia but eventually, making it back to his old haunts, he finds a life, the people and place unrecognizable.Much as he may have been dissatisfied with the old order it had its attractions but nothing about the new order impresses him at all.
Every time I read a book by Joseph Roth I have this image in mind of a stocky little man, balding,specs on his nose, a gifted writer so despairing of what he is seeing happen in Europe that he feels compelled to record his disillusion with a drink or three to hand that will speed him into an early grave and each book seems to reflect some little aspect of this.
The turmoil is all so quietly understated, almost matter-of-fact.
I never sense any anger seeping out of a Joseph Roth book either, he's too clever for that, more an all-pervading sense of helpless disempowerment;a writer who has gently surrendered to the might of his pen and this makes it even more impressive.In the same way that Penelope Fitzgerald wrote about life's unfortunates, Joseph Roth does likewise.
Yes indeed,melancholy aplenty.
I turn the pages completely immersed in a world I couldn't possibly know but actually, thanks to Joseph Roth, I'm starting to know very well indeed.
I still have two more lovely Peter Owen Joseph's to read (solid binding, nice cover, good paper, book printed in Cornwall, oggy oggy oggy) and whole lot more besides.
Is there a good biography in English? That's where I need to go next.

Proof encounter

After last week's proof encounter this one should have made me happy because it came wrapped in the dust jacket.
It has been explained to me that, although they are basic fare, proof covers do in fact attempt to reflect the content of the book, hence the orange for the Chinese dissident of last week and so to this week's read The Sound of Butterflies by Rachael King to be published by Picador in March.
Lurking under that dust jacket a jewel-like, well-within-my-zone, turquoise blue cover reflecting the dazzling array of butterflies collected by Thomas Edgar on his travels up the Amazon river.I quickly discarded the dust jacket this time because the book blended perfectly with my current quilting project.
In fact it more than blended. Sometimes there is a real fusion between what I'm making and what I'm reading and so my wallhanging, previously titled The Inundation of the Spring should now  be called The Inundation of the Spring With the Sound of Butterflies.I had used a line from an Emily Dickinson poem
"the inundation of the Spring enlarges every soul" but the vibrant colours in the wallhanging are more than reflected in this book.
That aside there is also a real Heart of Darkness theme running through Rachael King's book so the fusion will have to stop there.
My senses are always heightened by any mention of lavender in connection with Heart of Darkness.Wasn't there that rather ambiguous reference to the dough being lavender coloured? And was it dough? Rachael King drops in quite a few lavender references in this book and would you believe it, as I read the line "the copper-shot lavender chiffon falls in soft folds about her body" that theme from Ladies in Lavender started playing on the radio.
I was convinced it was another sign and we were in for an ambiguous casserole.
It's 1904 and young Thomas Edgar returns home to his wife Sophie from his lepidopteral expedition up the Amazon a changed, silent and very disturbed man.
Was it something he ate or was it something he saw? Was it something he smoked or was it something he caught? Did he catch the butterfly of his dreams?
I couldn't possibly comment but The Sound of Butterflies is a good involving read contrasting the constraints of life in Edwardian England with the rather more lax state of affairs in the Amazon jungle.Both jungles of their own kind when you come to think about it.
It's all left me with an overwhelming urge to go to the Natural History Museum and gaze at all those tropical butterflies, though really I should be getting on with some quilting because, as a way of making myself complete and finish, The Inundation of the Spring With the Sound of Butterflies is entered in an exhibition later this year.

Yes, I still love Pushkin Press

I've said it before and will shamelessly say it again, Pushkin Press how do I love thee let me count the ways.
These are perfect hand-sized little books, superb quality bindings and covers, high grade paper, plus beautiful artwork and typeface, every aesthetically pleasing box firmly ticked.
But what use beauty on the shelves if it lies there unread?
Inevitable by Louis Couperus, first published in Dutch as Langs Lijnen van geleidelijkheid in 1900.
This translates roughly as Little By Little but with no help from babelfish which offered Along the Lines of geleidelijkheid.
I was bewitched and besotted by about page 10 because the word melancholy seemed to prevail and books on that theme always cover so much ground for me.The men of the house were all gainfully occupied elsewhere (bookhound out booktracking, the kayaker playing football down in Newlyn and the gamekeeper out on an end of season shoot) and so I awarded myself one of those precious Saturday afternoons consisting of a fire, a pot of tea, uninterrupted silence and a book.
It was a long langorous afternoon very well spent immersed in Couperus's highly descriptive prose.I struggle to describe prose in any other way really and still don't know what "translucent" or "limpid" prose is.
Mostly in Rome, with some time in Florence and Nice in about 1900 and in the company of the Hague-born, recently divorced 23 year old Cornelie de Retz van Loo.
When in Rome and all that Cornelie falls in love with the Dutch painter and aesthete Duco van der Staal and much convention is flouted in the process.Anguish looms when Cornelie, forced by poverty to become a lady's companion, finds herself face to face with her ex-husband at a party.With a name like Baron Rudolph Brox there is little doubt he's going to be a red-nosed brutish sort of chap.
Inevitable is a book that you almost expect to have been written by a woman because for 1900 it engages so sympathetically with Cornelie's plight; her life, her emotions and dilemma, plus the disparity of women's rights.It bears favourable comparison to Kate Chopin's The Awakening published at about the same time and both were considered scandalous, Kate Chopin's perhaps more so because a woman had dared to write it. A full review here suggests it's "an appealing enough read - though it is very much a book of its time", that was the whole point of reading it for me.
All this woven into a book which to be honest is quite mesmerizing.I couldn't and didn't want to put it down until I'd finished it.Complete emotional engagement and deeply drawn characters coupled with a powerful sense of place;plenty of walks among the ruins, shimmering azure seas and pearly haze.
The perfect antidote to a dull, cold Devon afternoon even if it was a quiet one.

Open the Box

I did listen to the Norman Lebrecht Live programme on BBC Radio 3 on blogging this afternoon but only after a fortifying round of toasted tea cakes with clotted cream and a pot of tea in front of the TV and Noel Edmonds on Deal or No Deal.
I have been so slow to grasp how this programme works because I only ever catch about 5 minutes and Noel always seems to be on the phone, but raising my cholesterol must have helped and now I think I understand.
Isn't it a souped up moneyed version of that old Michael Miles series from years ago Take Your Pick?
We all used to shout "OPEN THE BOX!" at the screen.
Deal or No Deal is just as interactive and the stakes are considerably higher but eventually I had to tell bookhound it was only a game.
He gets very wound up about programmes like this and Dragon's Den and The Apprentice, it's the self-employed, decision-making, buck-stops-here business man in him I think.He is lighteningly quick on analysing the pros and cons of business deals.
Sometimes I feel really sorry for those students who have taken the jobs in call centres and then cold call to try and sell him financial advice, advertising or insurance or similar.He puts them all through their paces for amusement and of course the poor things haven't the first clue and probably go off sick and needing counselling.
It's for their own good apparently.
It's running your own limited company for 25 years that does it, once you've written a cheque in anger it's something you really understand.
I was too exhausted from opening boxes to get overly involved with Norman Lebrecht and blogging.
It was interesting but the usual stuff, reasonably even-handedly explored, and I probably agreed with John Sutherland's suggestion that bloggers are "that roar beyond the other side of silence".
Nuff said.

 

Sunday Confessions

Quite a select group of confessions this week and eternal gratitude to Peter Owen publishers who I discover have been around for fifty years and specialise in literature in translation and I didn't know a thing about them.
To help me get acquainted I now have three more Joseph Roth's that I hadn't come across before, Flight Without End, The Silent Prophet and Weights and Measures. I am in a frenzy to open these and it won't be long.
Also published by Peter Owen, Bless ' Em All : A Blitz Novel by Allen Saddler.This looks so right up my street I've had to make a start.A fictionalized social history set in London at the start of WWII.
I've been reading some wartime diaries at random recently and browsing another book Under Seige Literary Life in London 1939- 45 by Robert Hewison.I'm already 50 pages into Allen Sadler's book and am firmly esconced in the Anderson shelter with his characters and their lives and am loving his style of writing, plus he's more local to Devon than London it would seem.
More about all that soon.
Falling into my hands from the skies, an advance copy of Marina Lewycka's eagerly awaited second novel Two Caravans. I'm reading this as part of a reading group for The Book Magazine.I loved A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, there was much more to it than the humour, and so I'm in a state of antsinthepantsation about this one too.
Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures by Dr Vincent Lam won the Canadian Giller Prize last year and I am grateful to tripleblessings, who stops by here when the triplets allow, for recommending it.
I will luckily end up with another copy on it's way from the man himself, so hopefully I'm going to conduct a unique social experiment and pass this book around some doctors, if I can find a reading one, and elicit some insider opinions on it.
Finally a lovely New York Review of Books edition of The Go-Between by L.P.Hartley and the truth is now out, I have never read this book.
PS Had to start Flight Without End by Joseph Roth, it was all too much to bear

Bookhound sniffs out a Woolf or two

Bookhound set off on the trail with the scent of Virginia Woolf in his nostrils...no that sounds wrong, as if he's sniffed her cardigan.He didn't he just absorbed by osmosis from the blog the fact that I'd be interested in anything Woolfy he might find for my shelves on his bookshop travels.
He didn't disappoint.

A lovely hardback edition of Lyndall Gordon's Virginia Woolf A Writer's Life to replace my rather decrepit paperback copy.
The Essays of Virginia Woolf Volume 2 1912-1918. I only have Volume 1 so this was pleasing and I must refer to these more often, Virginia Woolf wrote such erudite and often cleverly veiled yet scathing criticism about so many books, always in the name of the royal "we".
But the piece de resistance, the sniffed out find of them all especially now that I'm more welded to the diaries than ever, A Passionate Apprentice The Early Journals 1897-1909.
I had no idea these early journals existed so I have swooped and gorged on this mouth-watering feast since it came in the door.
He also bought a curry in with him which was almost as appetizing so it must be my turn to make a pot of tea after all that.

Crafter Culture

It's rare these days for me to acquire a new craft book.
Even I know that I don't have enough hours in the day to start up something new, so although I might be tempted and make noises about getting a kiln or learning to spin, the reality is I usually try and talk myself out of it. I was seriously going to get into spinning and wool dyeing until Bookhound sensibly said why not buy it ready done and I couldn't really come up with a reason to proceed.Then there was the weaving and then paper-making and marbelling then....
So really the last thing I needed was The Crafter Culture Handbook by Amy Spencer (published by Marion Boyars) but I'd heard a whisper or two about it and was then offered a copy pre-publication and so I bought one.
Amy Spencer looks at the politics of crafting and why people take them up, whether taking a stance against sweatshop production, for self sufficiency reasons, recycling ethics or just for the sheer pleasure of creativity.Personally I feel as if I'm on the crest of a wave when I'm creating.
This is the book for the person who is perhaps new to craft and hasn't yet embraced the thrift side of the whole thing. Approach any craft in the 21st century and you'll spend a fortune buying specially made, pre-packaged new things to cut up and make into more new things.
I'm the worst I know, I know, I love some new wool and some fabric to add to my stash but I have also done my share of making do and mend and I still do.Currently an unquilted Amish quilt top is about to become a door curtain.
This book is a lovely combination of digging around charity shops for jumpers to unravel, unusual electrical crafts, lights made from colanders, pick-ups for guitars, rag rugs, fleece rugs, bags crocheted out of plastic carriers, you name it, it's in here and plenty more that would never have occurred to me.
There are two sections that I love and I will be using very soon, homemade lotions and potions is the first.
I now HAVE to make my own soap which apparently can be done in the microwave and there was me thinking I'd be up in the shed with old saucepans on the camping stove. Then there's the lip balm, hair conditioner, face masks, toner, it's all in here and no amount of suggesting I go and buy it ready-made will do this time.
The other must-make section is called Paper and Ink and here, well first find your octopus...no I'm joking, no animals get hurt in this book so no octopus ink recipes, but there are instructions to make a beautiful Coptic Bound notebook.
Somewhere I still have the book on how to make your own paper so perhaps I could?
No?
Oh alright then, but some beautiful paper out there to buy now and good instructions here about paper grain about which I knew nothing, take it from me, the rip test tells you all you need to know.

Home thoughts from the valley

I haven't taken you out and around the estate lately so I thought some home shots might be nice.
As usual I fancied something really special, nice vase of daffodils on a sun-kissed window sill, that sort of thing, but as usual I was thwarted by men and mess everywhere.
Go to Cornflower for perfectly lovely gorgeous pictures, stay here for rubbish.
Bookhound has given the log pile his undivided attention today,nothing like a spell of freezing weather to concentrate the mind, and the little cat that you never see on here made an appearance. Dusty is sister to the floozy and our wanderer, she will often head off into the great blue yonder for several weeks at a time.For twelve years she has always come home and always well-fed so we think someone else around here is also under the impression they own a little tabby cat that wanders off.

The gamekeeper has been in and out doing what gamekeepers have to do which is unfortunate for  the foxes but they are prolific this year and I won't even begin to suggest why.

The kayaker has been home and "doing his laundry".It was a wise move to teach them to drive the washing machine before the car but it does mean you have to put up with this. Never let it be said we don't air our dirty washing in public.

Better than daffodils we have these sweet-smelling things on our window sill.

Meanwhile the floozie just snoozed her way through it all

ON BEING ILL by Virginia Woolf

On the eve of Virginia Woolf's birthday and because of a roundabout set of coincidences I picked up and read On Being ill, that strange little essay of hers republished a few years ago in this very alluring replica version by Paris Press.
I came to it on my shelves via a google on "Edith Wharton-Hermione Lee" in readiness for the forthcoming biography, thence to Hermione Lee's website which I didn't know existed and that pointed me to her introduction to this latest edition.
This time last year I wasn't a blogger but I was ill and dovegreyreader scribbles was the direct result of that.
Quick resume, I had a fairly everyday virus which I expect a dear little baby gave to me and it settled on the nerve endings in my neck and became a neuritis.It was an excruciatingly painful and funny (peculiar not ha-ha) time and I had to have 6 months off work because I couldn't pick anything up (eg babies) or drive anywhere (to visit babies) or sleep (to have the energy to talk to babies) or write (to say what I thought about the babies).
Virginia Woolf bemoans the lack of illness narrative in literature,

"the public would say that a novel devoted to influenza lacked plot".

In her introduction Hermione Lee mentions one of my stalwart illness narrative books which I've mentioned here before The Wounded Storyteller by Arthur Frank.Virginia Woolf would have identified 100% with this book.
But something else Virginia Woolf wrote struck me too,

"Directly the bed is called for,or,sunk deep among pillows in one chair, we raise our feet even an inch above the ground on another, we cease to be soldiers in the army of the upright;we become deserters.They march to battle.We float with the sticks on the stream...able perhaps for the first time for years, to look round, to look up.."

How true and what an excellent time it was for me to transform a bucketful of nightmares into a glassful of blessings.
One of the greatest lessons confirmed (because I did know it already) was that at work I am not indispensable.Yes, it was an awful mess cancelling my diary for the few weeks ahead but after that, well, life went on.
It has to be said that my arms and neck were rubbish and the drugs - enough to flatten a horse- made me even more ill.Plus my experience as an NHS patient was pretty shabby and I can't believe I ended up writing a grievous and very sad letter of complaint to a surgery I had previously worked in for 9 years, but I did.
However the rest of me was as happy as larry because all I was fit for was reading, night and day (not that book by Virginia Woolf , I mean the hours...no not that book by her either...the time as in, oh you know)
As I started to emerge from that excruciating and drilling pain that felt like my arms were being sawn off and on to the dull pain I found that I could type if I knelt at my desk and used my laptop at eye height with my arms sort of propped and wedged. It looked funny (ha-ha) but it worked and I was away.I was desperate to talk and write about all this reading.
Here's my first ever blog post and it's been good to remind myself of that day, how uncertain I felt about it all at the time and how therapeutic the writing was and has been ever since.
What on earth must it have been like for a natural writer such as Virginia Woolf to have been forbidden to write when she was ill? Had she been allowed to write what might she have produced?
Dovegreyreader scribbles all kept my brain ticking along while the rest of me plodded back to fitness, and what an exciting year it's been since.

...it does feel a bit presumptious to imagine that anyone else would be remotely interested in reading what I think either.

So this is really about taking my handwritten reading journal into cyberspace which feels a bit precarious and I trust blogsource to take tender loving care of it.

The plan is for it to be completely literature based, life may intervene occasionally but in a bookish way. This will be about what I think about what I've read plus any other snippets worthy of comment from the big wide book world as viewed from the stunningly beautiful but rather remote literary desert that is the Tamar Valley.

There is plenty I never expect to get my head round so please non-existent reader be mindful of the following  and thanks to John Keats for giving me in the first instance, his comforting theory of Negative Capability

"when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason"

Those were the days

I expect you all get plagued by spam as much as I do and in amongst the messages telling me I've won a million euros or asking if I want things enlarged or meds for free there are often gems from friends who know my sense of humour.
Here's the latest, I can't credit the source of this but whoever penned it grew up in my gang because our go kart was wicked until the local doctor reversed over it in his car and we all just managed to jump out in time.
Because it made me laugh I think it probably means I can diagnose myself as getting older and starting to remember these as the good old days.I will expect a plethora of comments telling me all the awful things that happened to you as a result of doing all these things, the resulting lifelong afflictions and how much better life is now...or perhaps not.
The irony of it all is not lost, just who has invented all this new "stuff" that has made life so different for children now?

SOME OF YOU HAVE ACHIEVED THIS AGE AND THE ONES THAT HAVEN'T MAY APPRECIATE IT ANYWAY.....

 

CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL THE KIDS WHO WERE BORN IN THE
 

1940's, 50's, 60's and 70's !! 

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us.

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a tin, and didn't get tested for diabetes.
 

Then after that trauma, our baby cots were covered with bright colored lead-based paints.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking .

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.

 

Riding in the back of a van - loose - was always great fun.

We drank water from the garden hosepipe and NOT from a bottle.

 

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.

 

We ate cakes, white bread and real butter and drank pop with sugar in it, but we weren't overweight because......

 

WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!! 

 

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.

 

No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K. 

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem .

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo's, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, no video tape movies, no surround sound, no cell phones, no text messaging, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms..........WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!


We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents .

 
We played with worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.

 
Made up games with sticks and tennis balls and although we were told it would happen, we did not poke out any eyes.


We rode bikes or roller skates or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just yelled for them!

Local teams had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!

 

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!

 

This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever!

 

The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.

 

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned

 

HOW TO 
DEAL WITH IT ALL! 

 

And YOU are one of them!

CONGRATULATIONS!

 

Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn't it?!

 

Happy Birthday to...

Virginia Woolf.
Yes, it's her 125th today and I've been browsing her diaries for entries around the time of her birthday.

Monday 25th January 1915
My birthday and let me count up all the things I had...in fact I don't know when I have enjoyed a birthday so much - not since I was a child anyhow.Sitting at tea we decided three things:in the first place to take Hogarth, if we can get it;in the second to buy a Printing press;in the third to buy a Bull dog, probably called John. I am very much excited at the idea of all three - particularly the press.

Friday 25th January 1918
My Birthday...Nelly has knitted me a pair of red socks which tie round the ankle & thus just suit my state in the morning

Monday 26th January 1920
The day after my birthday;in fact I'm 38. Well I've no doubt I'm a great deal happier than I was at 28; and happier today than I was yesterday having this afternoon arrived at some idea of a new form for a new novel

Tuesday 25th January 1921 (K.M = Katherine Mansfield).
Here I have waited 25 days before beginning the new year; & the 25 is not unfortunately my 25th, but my 39th birthday & we've had tea and calculated the costs of printing Tchekov...I'm puzzled to say K.M. (as the papers call her) swims from triumph to triumph in the reviews; save that Squire doubts her genius - so I'm afraid, do I.

Tuesday 16th January 1923
Katherine has been dead a week...I was jealous of her writing - the only writing I have ever been jealous of

Wednesday 23rd January 1924
...back again tomorrow to The Hours, which I was looking at disconsolately - oh the cold raw edges of one's relinquished pages.
A letter from Morgan today (E.M.Forster) saying "to whom first but you & Virginia should I tell the fact that I've put the last words to my novel?" He is moved, as I am always on these occasions.

I've spent hours browsing these volumes over the last few months, one entry leading to another and into the deeps of Virginia Woolf's life, when suddenly I came across this entry and I realised I was perhaps finally warming to Woolf

Monday 7th December 1925
I want to lie down like a tired child & weep away this life of care - & my diary shall receive me on its downy pillow. Most children do not know what they cry for; nor do I altogether.

So now I wonder again as I often have, how long might she have lived if not for that moment with the stones and what else would she have written?
Would she have been a blogger? Her diary reads like one, she is certainly not talking to herself. Personally I think there can be little doubt that she would have loved it.

The Big Mouth is Back

Taking us all to the brink of deprivation, he's back in temporary accommodation after a bad dose of worms ( I can prescribe for that, I'm allowed) and you have to worry about where he bought that job lot of paint, is it Easy Jet surplus?
Yes alright we've missed you Mr Pack, next time scrub your nails as well:-)

Hardy bulletin

Time for an update from the valley on my progress with Thomas Hardy The Time-Torn Man by Claire Tomalin.
Biographies I find make excellent pre-sleep reading.
I don't mean they send me to sleep especially because all books do that eventually.It's just that the content isn't usually anything so disturbing that it gives you insomnia or nightmares.However fiction will often butt in insistently and refuse to be put down and of course then you face the perils of dreaming accordingly or just lying there with the maelstrom of a plot swirling round in your head.
That's happened recently so I'm only just heading to London with young Thomas in 1862 and his first employment.
He was in good company if he had but known it as a steady stream of eminent writers made their way to the capital with him.Henry James arriving with a credit note for £1000 and thus able to find decidedly comfortable lodgings in Mayfair .
Whilst Henry was busy dining with Leslie (Stephen), John (Ruskin) and William (Morris) and meeting  the pre-Raphaelite painters poor Thomas had to settle for a shared room in the then rural area of Kilburn, 3 Clarence Place still surrounded by farms and fields.Is it still there?
But luck was on his side and he wasn't on job seeker's benefit for long.
Wanted by Blomfield's, London's top architects, someone who could do Gothic ecclesiastical drawing for an annual salary of £110. So young Thomas now had the daily commute into the offices at  9  St Martin's Lane, just off Trafalgar Square.
Do we know what's there now? Could someone from Orion nip round and have a look?
Thomas threw himself into the London tourist scene, went to hear Charles Dickens read, did the galleries, churches, libraries, museums, theatres, heard Palmerston speak in the House and went to his funeral at Westminster Abbey. I can only imagine what a heady sense of pure excitement all this must have meant to the country-bred lad from Dorset. Anyone lucky enough to find themselves living in London for the first time must still go through the same experience, well I did.
My first read in the Hardy-thon will be A Pair of Blue Eyes set in North Cornwall which means we can finally get around to that long promised trip up to Boscastle and see just how things have moved on since the great flash flood of 2004.
Now that was a night to remember down here.
It was actually the Valency Valley where the flood waters rose as I recall and that's were we'll head to find St Juliot's Church and like so many churches around here it's best seen when the snowdrops are out.
Dig out your stout walking shoes and Bookhound will get started on the egg sandwiches.He does a wicked picnic, form an orderly queue and expect cafetieres of fresh coffee to be produced from the back of the Land Rover (once it's parked up that is)

Niall Williams how very dare you?

You may remember I posted recently about my first read of a Niall Williams book recommended by Susan Hill, As It Is In Heaven. My final read of 2006 and that was me ending the year like a wrung out dishcloth.
I was ready and waiting for the ambush when I picked up Only Say The Word and trying desperately not to be influenced by that 100% very me style cover.
Aha, don't think I'm falling for all that again, oh no not this time because I knew exactly what to expect.Like putty you are if you're not careful, this man has your emotions in the palm of his hand.
But that man from Kiltumper has done it again.
I'm in bits and may be suffering from post-reading stress disorder and will likely need counselling and time off work.
There's a plus side because now I really do want to work in a book shop so if reading Niall Williams leaves me all washed up and spent and incapable of a career in the caring professions that's what I'll do.
Jim Foley, spends some time working in one in New York and I like the sound of it all as the owner says to him
'Have you read it?...'
" No I haven't'
'Take it home tonight. Read it, you'll sell it better.That's a tip, take home whatever you want, read it. Would you buy meat from a butcher that wouldn't touch the steak? You wouldn't. Read the books, read them.'
I bet that's just what it's like, I'd get myself a wheelie trolley, can you see me at the end of the day?  Plus you never get generous offers like that in the NHS.
Take this enema home and try it.Would you give one without knowing what it feels like? Well um actually, yes, sorry.
This is a book about Jim's journey from County Clare to New York and back again and there's a Ralph McTell song in that sentence somewhere so I'll just have a little hum of From Clare to Here while I write.
It's a book about books and reading, writing, love, death, grief, families, the whole lot.There was a single and sudden moment of stark realisation about the plot for me as I read and I felt positively sick with sadness, then you are so engrossed that you don't see it coming and when it does, well it's clever.
I've already told Niall that I'm fed up with finding a writer so capable of playing with emotions like this because I'll have to read them all and regularly and willingly end up in shreds.

Congratulations to Boardfree

We have to send congratulations from Devon to Dave Cornthwaite and the Boardfree Team with little bucket-rattling, fund-raising Offspringette in there somewhere because today their journey is over.
They've made it to the finish line in Brisbane, 5823km in 5 months and lots of money raised for various charities and for all the team the journey of a lifetime.Thanks to Holly for the photo.
Most of them chucked in jobs to go and do it and Offspringette sold her worldly goods as well  to pay for the trip.
Doesn't want to leave Oz and all those beautiful beaches but hey, rich pickings on the sands here too if you're quick and we haven't seen a huntsman spider for at least a week.

Not exactly Whisky Galore

Whisky Motorbikes Nappies and Trainers Galore.
Yes, all our true West country wrecking instincts coming out it would seem and not just ours, people travelling from Basingstoke to get in on the plunder.Probably a lot of VW steering wheels on eBay tonight.
The local evening news was hysterical as people carried nappies by the million off the beach and the Official Receiver of the Wreck asking them to make sure they declared them.
Best snippet
"Well oive fownd these noyce trayners and they'll be good as nuw once they'm droyed owt, moy soyze too"
Expect a glut of empty barrels to appear in gardens all over the South West this summer.

The Dissident by Nell Freudenberger

The Dissident by Nell Freudenberger,due for publication in March from Picador, came my way courtesy of a publisher's proof copy and these in themselves are interesting.
It may not have slipped your attention that I am a complete cover-aholic junkie and of course the cover is my guide into the book, it provides my signposts, the messages I need to lure me in.
I must be a publisher's dream to be honest; far, far too easily impressed by a lovely book cover, the content doesn't have to work nearly so hard to get it into my hands and up to the till.
I'll forgive anything that's wrapped in that subtle combination of say muted tones of petrel blue/burgundy and yellow ochre.Monochrome receives my undivided attention and anything Niall Williams writes, while it remains in those perfectly photographed covers, will win my heart at the purchasing stage.I'm also fed up with books with headless women on them so I'm starting to walk away from those.
Even if the blurb doesn't immediately speak to me I'll still delve for a redeeming feature to avoid the disappointment of putting an attractive cover back on the shelf. Brown covers sadly will always struggle regardless.
Hopeless and fickle, I expect you are all far more sensible.
So a proof copy is the ultimate test for me. A bog standard thin paper cover with minimalist appeal and this one in reddish-orange so doesn't even match the curtains, just the Le Creuset.
There can be no doubt, I've got to read it for the content alone and can only leave it lying around in the kitchen.
Therefore if I find myself looking forward to picking up such a boring looking book and emerge the other end feeling that I really enjoyed it, there can be little doubt that the writing has succeeded.
I posted last week about the Nell-hype that seems to have by-passed the Tamar Valley and it was good to come to this book with no pre-conceptions.
Yuan Zhao, a Chinese artist. is the dissident of the title who arrives from Beijing for a year's residency with the Travers family in Los Angeles.He will tutor in the local school and also paint and hold an exhibition of his work.Naturally the Travers family have problems of their own and these gradually unravel alongside Yuan Zhao's back story.
There is a gentle hint early on that all will not be as it seems and so my antennae were up from the start.
I warmed completely to Nell Freudenberger's unobtrusive writing style. No self-proclamations of look at me aren't I clever with obtuse convolutions and complexities, and I was led competently, rather than being flogged to death and beaten up about my own inadequate artistic knowledge, into some very interesting thoughts about art.
The image and who owns it, the subject or the photographer?
Art in performance, is it art?
Also a clever turn of events around an art installation towards the end that has you reflecting on censorship versus repression and trying to decide exactly which country deserves the prize.
Nell Freudenberger's strength for me was her characterisation.
Yuan Zhao's life is narrated in a rather flat first-person-speaking-in-their-second-language style, he never quite makes it off the page and, though probably seen by many as a flaw, this seemed to fulfill the requirement for me that we remained uncertain about him throughout and constantly questioned his reliability as the teller of his own story. In complete contrast just about everyone else bounces into varying degrees of life around him.
There are probably inevitable comparisons to be made between Nell Freudenberger and  Zadie Smith and I was vaguely reminded of the family presented to us in On Beauty...well the first 50 pages of the family because as you know that's as far as I got with On Beauty but lets not go on about that anymore.
Cometh the hour cometh On Beauty, especially if the cover gets a make-over, currently it only blends with the shed.There's a thought,perhaps I'd have done better with a proof copy?
The Dissident was a good, page-turning read, great insights into US family life against a backdrop of life in China and a neat little twist in the tale.

So who are you?

This is a bit of fun.
Jenclair over on her blog A Garden Carried in the Pocket has provided a link to this online Meyer-Briggs personality test
We had to do the Belbin equivalent at work a few years ago when it became clear that as a team we were getting absolutely nowhere and just going round in circles.We all moaned at the very thought of answering the questions but the end result was quite revealing.We were all shapers, plants and resource investigators and the only completer-finisher was our clinic assistant and she was on the brink of a nervous breakdown trying to achieve outcomes on all our whacky suggestions.
This latest test reveals that I'm an ISFP for what it's worth which makes me " the first to hear the different drummer" and so are Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney which hasn't given me a whole lot of hope, though I suppose they are both filthy rich, or were.
Then there's Marie Antoinette and Britney Spears so what do I make of that?

Sunday Confessions

Some treasures to share this week.
David Malouf's books are more difficult to lay hands on than I thought, seemingly out of print, but the challenge must go on so I am accumulating them from sources various.So far Harland's Half Acre and The Great World have arrived.
Any Human Heart by William Boyd seemed essential after comments here this week and hey presto, sprinkle the oofle dust, quick incantation of abraca-bookdepository-dabra and there it was.
The same spell conjured up two more by Niall Williams,Four Letters of Love and The Fall of Light. A Pair of Blue Eyes also beamed itself into the order to get my Thomas Hardy-thon off the mark.
The next wave of the wand yielded a book I first saw in extract form in The Guardian colour supplement a few weeks ago, Cancer Vixen by Marisa Acocella Marchetto.
Just published here in the UK, it's a graphic novel account of New Yorker cartoonist Marisa's encounter with breast cancer.
Let none of that put you off, I am completely overwhelmed by the power of this book, it is quite AMAZING and I agree with every word of the blurb "a visually electric read...100% unputdownable, this is not a treacly survival story, not an expected woe-is-me-tale".
I'll be posting about this one later in the week because I think it's the inspirational style of self-help book on the subject that many women may have been waiting for.Every taboo surrounding breast cancer blown to the back of beyond in the most hearteningly honest,open and funny way...sorry you know all that already.
It's a definite in my Top Ten for 2007 already...I might not have told you that bit yesterday.
I also had some lovely surprises in the post.
Having wished upon a star to get a copy of Sorceress very quickly after enjoying Witch Child so much, a "very nice person" signed a copy and sent it to me post haste.Thankyou Celia and yes, I promise to read Pirates.
Ex Libris in Ohio and I have an occasional book exchange and I was delighted to unwrap Waiting for Gertrude by Bill Richardson which will have me wanting to make a return trip to Pere Lachaise after that recent Therese Raquin post.Thankyou EL
Then a lovely bookshop in Abingdon sent me Dartmoor...The Saving by B.J.Burton published by Moorhen.How amazing to get a book local to here that I haven't seen at all. Perhaps I've missed it. A novel and all about the little people on the moor and that's going to be perfect to read as I sit in my car at lunchtime up at one of my secret Dartmoor places.
Thanks to Mark and Nicki, please open a branch here very soon.

On Beauty and White Teeth

Funnily enough I have spent some time at the dentist this week after breaking my front tooth whilst eating a Bounty bar and I didn't feel in the least beautiful over it all but that is not the subject of this post.
There's quite a Zadie Smith love-in going on at the moment and that leaves me feeling as if I'm standing shivering outside in the cold in the garden watching everyone having a great time as the house glows warmly through the steamed up windows.
There's not a lot of raucous laughter going on inside because it's all quite serious stuff but I read Zadie's Tips 1-10 for Writers and Readers in last Saturday's Guardian and set it aside thinking I'll need a day to digest that but unfortunately I had to go to work so the day passed.
Then today there are Tips 11-15 so I'm now 15 Tips behind but the Guardian blog round up reveals that the blogs have been very busy with it all.
As you see there are hectares of Zadie's Tips to plough through.
Much about what it is to be a writer; a defence and an explanation of the art,

"To me writing is always the attempted revelation of this elusive multi-faceted self and yet its total revelation - as Zagajewski suggests - is a chimerical impossibility"

As I progressed through the piece furrow by furrow (that is a bit of a cliche, I've "pandered to a shared understanding" after my initial reference to ploughing...I think) the furrows were on my brow.I felt less and less clever, increasingly bogged down (sorry, I may be straying back to that ploughing analogy) and excluded and secretly quite thankful that I was.

" a great novel is the intimation of a metaphysical event you can never know, no matter how long you live, no matter how many people you love: the experience of the world through a consciousness other than your own"

Well I understand that bit, then I perk up a bit because there's encouragement for us readers in there too

"the novel is a two way street"

and then the analogy of the reader as the amateur musician placing the music on the stand and preparing to play

"the greater the skill, the greater the gift she gives the composer and the composer gives her"

Now I see the problem because clearly I'm a busker in Zadie's scheme of things.

"The ideal reader steps up to the plate (oh baseball analogy coming up) of the writer's style so that together writer and reader might hit the ball out of the park" (yeeessss home run)

Then that ball socks me right between the eyes (I didn't start this)

" What I'm saying is a reader must have talent"
"Readers fail writers just as often as writers fail readers"

Oops, dropped that catch.
I think most of us own up to our failure as readers with great regularity, how many times have I pronounced as much on here but when push comes to shove or plough comes to furrow sometimes I think the ball must be in the other court too.
Lovely, what a mess of pandering there.
For example here's one of the most useful and reassuring crits I've read about On Beauty to date from one of the top blogs I go to for trusted, rational, fair and balanced in depth intelligent criticism.
Comments left then necessitated this response.
Meanwhile until I've managed to read the books I'll carry on taking full and complete responsibility for my failure with White Teeth and On Beauty and the one inbetween I haven't even tried.
The fault is mine and mine alone.
I've put the music on the stand, it's clearly Grade 8 and I'm not even Grade 1.
Perhaps like The Secret History by Donna Tartt I'll be ten years in the trying and suddenly I'll get it.
Meanwhile back to practice.

Bookaholic Blogring

I've been meaning to post about the Bookaholic Blogring which I set up ages ago and which has seen a steady trickle of new members. We're now up to 22.
Joining is easy, there's a link over here <<<<<<<< and the criteria for membership is self-explanatory really, basically are you on the twelve step programme to achieving complete book addiction? Are you desperate to get others hooked? You know what I mean.
I check all the blogs before approving which is a good thing because you should just see what spams its way in.
Once in just add the html to your blog somehow (please don't ask me how) and the theory is that all the blogs link to form one big happy circle of reading addiction.

Cancer Vixen- Marisa Acocella Marchetto

I can't wait a minute longer to tell you about this book and you don't even know I've bought it until tomorrow's confessions.
Cancer Vixen by Marisa Acocella Marchetto has arrived in Devon and was the next book of the year to become an open and don't shut until finished case.Like all graphic novels it will bear a zillion re-reads because there is so much to miss each time and so many new things to notice.
Marisa is the self-confessed fashionista and cartoonist with The New Yorker and it must have been almost instinctive for her to record events as a cancer vixen rather than victim through her pen. The result is one of the best books you could ever wish to read on the subject of breast cancer but probably holds principles that could apply to any form of the disease.
This was never meant to happen to Marisa especially as she had let her health insurance lapse.The discovery of the lump comes just three weeks before her wedding to Silvano Marchetto owner of DaSilvano's which sounds like New York's answer to The Ivy in London, probably and not that I'd know.
On the subject of cost, continue to light a candle at every opportunity for the parlous state of health and wellbeing of our beleagured NHS because Marisa's final bill, eventually mostly covered on Silvano's insurance after they married, was $192,720.04
But what this book gives you is one of the most unique rides through this disease that you are ever likely to find. A serious subject dealt with in comic book format.Marisa took a tape recorder and a camera along to all her appointments translating the results into her distinctive cartoon style.
The outcome is an emotional as well as a factual account of what to expect, but it's all done with wondrous honesty and humour.
I always thought I was probably the only woman who had stood in the squashogram machine wondering why on earth men didn't have this done to bits of their anatomy? Well I'm not because Marisa thinks just the same and I suspect that throughout this book there will be moments for any woman to identify with.
Underlying it all is Silvano's love for Marisa and some very funny episodes when the 'it' girls make a play for him in the restaurant; he feeds their calling cards to the dog so they probably had vet's bills to pay too.
Another key player is Marisa's mother Violetta "the New Jersey version of Sophia Loren" and always plagued by her own ills but when the chips are down Violetta comes good, sitting through all the chemo sessions with Marisa and letting the world and its mother know the day the IV needle threatens to damage her daughter's drawing hand.
What follows is one of the many and frequent "best" moments in the book.
"Mom...?"
"Yes, Hon"
"YOU HAVE A SAY-IT-BEFORE-YOU-THINK-IT-TACTLESS-UNDIPLOMATIC
-BIG-FAT-SAGITTARIAN-MOUTH"
...and I love it"

Marisa, I love it all too and you can all perhaps see why when you read some extracts from the book here.
I was fortunate in the early days of my health visiting career to attend a course on palliative care run by the remarkable Dr Sheila Cassidy.The sessions opened quite dramatically with Sheila's own hand drawn cartoons depicting a woman discovering she had a breast lump.The impact of those pictures remains with me.
This book now joins those images.
I'm tempted to go into the surgery on Monday and quietly dump all those breast cancer "Help Yourself" books from the patient's library (eat tofu and feel better) and put copies of Cancer Vixen out instead, far more helpful and life-affirming.

The shelf dilemma

How often do I yearn for more shelf space?
I drip drop hints,things get worse and worse and eventually, when the piles on the floor and the tables reach Everest base camp altitude, Bookhound will suddenly galvanise and hey presto some new shelves appear.
This presents a dilemma of its own.
These latest shelves have come from the other end of the house where they housed overflow fiction.One day when we evict the twenty-somethings we will have a holiday cottage up that end and those books will be every visitor's dream.Currently they are now splayed over the floor and the far staircase and will need another bookcase to re-home them.
But the immediate problem in my book room is solved, I have more space.
The reality is the problems are only just beginning because what should I put on these new old shelves?
Once the spirit level and Black and Decker stuff is over, and the muttering because I'm supposed to have been propping and keeping the bubble level and it only slipped a fraction which I didn't think would show but of course Mr Eagle Eyes spotted that one, then I have to decide what to shift.
I am always amazed at the way a day can disappear when spent book shifting.
Finally the decision was made, this would be the new home of The Nineteenth Century Novel and some associated reading.
I embarked on a mixed merge of the ladies and the gentlemen because they had previously been segregated but that immediately caused trouble.
George Eliot looked very unhappy sandwiched inbetween Dickens and Hardy and the Brontes were not in the least content pressed up so close to Wilkie Collins.
So I then unmixed and things calmed down a bit.
But then I have shelves free elsewhere.
Diaries and Letters. That's it they should all be together.
But should Vera Brittain's come off the War shelf ?
Should Nicholas and Alexandra's come off the Russian shelf ?
The Literature in Translation shelf is looking nicely melancholic but shouldn't Gogol, Pushkin & co  be on The Russian shelf ? Should Lit In Trans be subdivided into language translated from? French, German, Italian, Icelandic, Albanian, hmm tricky.
Is there enough for Japanese Literature to have a little shelf of its own? The Tale of Genji takes up a lot of space.
Should books waiting to be read be kept isolated or mixed in with everything else?
I'm in a terrible mess and have had to stop for a rest.Could a nice librarian come round and sort this out for me?
Should I go Dewey Decimal?

Boardfree Update

YES! They're nearly there.
Check out today's Daily Telegraph for the news on Dave Cornthwaite, the man with a right calf he likens to a giant chicken breast fillet, as he nears the end of his skate across Aus for Boardfree. Offspringette in the back up team having packed in the job with an intransigent "Auntie" to go and help with logistics and fund-raising and have the road trip of a lifetime in the process.
Coming home is going to be oh so very tough. Devon is not looking its best and Glasgow possibly worse.

Jar City by Arnaldur Indridason

!!!!!Warning of a possible spoiler as I name that disease!!!!

True to my pledge to read more crime and making that easy on myself by picking up another Arnaldur Indridason, I was rapidly back in the cold, dank grey wastes of Iceland.
I've read these in the wrong order so Jar City is the one to start with if you haven't read any.
Like Silence of the Grave expect not only digging underground but digging back into the past as Erlendur rattles around Reykjavik trying to piece together cryptic notes on dead bodies, unsolved crimes from the past all interlaced with up to the minute issues around genetic diseases and storage of information and use of body parts after death.
I'm pleased to report that I named that disease in about four, cafe au lait patches had me onto it eventually but in old money.When I trained it was called von Recklinghausen's disease, now there is a spellable version.It was often thought that this was Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man's problem, but in fact he had something much rarer called Proteus Syndrome.
One of the advantages of nursing at The London Hospital in Whitechapel was the chance to go into the hospital museum where they have all sorts of Elephant Man bits and pieces and I see this is now open to the public so well worth a visit.
Erlendur is your quirky, gruff detective with the angst and the baggage and there's plenty more of it here.My Icelandic is coming along quite nicely and I sense with this and Steerforth's great posts on his trip to Iceland over on his blog I'm becoming more acquainted with a country I've largely ignored. Independent People by Halldor Laxness is waiting in the wings which I'm hoping may be enough to make me into a local.
I was delighted to think I had more Indridason at the ready so I opened Tainted Blood next and was a bit surprised to see it was also about genetic diseases and bodies with notes on them...yes same book, different title.Maxine, are you there? You mentioned a massive plot flaw in this book and it has passed me by, tell me tell me.I obviously wasn't concentrating hard enough.
I now have Voices lined up, don't tell me that's Silence of the Grave by another name.

Rocky's Sleeping Diary

What is that cats find so enticing about a tiny basket full of wool?
There's barely room for Rocky-No-Basket-Quite-Big-Enough here let alone his little floozy but this has become their latest favoured resting place...for about another ten minutes.
Then it's out into the fields and a dark winter's night of hunting for the pair of them to go and be real cats.We have a feeling they just sneak into the log shed and carry on sleeping.

Babies and Buttered Noodles

That sounds like a Health Visitor's answer to the latest Betjeman book Trains and Buttered Toast , it's not (but could be now I think about it) and you'll get the drift eventually.
I'm an occasional rather than a frequent poetry reader but I'm determined to read more.Despite my best endeavours I find it is not always the first book I head for but Jeanette Winterson's piece in The Times this weekend confirms it. I must make better use of poetry.
I went to a talk years ago given by an inspiring speaker who was determined we would all be in love with Gerard Manley Hopkins by the end.Tall order for me as I had most certainly wrecked my deutschland and sprung my instress over studying him for A Level.But one point she made has resonated ever since, poetry is there amongst other things to teach, to console and to warn and I've never forgotten that.
Over the years however one or two have managed to fight their way into my little canon of essentials.
Elegies by Douglas Dunn was one of those book club purchases unseen and unknown back in the late 1980's.I think by this time I was suffering from Mummy's Fried Brain Syndrome and this may have been an attempt to read something more improving than the back of a cereal packet.
It is a book that has had an overwhelming impact on me down the years, poems written after the death of Douglas Dunn's first wife in March 1981.He records illness, diagnosis, second opinions, those last days and nights together, registering the death and then his life afterwards and that all makes it sound morose and miserable but it isn't.Yes it's poignant and sad but it has an element of hope and survival to it and some wonderful little moments as his wife decides she'd best make an effort over this whole business of dying. It's a memorable and lasting tribute to her, exactly what you'd expect elegies to be.
It would be pointless to talk about poetry and not mention my treasured copies of The Hawk in the Rain by Ted Hughes and Ariel by Sylvia Plath.
Yes, I have just about every poem he and she ever wrote in various anthologies but these two collections contain some of the diamonds.The Horses and The Thought-Fox by Ted Hughes and my all time favourite Morning Song by Sylvia Plath.
I would certainly place dearest Seamus Heaney in my little canon and of his collections possibly The Spirit Level wins the prize for me, though I've yet to pass a verdict on District and Circle.
No mini-canon complete here without The World's Wife by Carol Ann Duffy and Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes by Billy Collins for a wry look at life.
But I have a new and exciting one to add.
I caught a snippet of an American woman reading her poetry on the radio, something about bathing a baby as slippery as buttered noodles and was so intrigued I missed the name; it was only mention over on Scott Pack's blog of Sharon Olds that tripped the memory switch .
Selected Poems has just arrived and I sat frantically flicking through the pages to see if I'd guessed right and there it was,

Bathing the New Born
I love with an almost fearful love
to remember the first baths I gave him,
our second child so I knew what to do,
I laid the little torso along
my left forearm, nape of the neck
in the crook of my elbow, hips nearly as
small as a least tern's tail
against my wrist, thigh held loosely
in the loop of the thumb and forefinger, the
sign that means exactly right...
........When I got him too soapy he'd
slide in my grip like an armful of buttered
noodles...

Michael Ondaatje rates Sharon Olds's poetry as "pure fire in the hands...the roughness and humour and brag and tenderness and completion in her work as she carries the reader through rooms of passion and loss".
Who am I to disagree? A great new discovery for me.

A therapeutic dose of George Eliot

To aid recovery from my Christmas bout of Hyper-Gaskellitis I dosed myself up with some George Eliot and read Silas Marner.
Luckily George didn't have Nell Freudenberger's problem which should have made life a whole lot easier.Being described by Henry James as "magnificently awe-inspiringly ugly" should have won her the sympathy vote surely?
I hadn't picked up Silas Marner since the compulsory school read when I was about 14 and when, to my complete surprise, I loved it, so I was interested to see how it shaped up nearly 40 years on.How can all that not be helped by this adorable painting on the cover of the Oxford World's Classics edition? Worn Out by Thomas Faed (1826-1900)
To be honest, ugly or not, George Eliot needs no assistance to shape up. I realise now she works for me regardless, so I was rapidly into the The Weaver of Raveloe and emerged feeling all sparkly and refreshed.
It was a joy to read it for pleasure and not pay too much attention to all the deep and meaningful stuff going on but there can be no doubt, as the introduction in my edition by Terence Cave points out, the novel "holds in place some of George Eliot's most serious and far-reaching concerns".
That aside it's just such a lovely story, the lonely weaver storing up his treasure of gold coins on earth only to have it stolen and replaced by a wealth far greater than anything he could ever have imagined.
That perfect moment of complete wonder when Silas discovers the child Eppie sitting in front of his fire,

"...he seated himself on his fireside chair... when, to his blurred vision, it seemed as if there were gold on the floor in front of the hearth. Gold! - his own gold - brought back to him as mysteriously as it had been taken away...He leaned forward at last, and stretched forth his hand; but instead of the hard coin with the resisting outline, his fingers encountered soft warm curls"

It's surely the mark of a great and timeless book that it can be read in so many different ways and for so many reasons, but read as a parable Silas Marner never fails to impart the simplest of messages nor does it ever lose its magic.

Schadenfreudenberger

I'm not so good on the German but it's not necessary here, schadenfreudenberger is the new word that has been coined to cope with the literary world's latest beautiful discovery who it would seem garnered a hate following in rather strange circumstances.
All this passes us by here in Devon for some reason so I can only repeat the gossip which isn't my favoured route to knowledge.It would seem Nell Freudenberger was snapped up at auction (not eBay) after a short story moment in The New Yorker and although the figures are only alleged, it appears she turned down a huge advance for a yet to be written book of short stories and accepted a lesser advance so that she could work with a particular person.That all sounds quite altruistic and being true to oneself and meritorious to me but it had the knives out for Nell as did her stunningly good looks.Curtis Sittenfeld logs events here.
Lucky Girls got good reviews in the end but it's clear beautiful writers have it tough these days, let alone the ones that also reject big pay outs.Their writing almost has to go the extra mile to compensate.
Right so having got all that irrelevant rubbish out of the way we can now turn to the product which is her first novel due out here in March, The Dissident.
I knew none of this when I picked up my proof copy, I paid scant heed to the inserts so for all I know it could have been written by a wrinkled old hag in Outer Mongolia.Now I check out Nell's picture and I see the problem.
I'm about 2/3rds through and have spent the entire day at work wishing I could just leave all the Christmas newborns to their own devices, park up somewhere quiet and get on with the final third.
I'm not watching Trevor Eve in Waking the Dead tonight just so I can squeeze in a bit more reading.
In fact what am I doing sitting here telling you all this for when I could be Freudenbergering?

Witch Child by Celia Rees

I've been a lucky lucky blogger this last week or so with all manner of books from all manner of people arriving in the post and I've been diligent over my thank you letters too.
I'm not sure publishers really appreciate their inboxes cluttered up with "thank you so much for the..." type messages when all they've done is kindly sent me a proof copy but it's an ancient inbuilt habit so I can only apologise.
Blogfriend Adele Geras sent me a copy of one of the Bloomsbury 21 series for which she has written the new introduction, Witch Child by Celia Rees.I have Pirates unread on the shelf but that's as far as things have gone with me and Celia Rees (or is it Celia and I?)
Sometimes a book arrives, you open it right out of the package, make a start and just carry on. It's hollering and blowing a hooley outside, you're warm and snug in bed, someone's delivered a nice cup of tea with the post and there seems no point in shifting.
A book for older children set in the 1600's amidst witch hunts, hangings and sailing off to the New World with the pilgrims, this is the diary of young Mary as she fights to survive in the climate of fear and suspicion that faces her when she arrives in Salem.There's some quilting too which fits well around ideas of fragmented extracts from Mary's diary piecing together into a whole.
I was transfixed by Witch Child and just sat (reclined) until I'd finished it.There's a sequel, Sorceress, which I shall be onto in a flash and much more of Celia Rees to come.
The book reminded me of two things,not only Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood, an entirely different book but another that uses patchwork as a foundation for its structure, but also Form 5C's triumph at the Nonsuch Girl's School drama festival 1970.
We had some hugely talented and serious actors in our class (not me, I always ended up laughing so was dispatched to the costume department and a sewing machine) and we entered the festival with Act 3 of The Crucible by Arthur Miller. I'm shivering now at the mere thought of the girl who played Abigail, meek, quiet and unassuming until you put her on a stage.The moment she let rip with that scream was never to be forgotten, made it all so easy for the others to follow and we just about had a real life hysteria moment of our very own going on.It all went on a bit longer than it should have done.
Well it brought the house down at the end and I think the judges were so relieved that Abigail & Co had all eventually managed to stop screaming the Drama Cup was ours.

Bookends: Art Garfunkel reads

I'm grateful to Rhys for alerting me, and to Curzon for finding the link in comments here today to Art Garfunkel's reading list on his website.
I had a quick google on Art and found myself scoring a terrible 7 out of 10 on the Guardian S&G quiz though I did get the pocketful of mumbles question right.This is tragic for an old folky like me who can sing all the songs in her sleep.
Art has logged all his reading for the last 30 years and it's heavily weighted towards big classic reads with a nod towards some contemporary classics but not a great deal of up to the minute fiction.I've had a browse and I can't see much Virginia Woolf in there either, he could do with taking a class I think.
Art has however made his way through more of the English canon than I have and when I heard Simon and Garfunkel sing at The Albert Hall in April 1970 he was either reading Balzac or Bertrand Russell in the wings.Neither of which hampered that pitch perfect rendition of Bridge Over Troubled Water which is etched deeply into my memory to this day.
I did e mail the website to ask permission to use a picture of Art on here as I'm trying to be ultra-fastidious about copyright now I'm being archived for posterity (sorry, have I mentioned that already) and also sent a link to that post about the concert.I've just read it again and realised the revelations therein are  unlikely to win me any friends in Art's camp so I've gone with the record cover instead.That probably breaks the rules too, but it's Bookends, perfect and I'm sure Paul wouldn't mind.
However why does my heart feel a little momentary uplift when I know that people like this read and are willing to share it? Mind you, I'd be thrilled to be sharing a list like this but it's still quite an insight into a person to know what they are reading and perhaps more celebs should do it, except perhaps...no, I'll not go there.

Sale Confessions

All told I've had a bit of a tempting time around the sales but all from the comfort of the sofa.
Some of the book deals have been too good to miss, so when Blackwell's offered Leonard Woolf A Life by Victoria Glendinning at half price I was easily tempted. When it arrived I was pleased I hadn't forked out full whack because the paper is a disgrace for a £25 book.Awful, cheap and nasty and will yellow very quickly.Not even a declaration that no trees were hurt or offended in the making of this book which would offer me some solace.
Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clarke and District and Circle by Seamus Heaney found their way into the same parcel.I've been tardy about getting both those.
From The Book People Somewhere Else I Can't Remember The Name Of, I hit what Bluestalking and Ex Libris would call pay dirt, but here we'd probably term it a jolly good bargain for which I'll be in trouble.
A surfeit of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, a plethora of Peter Dickinson's young adult fiction and a glut of Tove Jansen's Finn Family Moomintroll. Then The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly which everyone else bar me has read, a book on Nelson and Napoloen because I'm quite interested in reading about the other side of Horatio and perhaps exactly why we gave him a column of his own.Finally Forgotten Voices one to add to my Holocaust reading but the time will need to be right for that one.
Yes I do feel terrible buying from SEICRTNO but it was only £30 worth of terrible and I've owned up and I did turn down the free gift offer to punish myself, no 2007 Wayne Rooney Annual for me.
Then I bought one item of clothing in the sales from Toast just to ensure that I get the catalogue for the next year which is as inspiring as any design magazine.
This time it was the irresistible slouchy fingerless gloves.Perfect as I sit here typing in my garrett and I really had to buy them to see how to make a pair.

A Mug of One's Own

I'm not sure why it's taken me so long to buy a Penguin mug.
It might be something to do with the fact it will have to survive the rigours of a dishwasher occasionally (very occasionally) manned by twenty- something sons who kick tray and door shut together in one manoeuvre and rattle everything within to kingdom come.My Emma Bridgewater mugs died years ago.
That aside today I succumbed because I felt I might be starting to earn this.I'm sort of almost nearly actually starting to feel more enamoured with the old Bloomsbury-ite the more I read.
Jacob's Room has delivered the most unsettling start to a year's reading that I can remember.Everything else I pick up just won't do, all those fragmented images, fleeting characters and innovation and newness in the context of 1922 is still buzzing round in my head.
Am I sickening for Woolfingitis?

BritLitBlogs

So now I discover that BritLitBlogs is run by Mark Thwaite of ReadySteadyBook who also runs The Book Depository.You see you all probably knew that, but down here it takes a while for the penny to drop.
I found BritLitBlogs very early on in my blogging days.I was interested in finding the movers and shakers here in the UK in this strange new world I had stumbled on, so I put a link button on here <<<<<<<<< and I have followed them ever since.
As you can see they feature six blogs and link to plenty more and for their sins they now have a bookaholic sock-knitting quilting dove perched in their midst too.

Name that book.

Talk of pens and handwriting recently and I have to own up to a bit of an extravagently loopy, sideways slant to mine, borne of a rebellious reaction to years of being taught a very precise upright style known as Marion Richardson where any embellishment was a sin.Loops were a seriously punishable offence so I added loads, plus the slant, the day I left primary school.
It had all felt like a straitjacket on free expression but I've never quite managed to lose that formality and neatness.I find the whole business of handwriting analysis bizarre, is it really a window on your soul and your personality?
Head here and you can run a free handwriting self-analysis test and then get a three page personality report from someone called Clarissa Tiarra.Can't think where they get the idea that I'm the sort of person who does a hundred things at once.
My handwriting feels more like a blatant combination of seven years of a headmistress whose incessant and terrifying wrath over untidiness (she used a cane freely in case there was any doubt) made its mark at a very impressionable age. That coupled with a brave glimmer or two of freedom of style.

I still half expect her to be peering over my shoulder every time I indulge in a loop, with a summons to go and stand outside her office THIS MINUTE.
I think the Tinker would agree I had a lovely childhood and was a reasonably well-adjusted little person but I was genuinely frightened of this woman and developed an instant fear-related response to her anger ; I'd be spontaneously sick on the floor and my aim was true...for her sandal-clad bunions.There is no doubt in my mind she would be classed as a child abuser nowadays.
But this was education by fear 1950's style it was the same for many of us.
This an extract from my 2005 reading journal.If you can read it perhaps you know this book? Plenty of clues.Actually I might do some more of these, Name That Book challenges.
If you can't read it don't say a word or I'll throw up on your feet.

First read of 2007

I always choose the first read of the year quite carefully, nothing left to chance, somehow it sets me up for the year ahead.
That said last year's launch was serendipitous chance because I'd been coveting The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion but it wasn't due out in the UK for a while.Then inbetween Christmas and New Year I strolled into our Oxfam bookshop and there, in the back of beyond of Devon, was a new unread hardback US Knopf edition for 99p.John's name so poignantly highlighted in the title.I decided that book was meant and so that was my first read of last year.
This year it's been Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf in my continued efforts to warm to Woolf over on the Hillblog Woolf for Dummies course.Night and Day despite its publication in 1919 made no mention of the Great War and for that Virginia Woolf was criticised. Jacob's Room is her answer to that and she uses a very subtle and experimental style to do so.For me this was telling it slant, she doesn't need to tell us, we know.
I'm a multi-book at any one time reader, usually about six on the go, but I had to abandon all else to concentrate on this one and then only small chunks at a time before I had to come up for air and ponder what I'd read.This is obviously the book where Virginia Woolf buckles on the skis and starts to go a bit off piste with her writing, as she attempts something new and innovative. I'm an old hand at Mrs Dalloway so I could cope with the seeming oddness of the book compared to any expectation for a cover to cover plot/character/beginning/middle/end so perhaps that helped me appreciate what was going on.
Yet again perhaps Virginia Woolf's attention to the miniutiae may make Jacob's Room one of the few novels of the time offering a window on the world as seen by a woman.Katherine Mansfield perhaps close competition? There must be others.
One read is nothing like enough and that's fine too because I will happily read this one again and again.My Oxford World's Classics edition has an excellent introduction by Kate Flint and this quote gave me much to think about.

"The question hangs in the air, unanswered:is Jacob a victim, part of an anthem for doomed youth; or do the attitudes he expresses in the novel - his easy acceptance of his educational privileges, his casual treatment of young women - represent the same brand of thoughtless male superiority which leads to the war in the first place?"
I'm starting to realize within the context of the era, exactly what some of the issues were that exercised Virginia Woolf so greatly in 1922.

Costa contest

Plenty to grab my attention in the Costa Book Awards.Used to be the Whitbread Prize and somehow a book award named after a pint of beer achieved a highly respectable status.Didn't Ted Hughes win it posthumously for Birthday Letters ? Nuff said.Let's hope a cappucino has the same impact.
I have picked up The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney umpteen times and eventually made the paperback decision but it looks as if I'll have to do a U turn.It's won the First Novel Award, is set in Canada and there looks to be some snow so it's ticking all my boxes.
I had Set in Stone by Linda Newbery on loan from the library when they very unreasonably asked for it back before I'd read it.I renewed three times so I'd only had it about twelve weeks, not long at all for a book to sit around unread here.That's won the Children's Prize.
Then William Boyd takes the Novel Prize with Restless. I like William Boyd I think to myself as I recall The Blue Afternoon and Brazzaville Beach. I worked with a locum GP once who was reading Brazzaville Beach in between patients as he couldn't put it down. So I checked out William Boyd's current output and see that in the blink of an eye I've missed a shedload of Boyd's.Any recommends welcome.
I don't keep up with many contemporary poets on a book by book basis, probably only a handful. Seamus Heaney is one of those and I've just bought District and Circle which therefore hasn't won the Poetry Prize. John Haynes has though, so I will check out Letter to Patience.
Finally, I do like the sound of a memoir that isn't a misery and apparently Keeping Mum by Brian Thompson defies the misery genre with ease to win the Biography Award.
The final winner will be announced on February 7th, last year Matisse by Hilary Spurling.
I'll report back if I get to any of these before then.

A visit

Niall Williams found his way to dgr scribbles and left a comment. In case anyone missed it there's another novel on the way, we can gorge a bit more freely knowing supplies will be topped up.

BAFAB update.

Check out here what happened to my BAFAB secret dispatch to a good friend here in the UK who loves a book to plop through her letter box.
With grateful thanks to the Royal Mail, and whoever has that lovely copy of Washington Square by Henry James, with a thoughtful inscription inside that took me ages to think up and the nice card, I genuinely do hope you enjoy it in the true spirit of BAFAB week even though you weren't quite the person I had in mind for the book.
Meanwhile here's a picture of it to keep CraftyPerson going, there'll be another one on it's way to her and Kailana...where are you? Did you get my e mail?The dove is poised ready for flight but waiting for directions and suggestions about what you'd like.

P.G.Wodehouse

Well what can I say? Never read any P.G. Wodehouse or a Jeeves story before because there seemed absolutely no need.I'd hate them.
Embossed forever on my mind is the Ian Carmichael TV series and sadly that came along when I was of an age not to be impressed by it, so I've written the whole lot off as "not my sort of thing" ever since.
I used to find it all a bit irritating if I'm honest and Bookhound agrees.We were the Monty Python generation and anything lacking a dead parrot/dead bishop on the landing fell by the wayside.
But it's niggled and couldn't be dismissed on such flimsy evidence because so many rate P.G. Wodehouse's writing highly.
So my challenge for the Endsleigh Humorous themed evening last night was dictated by a gap to be filled.
But was I just a teensy bit slightly influenced by a complete set of the Everyman Wodehouse series on the shelves of the hotel library? They looked delicious, how could I not even attempt to savour the contents?
These books are a treasure; everything you'd expect from Everyman but in a perfectly compact size and with cover artwork that completely nails the book as one you want to love.It's that reading placebo effect.
Thus, discerning as ever here, my first pick was based solely on the cover. At least it'll look pretty even if I hate it, plus I quite thought it wouldn't matter where I started, they'd all sound the same and I probably wouldn't read more than one.
I started with Wodehouse's introduction and, hold on a minute, I was chuckling already.
Then into the first story and my inner smile was beaming away with even a bit of laugh out loud. It's the stuff of bags of flour on tops of doors and lancing hot water bottles with a darning needle on a long stick and I see any non-PGW fans sitting there looking decidedly unimpressed.But as always it's the way he tells it.
These are serotonin-enhancing reading Prozac and should be available on NHS prescription.I reckon a stat dose daily would make the perfect antidote to that bout of  Post-Christmas Induced Seasonal Affective Disorder. We could reduce the prescribing budget by a few noughts at least.
In fact I'd be so bold as to say we could then ditch all these cardiac disease management clinics because the evidence for what we all know is already out there, laughter really is the best medicine.
Just think, people would have lovely books to show for it and here's the best bit, they could read them again.
As the days have gone by I've laughed more and more, looked forward to picking the book up for my daily dose, upped it to bd (twice)or tdr (thrice) as necessary and with only 11 stories in this volume of course I've had to buy a few more.It'll be at least February before I need a repeat prescription.
What a lovely discovery after all this time but I'm going to want the whole set I know it.

Whispering quietly...Internet book buying

Did I mention that I had transferred my internet book buying allegiance and kicked Amazon into touch?
I don't feel so bad declaring as much on here even though I know a few of the Indies stop by and might now want to shoot me.
It's probably a sin to shoot a dove so please don't I love you all.
The Indies have all had bumper Christmas sales according to their blogs for which we must rejoice, give thanks and be glad, but not all of us have a friendly,innovative and well stocked Mostly Crockett & Crow on our doorstep, more's the pity.
I have been having increasing problems with Amazon insisting on delivery via Parcelnet and every plea to use anything else, a fairy or even a pigeon, has resulted in a 'there there' pat on the head response.
A bookaholic will only take so much of that, community nurses even less.
Parcelnet use private car owners in rural Devon who obviously hurl the books from a great wellie-throwing distance through a closed door into a damp shed or a sauna for weeks on end until they have enough to make the drive out here worthwhile.I pay for new books and I'm fed up with waiting half a lifetime for these battered and crinkled offerings.
So I have given The Book Depository a month's secret trial and they've passed with flying colours, 100% customer satisfaction here.Please don't anyone tell me anything awful about them because I don't want to know.
Free postage on all books, no minimum order, pristine books arrive within days, individually packaged and the price difference? Well it's pence.It's also frighteningly easy, someone recommends a book and it's here within a breath.
Currently they post FREE to anywhere in the world.I hope that isn't just a ploy to lure us all in before they hit us with the damage, but even so, it's great while it lasts and they will have my custom as will Mostly Crockett & Crow whenever I can get there.

The Reading Experience Database

Mention of a fascinating project in the latest edition of newbooks magazine and one that may be of interest if, like me, you hadn't heard about it.
A joint initiative of the Open University and the University of London, The Reading Experience Database 1450-1945 is the first large scale attempt to bring together information about the habits and practices of readers from the past, focusing in its current phase on the nineteenth century.
They are interested in knowing about how, why, what, when and where people read and what they thought about their reading.
Of particular interest are groups who may have been previously under-represented in history: women, domestic servants and slaves, labourers, clerks, artisans and others - the ordinary people whose voices have rarely been heard.
Any database is of course only as good as the information that goes into it, so they are asking readers to keep an eye out for any descriptions of reading from any period between 1450 -1945 that they may come across in their reading of biographies, collections of letters, autobiographies, diaries, memoirs etc.
They are also keen to hear about any family records that may mention reading too.
Currently they are not recording any fictional accounts of reading.
There are good clear guidelines on the website about what constitutes a reading experience and you can get this and more detailed information about the project here.
It's at this point my mind starts to whirr and click and I think back to all those references I've come across in my reading over the years, but can I remember them? Can I heck.

We have a BAFAB winner!

It took four traverses and some very fancy fairy tip toes avoidance footwork before we had a successful adhesion.
Nor would we pose with that ridiculous thing on our paw so we slapped it on the back of his neck for verification purposes and the winner is...

Have you entered the BAFAB draw yet ?

It's still not too late to enter the BAFAB prize draw to give me the pleasure of giving a book to someone for no reason and you the pleasure of receiving one. Just leave your name in comments.So far 30 entrants and 1 cat called Tinkerbell.
Any more literate animals out there?
The PawDraw will take place this evening and will be entirely random with independent adjudicators to witness the proceedings.Frankly the whole process will be quite stunningly original with the innovative use of post-it notes, name down,sticky side up.We think it's going to be hilarious, Rocky likely to be very unimpressed but the first name that sticks to his paws will be the name that wins.
As you can see he's not looking at all nervous ahead of the big moment and is preparing well with the help of a feline chin rest.

Stashing wool

Karen over on Cornflower has been extolling the virtues of stashing wool;that cumulative necessity that stalks all knitters (fabric for quilters) and the need to keep the stash updated and ongoing has come upon me. As you can imagine I really do actually have enough wool lined up to sock the nation but it remains incumbent upon me to keep the supply topped up.
This is easy when you visit The Yarn Yard and I thought joining their version of A Skein a Month Club would be an inspiring start to 2007's knitting.
I'm a fiend for getting wedged in my own colour comfort zone (petrel blue, burgundy, yellow ochre, teal you know the sort of thing) and I think the whole idea of letting someone else do the choosing and foisting is an excellent one.
You just sign up for 3 months at a time and an exclusive hand-dyed mystery skein will be delivered, so I have and I'll see what happens.
If you knit socks you also spend your life searching out 30cm circular needles and you have a strange penchant for sets of double pointed needles of unusual origin.I'm floundering at the loss of one from my precious set of 2.75mm Brittany Canadian birch ones so Yarn Yard's fetching Boye purple aluminium looked worth a try.Mine have arrived and they may not look that exciting to you but OMG these are top drawer dpns.
New year, new needles, new socks.

The Guardian Review

I'll own up that for reasons various The Saturday Guardian has made it back onto our list of purchases from Hilary at the village post office.This is to save people from cutting "it" out and sending "it" to me for my scrapbook.They mention dgr scribbles occasionally so I must reciprocate.
Apparently January is a nightmare time for literary editors though I'm not sure why.Surely we're all pining for some new routes for our reading and there are plenty out there.Today's review is chock full of good and relevant things to mention and most of it available in the online edition.
Interesting piece by GW Dahlquist on the serialisation of The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters and here I'll admit failure after initial enthusiasm about the concept.I haven't dismissed it out of hand though, I'll apply myself to it soon.Not sure it quite fits the bill of the original Victorian serialisation idea of reading aloud to the whole family though.Rather you than me in this house of young twenty-something sons.
A review of David Malouf's latest collection of short stories Every Move You Make and that's blogendipity because just this week someone who drops in here issued me the challenge off-blog to read David Malouf in the right order as he felt sure they'd be a highlight of my year.I'll be taking up that one soon.
Another book caught my eye as a possible great big enjoyable little read Song For Eloise by Leigh Sauerwein.Sadly Bloomsbury may just have lost me with this cover, Front Street may have won me with this one.It matters.
There's a little piece on Lewis Buzbee's The Yellow Lighted Bookshop which did the rounds of the blogs and was highly appreciated by one and all.
Then a full page on George Eliot by Kathryn Hughes and an early offering Amos Barton, the forerunner to Adam Bede. A book that made my top ten of last year with ease.Kathryn Hughes excellent biography George Eliot The Last Victorian also made my reading list last year.
An article on T.S.Eliot by Craig Raine.Not such a dry old stick apparently (T.S.E. not Craig) As always you end up remembering the salacious bits about some of these people (T.S.E. not Craig, I don't know anything about him) and it would be good to read this one and sort out that business about the black bed sheets once and for all.
Tucked in the corner of this full page, a pertinent poem by the lesser known Amy Levy and perhaps time to read Reuben Sachs again.
Best of all a review of one of my top reads of last year The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.I think I ended my short resume of it in my Top Ten books with a plea to read it, and there's a link there to my thoughts when I first read it a few months ago.
I'm not alone, Philip Ardagh agrees "Everyone should read this novel...unsettling, thought-provoking, life-affirming, triumphant and tragic, this is a novel of breath-taking scope, masterfully told"...
YES YES YES! That makes two of us then, Lesley at Book Nook makes three, Sheri at Bookie, four. Anyone else?
Then there's From the blogs and would you believe it, after all this effort, there's no link to that bit.

Dorothy Dunnett

Mention must possibly be made of the Dorothy Dunnett debacle by way of explanation for my reluctance to let her onto my blog, she's big trouble and anyone who was there will know this is bravery verging on foolhardiness.
I have a legion of lovely online reading friends across the world and in 2005 quite a few of us caught Dunnettmania with a vengeance.We were quarantined in an online reading list of our own and left to indulge ourselves, yes like children in a sweet factory and it all went horribly wrong.
Far too many D numbers.
Like many of these things they run out of steam, expectations vary wildly, tempers fray and the whole thing implodes in a flurry of huffiness...or was it a fluffy of hurriness.
After retiring to our respective continents to recover we very quickly shook virtual hands, regrouped at a new online venue completely cured of our Dunnettmania and have read and continued to share our thoughts on books and life very happily ever since.Dorothy was firmly boxed and gaffer taped up and booted out to the garage.
Unruly passions can be aroused and factions develop when you embark on a online group read of the six books of The Lymond Chronicles. The writing is dense and intensely well researched historical fiction and it can take what seems like an age to read just a few pages, there is so much to take in.
There are several approaches to Dunnett reading as a group.
One is never to start in the first place and this could be the wisest course.
Failing that you can gallop headlong through in a cloud of great unknowing and some of it will eventually be revealed, or you can sit with Elspeth Morrison's Dorothy Dunnett Companion at your side and be turning to it approximately every twenty seconds.Looking things up gives you a minor history degree by the end but expect to fall far behind everyone else.
I managed a wholesome three of the series but then just couldn't face another.Too much revving of the engine had flattened my Dunnett spark plugs completely.
So it was with some trepidation that I finally plucked up the courage and tentatively moved Pawn in Frankincense, number four off the shelves.Then I put together a 3 step aversion therapy plan.

1. Just look at it for a while and see if I could do that without feeling sick.
2. See if I could summon up enough voltage to start the Dunnett engine up again.
3. Gently into first gear, signal and pull away slowly having checked your mirrors first.

A few of the old guard have crept out of the woodwork and we are tentatively picking up where we left off (someone who shall be nameless is on the final one) but we've signed a pre-read agreement.
There will be no dissent over this Dunnett-fest.

On the Twelfth Day of Christmas

So to the final exhibit on the final day of The Twelve Days of Christmas Quilt Festival.
I hope you've enjoyed seeing them as much as I've enjoyed looking at them again, thank you so much for stopping by and perhaps you feel a little inspired to thread a needle and give it a go.
I know I've shamed inspired myself to keep busy on some sewing projects alongside all the reading and knitting.
Who knows perhaps I'll do a mini DGR beginners class on the blog soon.
So to the final confession and here it is,
The Millenium Quilt, the Great Unfinished.

The design was simple and conventional,each block chosen purely for its name and the significance that name had for our lives here in The Valley.Tucked away in there Fox and Geese, Sunnylanes, Buffalo Ridge (nearest we could get to cows), Autumn Star, Flight of Swallows et al.

The central block is Milky Way and that took centre stage as does our perfect view here of it in the pure, unpolluted darkness of our night sky.It's a blessing that we never take for granted.

I've entered quite a few smaller unfinished things in quilt exhibitions this year as I know that will ensure they are finished.Somehow I haven't quite had the courage to enter this and to rush it now would almost be a crime, I think it's a life's work and will be completed in the fullness of time whenever that may be.

Techy stuff for those that like to know.
Rotary cut and machine pieced using designs from the book Around the Block by Judy Hopkins.
Quilt  - 82" x 82"
Blocks - 12",
Lattices - 6",
Central block - 29" x 29" (inc borders)
Finally, for this one I used a calico backing and wool batting, it's like quilting butter.

Post traumatic stress avoidance

I don't know how it happened but I seem to have got embroiled in this terrible celebrity singing contest being broadcast nightly at the moment, but by all accounts that could be better than Celebrity Big Brother where Scott Pack predicts the first "live death" on TV. Ken Russell high risk apparently and much footage of him snoring, so that rules in sleep apnoea as one possible cause.
Meanwhile over on It Takes Two, the celebrity sing-a-long, I'm worried there could be another fatality. Jim  (John Bardon) from Eastenders looks set for busting a blood vessel if he carries on hitting those top notes alongside his singing partner Jocelyn Brown.
Sarah Brightman does seem to be enjoying cricketer Mark Butcher and Brendon Cole of Strictly fame has found a new side to himself with soul diva Beverley Knight, he has tantrums and storms off but this time in tears.
I've only just realised where I'd seen Marty Pellow before, Wet Wet Wet of course, he's got his hands full with Hannah Waterman in that case.
Talking of hands, employing them gainfully whilst watching upsetting events is known to reduce the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder so I have resurrected the stuck socks, turned the heel and am now romping down the sole.Should be on my toes by Sunday's final.