dovegreyreader scribbles

Daphne

When writers such as Daphne du Maurier and the Brontes have meant as much to me as they have for so many years, a book like Daphne by Justine Picardie is both compelling and irresistible and also vaguely worrying.
What if someone has taken my spell and messed with it?
Mixed it all up and spoilt my magic?
The path on both sides, author's and reader's, is fraught with peril and there are mixed reviews out there on Daphne so I wasn't sure what to expect.  
Then you read that the film rights have been optioned and the only thing left to do is read the book for yourself. Justine has kindly visited here this week but it's still no guarantee I'll like the book, it could all have been horribly embarrasing.
Factual accounts seem easy in comparison to what Justine Picardie has achieved with Daphne. Surely it's a couple of years in the British Library (all right, perhaps a bit more) and you're done. To weave together the disparate strands of fact, fiction, biography, autobiograpy, the known, the unknown, the supposed, the newly discovered, the letters, the lives, the literary connections,  ( Brontes, J.M. Barrie, the Llewelyn Davies family ) add in a completely new piece of fiction and place existing fiction ( Rebecca ) firmly at the hub, well that all might take a bit more application. Blurring literary boundaries in this way, and on such hallowed ground takes real nerve and courage, to write it as well as this, consummate skill.
I'm delighted to report that reading Daphne didn't mess with my spell at all, in fact it's added plenty more elements to my magic and reopened umpteen reading trails. Just look at the scribbles.
There are three lives to follow, Daphne's, then Alex Symington's - the disgraced curator of the Bronte Parsonage Museum and to whom Daphne dedicated her book on Branwell, both in third person narratives and then the much more intimate first-person narrative of a latter-day PhD student. I sensed this could have been partly a fictional vehicle for Justine to explore what she has done in researching this book as well as an exploration of some of the themes from Rebecca.
It is Rebecca who, in keeping with her spectral tradition, is encoded and woven into the book at every turn. For me the first Mrs de Winter's presence became a representation of all that is secret and concealed, glimpsed at each receding tide, quickly concealed again especially as everyone struggles with their demons.
Menabilly, Daphne's beloved home then became another vital component of the book and for this reader, a brilliant representation of Daphne's fractured soul; her retreat from life, the lived-in warm, comfortable, homely part versus the rarely and reluctantly visited derelict, locked-up wing; ghostly and terrifying when confronted.
There is much in Daphne's life to be unlocked and Justine Picardie has done it with great empathy, there is a fondness for her subject which I share and lesser-known elements of Daphne's character shine through. Her sense of inferiority, low self-esteem, her shaky confidence in her own ability and the torture of rivalry which Daphne felt so keenly. Rivalry with family, friends, her husband Tommy Browning's lovers and with her literary rivals, the race with fellow biographer Winifred Gerin to produce the work on Branwell Bronte was unknown to me as was the complete saga of Alex Symington.
The theme of women possessed by men in Daphne is powerful and pervasive at every level. Anyone who knows the subject will be familiar with some of the detail, others with no prior knowledge are likely to be fascinated by the scope of this book and there are some new connections here too of which I knew nothing. I have come away with a new and deepened sense of Daphne du Maurier as a person and a much clearer view of what lay beneath the veneer of the glittering and successful du Maurier family. Like many devotees I read the Margaret Forster biography the week it was published, but this book, swaddled in its pitch-perfect cover, with its Gwen Raverat-like picture, has added another side to Daphne du Maurier which I had always sensed was there. It's difficult to impart it all in a single post.
So what now?
Fortunately we live near enough to Fowey and du Maurier homeland to nip down on a whim, and so my whim is to be indulged this week, anyone else living within a whim's distance of Oxford could do no better than nip along to hear Justine speak at The Sunday Times Literary Festival this Thursday April 3rd at 8pm.
Look it's only £7.50, dinner with Mark Tully is £99, failing that you can chat to Justine in comments here today.
My starter for ten post-Daphne reading pile tomorrow.

Sunday Salon - News of a guest curator

But lo, the Sunday Times Literary Festival doth draw near and I am actually really looking forward to being let out of Devon for a few days, I've got my passport and visa ready and changed some currency so hope there won't be a hitch at border control.
I'm also really excited to be meeting quite a few people who visit here who  will be attending the event.
Please come and find me afterwards.
I'll be the one standing in the book signing tent with nothing to sign.
Meanwhile my thoughts on Daphne by Justine Picardie will be on here tomorrow.
For anyone who may be wondering, I had heard of but not read any of Justine's books before this one, other than her sister's book which she edited.
Before I Say Goodbye by Ruth Picardie was published in 1998 after Ruth's untimely and tragic death from cancer at the age of thirty-three. It's an eloquent and moving book as Ruth recounts her plight with a fierce intensity and a wicked sense of humour. I have never forgotten ' it ain't over until the fat lady's thin' and Ruth's heart-breakingly tender letters to her two-year old twins. I always loved those beautiful sandals Ruth is wearing in the cover picture and I've read the book several times over. It never fails to root me to the spot, I grind to a halt, body and soul, and just have to sit and mull it over. It must have been one of the first books to publish e mails and one of the first to recount a death in this intimate way. It is in no way what we might now term a misery memoir, this book is a celebration of a life lived to the full by someone who was only going to relinquish her grasp on it after the mother of all battles.
I felt an immediate affinity with Justine because I too had lost a sibling to cancer at a young age, back in 1975, I was twenty-one, my brother was twenty-four and had been married three weeks when he was diagnosed with leukaemia. Often, when I saw her name mentioned here and there around the literary world, other books, newspaper writing, I would wonder how life was for Justine now ?
Did she feel as I felt ?
Did the loss of her sister ambush her in the way that the loss of my brother so often ambushes me?
Had that loss of the only person who really shared your childhood with you affected her as much as me?
Does the cliche suddenly ring very true for her as it does for me? Life genuinely and really suddenly does seem too short for wasting ?
I could have e mailed Justine somehow I suppose, but I never did, then last week Justine e mailed me to say she'd been a regular visitor to dovegreyreader and couldn't help noticing I was reading Daphne and hoped I would enjoy it.
Fortunately I was loving it or the correspondence might have stopped there, but we have exchanged kindred spirit experiences and it has also been good to talk about Daphne. There is a great deal that is fascinating and waiting to be told about the writing of this book and Justine will have much to talk about on her blog and at forthcoming events.
But why should I have all the fun?
I've hatched up a new idea for the blog, Justine has very bravely agreed to be a guest curator in my absence tomorrow and will nip in and out of comments over the next few days and respond to any of your thoughts. So as well as my ideas on the book on here, you can have a Daphne conversation with the author and Justine may well link across to her own blog and post more fully over there too.
That feels like quite a new and exciting blog-collaboration and I'm sure you'll look after Justine, hopefully she can plump the cushions, set the tea things out as nicely as I do, if you could perhaps remind her to warm the pot before the leaves go in, that sort of thing because you know how fussy we are and I know for a fact she's been baking lemon cake especially for you.

Zugzwang

I enjoy books which use a game of chess as a central metaphor on which to build the plot of the novel and not that many come to mind. The Royal Game by Stefan Zweig of course and Miniature Man by r.muir (the mysteriously anonymous lower case r.muir) and now into my hands Zugzwang by Ronan Bennett. Each time I read one of these I belatedly think, should have got the chess set out and followed that properly, because the moves on the board usually cleverly reflect the plot in some way and it's easy to miss from the flat, square, cross-hatched images on the page.
I enjoyed but, if I'm honest, wasn't bowled over by Ronan Bennett's fourth novel Havoc in its Third Year, I think I missed something and whatever it was I can't now find out, because that was in the days pre-blog when, if I'd spent money on a novel in hardback it went straight back onto Amazon to fund the next one. Now I keep in case I need to refer back, as often happens.
Firstly there's a helpful explanation about the title,

'Zugwang : chess term derived from the German Zug (move) and Zwang (compulsion, obligation).It is used to describe a position in which a player is reduced to a state of utter helplessness. He is obliged to move, but every move only makes his position even worse.'

I'm to be transported back to St Petersburg in 1914 by all accounts and treachery, murder, psychoanalysts and a chess genius ' on the verge of a complete breakdown who must now play the most important tournament of his life.'
Spethmann, the psychoanalyst broods over his own chessboard and suddenly I wanted to brood over mine as well.
First find the thing and with no will to face the ascent into the loft I was suddenly awash with the memory of my brother's miniature travelling chess set long vanished.
It came in a small red box, tiny pieces but we played on it endlessly. Please don't get the impression that I'm a Grand Master, more a Mewling Infant where chess is concerned. Not a jot of game plan strategy enters my head as I struggle to remember to move knights up two and across one and bishops diagonally and rooks up and down. But suddenly I HAD to have a little book-sized chess set at my side to accompany my read of Zugzwang, to throw the boards and pieces on the page into sharp relief before my eyes, and so imagine my delight at finding the exact same set on eBay for a mere £2.
Only so much Russian angst I can cope with at one time, but once I have recovered from Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith, Zugzwang will fill the Russian reading slot and battle will commence. I'm intrigued to see just how this adds to my enjoyment and interpretation of the book and whether I then recommend that every copy is issued with prescribed chess set, if I haven't gone chess-crazy by the end that is.

Dreaming spears

My ongoing bout of contagious Fadimanosis persists and now I'm  enthused yet again about the essay form since the arrival of Anne's latest book which I ordered in hardback, At Large and At Small, Confessions of a Literary Hedonist. After the joys of Ex Libris and Rereadings in recent days I couldn't possibly wait for the paperback. But I have a small complaint.
No book of essays should EVER be published without a ribbon bookmark, this little book is weeping for lack of a ribbon bookmark.
Pending Oxford and all things literary I have been writing my offering having first doused myself in the essays of Virginia Woolf, I mean you just can't go wrong can you?
Is there anything Virginia Woolf didn't write about that isn't always pertinent to the moment the minute you open the book?
It's my second impression The Moment and Other Essays with original Vanessa Bell dust-jacket (have I mentioned that before in passing?) which has been off the shelf this last few days, as well as The Common Reader, second impression also Vanessa Bell dust jacket (hope I've told you about that one too). I have all these essays in run-of-the-mill paperbacks but for value-added inspiration there is nothing like holding the real thing (almost) in your hands. The paper is worn to a shine and with that delicious this-is-a-special-old-book smell about it, no ribbon there was a war on, but I feel sure Virginia and Vanessa would be delighted to think the books are still giving such pleasure into the next century.
OK, I've got over the bookmark thing now, Anne Fadiman could well achieve such pleasurable literary longevity too (this would have been absolutely assured with a ribbon bookmark) and could just as easily write a book of prefaces and I'd read it, in fact I'll bet she makes a shopping list interesting, and she has set out the stall for the essay form, all capably decorated with pleas for the rebirth of the familiar essay, and all with perfect clarity,

'The familiar essayist didn't speak to the millions; he spoke to one reader, as if the two of them were sitting side by side in front of a crackling fire...and a long evening of conversation stretching before them. His viewpoint was subjective, his frame of reference concrete, his style digressive, his eccentricities conspicuous and his laughter usually at his own expense.'

So focusing my thinking on blogs and blogging this week  it suddenly occurred to me that in many ways that definition loosely but succinctly (can you be loose and succinct? ) exemplifies the blog form. It's necessarily briefer but a blog does have the ability to convey something in a direct voice as if addressing one person only, and to be honest I never expected this one to get into double figures in a day let alone three figures and then four. I still write it as if I am speaking to one person in my mind and of course that person is you.
Virginia Woolf has the art down to its finest denominator and more than fulfills Anne Fadiman's requirements for the familiar essayist,

'Today's readers encounter plenty of critical essays (more brain than heart) and plenty of personal - very personal - essays (more heart than brain) but not many familiar essays (equal measures of both).'

But Virginia also has something very pertinent to say on the art of amateur criticism in relation to the author in her piece entitled "How Should One Read a Book?"

'If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people reading for the love of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work? And if by our means books were to become stronger, richer and more varied, that would be an end worth reaching.'

Seventy years on I'm not sure whether that outcome still holds good, perhaps the authors will tell us, but it has all provided me with plenty to think about and ample to offer the forthcoming Episode of the Dreaming Spears Spires.

The Point of Rescue

I most certainly enjoyed Sophie Hannah's Little Face, missed reading Hurting Distance and so pounced on her latest novel The Point of Rescue when I got my hands on a copy recently.
Sophie writes psychological suspense like no other, setting her novels amongst the bright young things of today. The two that I've read feature young mothers with babies and in The Point of Rescue a young mum holding down a high-powered job, ambitious for the family but struggling to keep head (and Venice as it happens) above water with the nursery run, the job, the shopping and a very laid back husband.
This isn't my lived territory any more, but it's territory I am very familiar with, or at least the trials and tribulations of the territory. I often arrange to see mums at their request on their way to drop babies off at nursery, before they start a day's work and so we book early morning appointments at 8.30am.
8.30 am's early for me now, but I'm acutely aware that for most of the mums (and it is mostly mums) half the day's already gone. They may well have done a good three hours stressful work by the time they arrive just to get out of the house, let alone the full day's work they have ahead. If they are coping with a sleepless toddler you just want to weep for them, but that is often the way of parenthood a la 2008.
So I was quickly into the step of Sally Thorning's frantic life as she spun all the plates on the poles, and who could blame her for continuing the pretence of a week away in a luxury hotel at a conference when in fact the conference had been cancelled ? It's but a small step into the arms of the mysterious Mark Bretherick and a brief moment of infidelity madness that she lives to rue.
When some time later Sally sees Mark Bretherick being interviewed on the television about the death of his wife and daughter, she is stunned. The facts are exactly as Mark had told her, wife Geraldine, daughter Lucy, the circumstances of the deaths gruesome, but this is not the Mark Bretherick she recognises.
This was a no-notes-no-underlinings read, I was glued to the action and just had to brace myself and live out the terror as things fall apart around Sally and her ever-so-scatty husband Nick and their uber-demanding two small children.
Sophie plots with complexity and writes with panache and you never quite know what's coming next, there are surprises around every corner, little and large moments of gasp as you turn the page as well as a rumbling on-off relationship between two of the investigating police officers. This grand affair flows through each novel so I've missed an instalment and I sensed it, so despite helpful hints I had to do some guessing and then concentrate hard or get left behind and I do think I missed tying up a few loose ends in the final chapters of the book, or perhaps they are left untied intentionally?
Plenty in here to disturb; the diary of a dissatisfied, unfulfilled mother relayed in instalments makes difficult reading, yet I was recognising the honesty of it all. I've worked with people who could have written that for real, it happens and it's tragic, so no shying away from the realities of life for Sophie Hannah.
This feels like young and very original psychological thriller writing and now I've picked up Novel About my Wife by Emily Perkins due for publication in May because I realise this is a genre that needs a permanent place on the Now Reading list. Fictional lives held in a state of electrifying tension offer incomparable reading and vast amounts of  'thank goodness that's not me' thinking.
Then I see that Jessica's re-opened The Book Bar,sloshing the drinks around again and you'll find a review of The Point of Rescue there from one of those very bright young things of today, as opposed to one old enough to be their mother, so go get all the goss there and far better refreshments than the pot of tea on offer here.

Virago assistance required

Justine is asking for thoughts on Virago books, what they have meant to you and the old versus the new Virago covers over on her blog for a piece for The Sunday Telegraph magazine, so hotfoot over there if you want to have your say. I've waxed lyrical off the top of my head over the original Elizabeth Taylor covers but am going off to do some evidence-based research on my shelves before I condemn the more recent covers out of hand. It might still not be good though.
Meanwhile I've fortuitously had to whizz The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte to the top of the reading pile. I'm reading it for a reason and thought I had six weeks from early April before commenting, now I read the email properly and my comments are required BY early April.
It's a good thing that my recent read of Daphne has plunged me into du Mauriermania, Foweymania, Brontemania and all things Haworth because now I can't wait to get started, and even better and talking of old versus revamped covers, I have been sent the new Oxford World's Classics edition to read and it's a cracker.

Endsleigh Salon - The Test of Time

Another exhilarating Endsleigh Salon last month and one that has catapulted me into thinking about the past in a way that cannot now be denied.
Age creeps up and what's gone before recedes slowly, perhaps all in a bit of a jumble and then suddenly, wham, you have a clearly defined historical perspective on a chunk of your life that you have never had before. You realise you've finally entered the realms of  the primary historical source.
The bookish theme was The Test of Time and the plan was to revisit a book that you had read and worshipped years ago and just see what joys it held now.
That all feels relevant with talk of rereading on here too.
The choices were wide-ranging and the discussion was fascinating.
All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot passed the test and perhaps that surprised us. I had quite forgotten that we all read the books long before the TV series and their impact as funny if not altogether true didn't seem to spoil them one iota. The reader had first read them as an eleven-year old and could still recall the impact of the humour and the life, they still felt well written and readable. Much debate about how a TV series can spawn tourist trails and how the characters infiltrate our thinking, who can have forgotten Mrs Pumphrey, the pampered Pekinese dog Tricki Woo and his regular bouts of flop-bott.
Next some very early Maeve Binchy short story anthologies, Central Line and Victoria Line about life in London in the 1970's, unexpected territory for Maeve Binchy, we're much more familiar with her Irish family sagas these days. The stories revolved around stations on the London Underground and were staunchly early feminist. They had inevitably dated but remained readable providing a good fictional account of the times and we all then had a wallowing nostalge about life in London flatshares in the 1970's when the rent was £2.50 a week each. I only earned £12 a week as a student nurse so the budget was tight but we seemed to do a lot with it. Those of us who'd been there agreed that it felt as if we'd been part of a special era in London life.
Katherine by Anya Seton passed The Test of Time with distinction and there was a flurry of  'do you remember Dragonwyck?' etc.
The Plantagenet Prelude by Jean Plaidy was less fortunate but as it had been given to the reader by her husband of many years as a 21st birthday gift, and he'd written in it very nicely, it can't go to Oxfam. Laboured and dull was the verdict but was that years on and as a result of good deal more reading on the subject ? We debated long and earnestly about it all and since then I've read Anne Fadiman's thoughts on the subject in Rereadings and she has this to say

'The problem with being ravished by books at an early age is that later readings are likely to disappoint...you become harder to move, frighten, arouse, provoke, jangle. Your education becomes an interrogation lamp under which the hapless book, its every wart and scar exposed, confesses its guilty secrets : " My characters are wooden ! My plot creaks ! "...'

As always it was lastminute.com here so I had to choose a slim novel but my efforts at The Millstone (1964) by Margaret Drabble left me surprisingly disappointed, yet this had been a real favourite in the 1970's.
I've always waved the flag for early Margaret Drabble in the face of personal failure with some of her more recent books and am now left hoping that my theory hasn't been been blown out of the water. But we had interesting discussions about historical context and the unacceptability of single motherhood then versus the norm it has become, as well as shifting writing styles. I just couldn't get back into The Millstone at all and I couldn't quite define why.
Writing style ? Plot ? Context ?
I had much better luck with The Triple Echo by H.E.Bates which was my successful and equally slim replacement offering. I still have the pile of tatty old 30p early Penguins that signalled my love of all things H.E.Bates and The Triple Echo had me gripped to the final sentence yet again. To my delight a bookmark fell out of the book which dates my reading more precisely, 1974 when I was on secondment from Gt. Ormond Street to Queen Elizabeth Children's Hospital, Hackney Road. As well as neonatal intensive care, this is where I did my twelve week stint in theatres and there we worked to two extremes. Either plenty of time to read and knit (I remember the tank top well, Wendy pattern, three shades of blue) or spent my days and nights hair frizzed in front of an autoclave or scrubbed and counting swabs.
Set in World War II, a deserter hides on an isolated farm with a woman whose absent husband is a Japanese prisoner-of-war, what happens next is an atmospheric evocation of life disrupted by war in the 1940's, and The Triple Echo a story that is both mildly humourous and tragic in equal measure.
I'm only sorry that in my detailed, dramatic and nail-bitingly gripping account to the group, and thinking no one would want to read it, I gave away the stunning ending to a communal groan of spoiler and cries of  'oh no, I was going to read that.'
Next month's theme is The Far East and I'm pondering.
Meanwhile our ongoing Classics read has gone on apace and a clear and popular Victor Ludorum is emerging from the four authors we selected to read. A small clue and the Latin teacher will confirm, it should probably be Victrix Ludorum so that rules out Dumas and Hardy, but more of all that soon.

Books & Quilts

Some annual leave over the next fortnight and a good time to apply myself to a few craft projects.
A glimmer of inspiration hovers and needs to be addressed but having gazed around the fabric stash, and with great restraint kept my hands off the pattern books and the rotary cutter, I decided it was time instead to get this little wallhanging quilted. It was pieced last year (or was it the year before) and all the blocks were inspired by books I'd read. Strange and incomprehensible to many perhaps, how reading a book can make you want to make a quilt, but the two are inextricably linked in my mind and the fabric for this one was from a range called Wuthering Heights so what else was I to do with it?
Sitting and quilting on a weekday afternoon feels mildly decadent but quilting time is never wasted. I can't find the quote but I'm sure it was Claudine's House by Colette and her mother's reluctance for her daughter to learn to sew because then she will have time to think, and who knows where thinking will lead? Well I've just finished reading Daphne and there's a great deal in there to think about. I'll post about it in full very soon but it's been an inspiring read and I'm about to reread Rebecca. It's a pretty safe guess as to my two choices for naming this little quilt.
The old tradition says that you stitch your life events and thoughts into a quilt as you make it and I think this is especially true as you hand-quilt. I can look back on all the quilts I've stitched and know exactly when in my life I've made them.
When I haven't threaded a needle for a little while I find it takes a time to get my quilting eye in, (no, lets be honest it takes me an age to thread a needle first, I use tiny Clover Gold Eye No.9 and will move to smaller 10s when I'm back in the groove) the needle feels miniscule, the stitches feel too big, too far apart, crooked and uneven, my fingers feel like sausages and my thimble feels awkward.
This one is pear wood and I've been using it for over twenty years. It must have come from a magic pear tree because no other thimble will do and no other fits so well. After a while it warms up, the magic seeps into my finger and those soft grooves, worn in over the years, start to connect with the needle and I feel the stitches.

Slowly but surely the rhythm returns and then I'm away and I thought if I share the progress of this on here over the next couple of weeks I will finally be forced to finish it or be shamed into confessing I haven't.
Quilts in progress look messy, tacking and raw edges everywhere, but I was pleased with an afternoon's work on the hoop to get the centre quilted. It was so long since I'd marked this one with quilting patterns the disappearing marker pen had all but disappeared and I've had to rethink it.

Once I'd done some Daphne thinking I decided I could do audio book, so I listened to The Woman in Black by Susan Hill. I haven't read it for years and the listening has been as spine-chilling as that first read. As the mist from Eel Marsh started to gather the stitches started to flow and I was as engrossed and remote from the world as if I was reading. This one is narrated with acres of atmosphere and suspense by Paul Ansdell. One CD left to listen to and I'm onto blocks and borders now and on a hand-quilting roll.
Just what I needed.

Anyone fancy a walk?

Years ago traditionally there was a Church youth club ramble on Easter Monday. Growing up in Surrey for some reason it was always Dorking to Friday Street, or Box Hill but as we're in Devon we can do beach. So for anyone who fancies some sea air, here we are, a little trot across Bigbury beach to Burgh Island on the South Devon coast plus I've made sure there are facilities. We checked it all out on Saturday and perhaps we'll do more of these as the weather improves, there are some beautiful, hidden coves around the Devon coastline.

Tide's out so a beautiful walk across the beach, bit windy so mind the kamikaze kite flyers and their aerial mattresses (does a kite have to be that big?) Sadly the fabulous art deco Burgh Island Hotel firmly out of bounds to all but paying guests, so we'll walk around the island instead, but take a look here, several rooms named after some of the more famous clientele.

Challaborough Bay looking stunning and empty from our island viewpoint. We'll nip into The Pilchard Inn for a spot of lunch, The Pilchard is right next to the hotel on Burgh Island.

If we stay a bit too long, and the incoming tide from the Bigbury end of the beach meets the tide from the Challaborough end, we're stranded and will have to get back on the sea tractor.
Now who wants a drink? Bookhound's round.

Sunday Salon - Blogwarming party

I've just been to a Blogwarming Party over at Justine Picardie's.
I'm as possessed reading Daphne as Justine must have been writing it and can feel all sorts of reading trails opening up as a result, it will be good to hear Justine's thoughts on it all as the book forges a life of its own.
Currently Daphne is content and settled in Devon, the weather is atrocious, the fire is lit, chocolate is available and this reader will be curling up any minute now.
I've also been preparing for my reread of Rebecca by taking a look at a book I bought recently, quite helpfully titled Rereadings and edited by Anne Fadiman. Seventeen writers revisit books they love and Patricia Hampl's account of the joy she gets from Katherine Mansfield's Journals and Letters is worth the cost of the book alone. However it's Anne Fadiman's Foreword: On Rereading that is setting the scene so perfectly for me, it's just brimful with like-minded thoughts, I might just as well have underlined every page in the end, here's a taster,

'One of the strangest motivations for rereading is purely selfish: it helps you remember what you used to be like...your earnest, anxious, pretentious embarrassing former self, a person you thought you had left behind but who turns out to have been living inside you all along.'

Now that will be interesting.

Sunday Salon - Easter Greetings

Happy Easter one and all.
The Easter bunny has visited again and without being spotted by the Gamekeeper, so please help yourselves before he spots these and they all disappear.
Some Sunday Salon thoughts later no doubt.

Eyes down

Every so often adult children make you do something completely out of the ordinary on the pretext that it's their birthday and you are their parents and therefore obliged to attend and the Kayaker's birthday bash was no exception. He had an evening excursion planned with friends to celebrate finally becoming a grown up at twenty-five and which he said would be entirely appropriate for people of our age.
Are you sure I demanded, imagining being set up for a terrible foam party clubbing experience ?
Yes, he assured me and he was not wrong because we had a great time and I'll be honest we were not very excited about it.
I can't believe that I've never done it before, at least not properly like this, in a room full of hundreds of people and occasionally via a live link to thousands of others doing likewise across the country.
I have never known tension like it and the concentration required fair knocked my poor brain for six. If anyone in the party spoke they were hissed at through gritted teeth and you just sat in awe of the considerably older generation (even than us) present who rattled through it with ease whilst I was struggling to keep up. I wish I'd taken my knitting too because they all got that out at half time.
You've guessed I'm sure but if not here's your starter for legs eleven.

Yes, it was Gala Bingo and what a night we had and no we didn't win the national jackpot, that went to someone in Grimsby, but what a revelation it all was. Firstly I do have to acknowledge that for many it is part of a gambling addiction and there were  notices up warning of the dangers and offering help, but that aside it's all deadly serious. There's none of that clickety-click, quack-quack stuff which we'd been practising all day.
The Tinker was away so we didn't even have him with us for cover, really really old people, much older than him anyway, sitting there playing two lots of cards at a time, pen in EACH hand, awesome, and the numbers just flying out, barely a one second gap in between each call from a caller who couldn't say "th" so it was "all the frees firty free". Fortunately a very nice gentleman who had been going twice a week since 1976 came over and explained it all because we were clueless.
Well this first game is the Party Extra you need lines across, down, diagonal or four squares in the middle, once that's been won you need a full house.
Do I run up to the front?
No you just shout.
Shout what?
Anything, don't feel stupid, always shout.
What about all these?
Well those are one line, then two lines and then full house and then there's the National Game which is lines, then full house, the High Five's just full house.
Do the lines have to be in the same box? Two lines? Two lines where?
After three minutes intensive tuition and dire and solemn warnings about never tearing the pages out of the book we were off and I want you all to see this,

See, those two lines, right at the bottom. Well by the time I'd noticed and told Bookhound that I'd got two lines and Bookhound had verified that indeed I did have two lines, then I'd called out, "ME ME" waved my arms in the air, half fallen out of my seat and then tripped over my bag with excitement and clouted my knee, the whole thing was onto the next number and someone else had shouted. Silence.
All eyes fixed on me, hundreds of them piercing through me menacingly, everyone's concentration shot to pieces as proceedings were halted for verification and to advise me that, despite the undeniable drama and volume of my claim, I had called too late. 'FALSE CLAIM' was announced loudly to all and sundry, inciting frankly unnecessary smug grins around the olds and actually a surprising number of young people there too. I sank down into my seat, face glowing a fetching shade of Eating Room Red whilst bitterly bemoaning that I had been robbed of £15.
Meanwhile the smugly ambidextrous nonagenarians, having warmed up, are now approaching peak fitness levels. If this was an Olympic sport I swear we'd trounce the world. I was too busy concentrating to check but now I'm certain they were filling in extra cards with pens in their toes and probably utilizing a nodding technique involving a pen attached to their foreheads, and they were raking it in.
For the National Game halfway through the evening you link live to all the other Gala Bingo halls in the country and get beaten by nonagenarians in Basingstoke.
The trouble is your brain frantically scans up and down the columns for the numbers and forgets to look laterally for completed rows, I could feel bits of my cerebral hemispheres creaking undone like screwed up newspaper and the tension was indescribable. My jaw remained locked in such a state of clenched muscle spasm for the next two days that I thought I was at least sickening for tetanus.
However I think Gala Bingo might be the great undiscovered night out. You don't have to make polite conversation, completely unsociable, every time someone speaks you tell them to be quiet, but at least you know you are fending off the Alzheimers for a bit longer, seriously don't knock it, we were really impressed.

Sacred reading

Sacred reading, that's a bit misleading on Good Friday and many's the year I've spent the day robed and choired and singing for several hours, but I'm in an lapsed Anglican organised religion phase right now, yet that doesn't mean you don't mark the day somehow.
Times have changed for sure. We were never allowed out to play on Good Friday and it was fish on the menu which was torture. I can't remember whether I was let off or spent an hour pushing it around my plate until it was cold, but then hot cross buns which more than made up for it, bearing in mind that currants were the other food I loathed as a child.
But all in all a strangely quiet day was had by all.
Bookhound recalls hot cross buns, and  thinks they probably went and caught their own fish, but there was no such sanction about not going out to play and he thinks it far more likely he wasn't allowed to stay in.
Currently top of my reading pile is Daphne by Justine Picardie, and anything that encroaches on Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier territory could be considered sacred reading. Oft repeated here, Rebecca was the first book I read that made me realise that I was reading as an adult rather than a child and appropriately I read it on a beach holiday at St Ives in Cornwall, when I was about fourteen or so.
Here's my original 5/- Penguin copy, vague whiff of the Ambre Solaire about it.

Is that grains of sand I can see trapped in the endpages? I've convinced myself it is...or perhaps dead ants?

This lead me to thinking about other books from that time, special reading that was opening new and exciting doors to a different bit of the library and setting me off on a lifetime's reading journey. Library not withstanding I was a book buyer even then and don't ask me how I managed that on 2/6d a week pocket money, but I still have some of those books and this moth-eaten pile has amassed a sentimental value far beyond its worth, I'd be sad to part with any of these.
I remember reading the first two in the Forsyte Chronicles and that was when we were all rooted to the TV series.
Nevil Shute was another favourite and I'd plump for A Town Like Alice as the definitive one for me. Remember those old Pan editions, 3/6d with the fabulous artwork covers? They really do speak of the moment.
But it was the Daphne du Maurier's that had my full and undivided attention.One after another, Jamaica Inn, Frenchman's Creek, My Cousin Rachel and I carried on down the years, The Glassblowers. House on the Strand, Don't Look Now and the rest but nothing matched that Rebecca moment.
Much more about Justine Picardie's book Daphne soon which I'm loving and will curl up with today because Good Friday remains a quiet day. The book is a compelling blend of fact and fiction, faction I suppose? A real blurring of traditional literary boundaries with biography, historical literary detail, reworked themes and explorations and an innovative extraction of elements from Rebecca which intertwine with Daphne's life and that of a student researching her life long after her death. Mix in Daphne du Maurier's The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte and an associated Bronte theme and the end result is all an intoxicating patchwork for an enthusiast like me.
There are a lot of books I will be rushing to revisit once I've finished Daphne and by the way the cover is as gorgeous as it looks. Has the feel of a Gwen Raverat woodcut about it, slightly raised ink printing, subtle pale colour tones against that Eating Room Red shade straight off the Farrow & Ball paint chart.
Perfect colour on a book jacket, but the paint everyone buys for the name and then realises they don't actually want to eat in a room that colour after all, well that's what happened here.
Now I'm beginning to feel the colours speaking to me and it's really time I made a Daphne - Rebecca quilt, but I'm currently and supposedly on an inspiration embargo pending too many unfinished projects. All right, I'll just think about it, won't buy any fabric.
You know me by now, once I've had the idea it's a mere nano-second before I have Jinny Beyer's The Quilter's Album of Blocks and Borders off the shelf and just think of the traditional block names you could use?The Lady of the Lake, Storm at Sea, Double Wedding Ring and then I'd invent a few, Danvers Choice, Sinking Boat. Could I just cut out and piece one?
As for the books I must revisit, well finally I have to read Rebecca again. It's high-risk because Rebecca is enshrined and preserved in amber in my mind, dare I chip it out and have a look? Also Margaret Forster's biography of Daphne du Maurier which I read when it was first published but not since. But I'm also intrigued enough to pick up Trilby by George du Maurier, Daphne's grandfather and I'm sure plenty more will emerge.
Anyone else have sacred reading like this?
Is there a book enshrined in amber for you too?

Benny & Shrimp - Katarina Mazetti

Now Kurt's taken me to Sweden might as well hang around on my Around the World in Eighty Books challenge and see what's selling.
I suppose it's difficult to predict whether a best-seller in another country will do likewise elsewhere, all a bit of gamble, but Benny & Shrimp by Katarina Mazetti the second fiction title for Short Books, has a great deal going for it after taking Sweden by storm. The themes of grief and loss, love and incompatibility, translate well into any language and I'm sneaking it into Around the World in Eighty Books because everyone knows you travel to Australia via Sweden.
Whilst visiting her husband's minimalist grave, librarian Shrimp notices the grave alongside,

' Next to Orjan's stone there's a really tasteless gravestone, an absolute monstrosity. White marble with swirly gold lettering; angels, roses, birds, words on garlands of ribbon, even a salutary little skull and scythe..'

and visiting that very grave with equal regularity and gravitas is bachelor farmer Benny who is mourning the loss of his parents.
Shrimp is not really approaching all this in the way she feels she should

'I always sit her for at least an hour. Presumably in the hope of getting down to the right sort of grieving if I stick at it long enough. I'd feel better if I could feel worse...the truth is, half the time all I feel is furious with him. Bloody deserter, why couldn't you watch where you were going? And my feelings the rest of the time are, I suppose, pretty much like those of a child who had a budgie for twelve years and then it died, There I've said it.'

Meanwhile Benny sits and contemplates Shrimp

' and that gravestone she sits staring at! What sort of a stone do you call that? It looks like something a surveyor put down as a boundary marker! '

An unlikely friendship develops between the two and chapters alternately recount the same events from each other's point of view. The book is well written in translation, ultimately gently humourous and all without taking itself too seriously but also explores the impossibilities of 'getting a relationship to work between two mature single people, driven by enormous longing and loudly ticking biological clocks.'

If opposites attract then here's the evidence that the attraction is not without its difficulties

' How will she learn to accept that he falls asleep at the opera and has a house full of his mother's embroidered wall-hangings, and how could he ever feel at home in her minimalist apartment, bare as a dentist's waiting room? '

I'm impressed with Short Books first foray into fiction, Benny & Shrimp and Betsy Tobin's Ice Land suggest a promising and varied selection of novels nicely produced, soft touch that I am for a book that looks and feels good before I've opened it. But then we all know it then requires the right words on the page in the right order and if they can keep up this standard these will be books worth looking out for. Benny & Shrimp is indeed quirky, unusual and very readable and you have to marvel at Katarina Mazetti, a multi-talented author who having been a teacher is also a commentator, musician, poet and radio programme producer in her native Sweden.
450,000 Swedes thought this book was worth reading and we'll make that plus one Brit too.

Once more unto the screech (of tyres), dear Ken.

Sorry, so sorry, that title's awful, don't know how I've got the nerve, but at last my first encounter with Kurt Wallender, soon to be played by our Ken (Branagh), and all courtesy of Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell. It's all gone as smoothly as any trip out with Kurt can do and I am now on the lookout for the next in the series, The Dogs of Riga. The challenge is that I must find all these in charity shops as I go along.
Kurt has a big following at the Endsleigh Salon and I can see why. I've listened to all the conversations about this brusque and flawed Swedish detective and so I almost felt I knew him before I'd even laid eyes on him. Arnaldur Indridason had also prepared me well here and here for the character traits of these brooding Nordic policemen. Erlendur and Kurt would get along famously because they share many of the classic characteristics.
They have hopeless family lives, absent wife, problematic children.
They are unlucky in love.
They are gruff and abrupt.
They have minimal dress sense.
They drink excessively.
They like classical music (I can't actually recall, does Erlendur like classical music? If not Kurt would educate)
They rarely eat five portions of fruit and veg in a week, let alone a day.
Holiday? What's a holiday?
Happiness? What's happiness?
To be solved, the murder and torture of an elderly couple in an isolated farmhouse and the subsequent racially motivated crime that starts to spread when the old lady's dying word, 'foreigner', is leaked to the press.
Constantly and acutely aware of all his own personal failings and incapable of addressing them effectively, Kurt must bury them under his professional persona, and with these two interweaving crimes to resolve he has barely a minute to acquire one lot of bruises before he's sporting the next lot. Give the man some arnica because Kurt certainly throws himself into all this with gusto and he's a decidedly thoughtful and considerate leader of his men too, often to his own cost. Never assigns them the nightime surveillance duties without donning his thermals and doing the midnight to morning stint himself.
There's a little warm heart beating inside this grizzly of a man.
The whole point was to read the books before Kenneth Branagh becomes Kurt for the TV series but a strange reverse thinking came into play.
I spent the entire book visualising Ken in the role, exactly how would he stiffen up the sinews and summon up the blood to become a cop?
How would he portray this action-prone, battle-scarred detective?
How sensitively would our Ken deal with his pre-senile father, his wayward daughter and his recently separated wife?
How would he look hanging upsidedown on the scaffolding by his foot?
Would he be able to hang upsidedown on the scaffolding by his foot?
Should we really risk Henry Vth hanging upsidedown on the scaffolding by his foot?
In fact, though I'm a mere novice to the Mankell ranks, I think Ken will do very nicely for Kurt, and I'm counting this one into the Around the World in Eighty Books challenge too and then it's off to The Tinker, because I just know he'll love these.
Meanwhile no sign of The Dogs of Riga in Woodside Animal, The Mare & Foal Sanctuary or The Cat's Protection League charity shops, all my hopes are obviously pinned on The Labrador Trust.

The Changeling

Do I always say 'you must read this book'? If so I'm sorry but I really mean it this time, especially if you were a Coronation year baby like me, or a child of that era and I'm sorry too because I keep reading books that leave me choked at the moment, and this one is likely to have that effect on you as well.
But it's all right, we're in good company because The Changeling by Robin Jenkins and published by Canongate leaves Andrew Marr in a worse state in his afterword,

'this book makes me cry, and unsettles me badly...it has settled itself somewhere inside my mind, and stayed'

Now it's settled and stayed in my mind too and, like so much else that I've read recently, I think it will be there for ever. When I eventually lose the marbles, and can only sift out the odd thing here and there, I'm certain I'll still be muttering and sobbing over The Changeling and getting it all mixed up with Child 44 and that short story by Carys Davies, The Gingerbread Boy about the child abduction.
If like me you you're a sassenach who has never heard of Robin Jenkins (1912 - 2005) then hie thee oot there and discover because I can't recommend him highly enough. Hailed by many as Scotland's greatest fiction writer, and though I couldn't possibly comment on that, The Changeling is in a league of its own and more than evidences the accolade.
Any children of the 1950's will relate fiercely and often very uncomfortably with this book because social class distinction was prominent, judgemental and very evident in my childhood. Not in my home, and not that I really understood so while I was out there with my gang roller skating around in a smocked frock with a bow at the back, but out there in the world at large, and casting my mind back little incidents fly in that are suddenly most unwelcome.
The ostracised smelly child at school and the awful rhymes that were sung, the "backward" child who spent half his life standing in the corner for being naughty, by today's standards on reflection a good deal of it was grim and this book will bring it all back to you. In amongst the welter of fashionable nostalgia publishing it is easy to forget that things have also changed for the better, this book sharpens the gaze very effectively.
Published in 1958, The Changeling recounts the story of the nice aspiringly middle-class Forbes family living in Glasgow. Father Charlie is a school teacher, overweight, not a post-war hero for his son to idolise, low self-worth but a seemingly kind and honest heart and with a burning desire to ameliorate the social injustice that he spots in one of his pupils, Tom Curdie.

'That boy lives under an Everest, a whole Himalayan range, of handicaps, disadvantages and penalties. Yet he has never revealed...one whimper of complaint, one yelp for revenge.'

Bright and intelligent but from the lawless jungle that is the Donaldson Estate, Glasgow's worst in this fictional account, Tom is an enigmatic child and one entirely misunderstood by most of the adults around him. (though interestingly not in the very final analysis, by his apparently useless drink-sodden mother.)
Charlie decides that it would be an act of charitable benevolance to take Tom along on the family's annual holiday because in Charlie's eyes he clearly needed temporary respite from the Donaldson Estate,

'Newly born babies in their prams, if washed looked pathetically alien there; but in a short time, in two years or less, they had begun to acquire the characteristics which would enable them to survive amidst the dirt and the savagery...slumdom was hideous; but then the people who lived there were slum-dwellers.'

and the Forbes family had this to offer,

'Towellan was not just a place where a holiday was spent, it was where the Forbes family renewed itself, where their love for one another, their faith, trust and hope were strengthened.'

Surely what more could Tom want or need?
Charlie's suggestion does not go down well with Family Forbes, the wife and two children are less than enamoured and there is much questioning of his seemingly altruistic motives by Charlie's colleagues. Amidst fears of lice, nits and general osmosis of low moral standards by association, when Charlie's wealthy and highly judgemental mother-in-law also pitches up for the holiday you can but sense there will be turmoil.
No more of the plot because though it is perfect, it is the limb-by-limb dissection without anaesthetic of this family that makes for spectacular reading. This is the archetypal 1950's family, trying to make good, rebuilding lives in the aftermath of a war that has shifted the goalposts. People jockeying for position, a new page turned for yet another re-writing of social history.
Ideologies are methodically and ruthlessly torn apart and exposed for what they are as the glaze of this perfect family gradually crackles and splinters beneath the pressure of a stranger in their midst.Tom is quiet and has little to say but Robin Jenkins doesn't need to give him a loud voice because as a reader you supply it, every single word and emotion necessary on his behalf. Motives and misunderstandings are excruciatingly exposed along with shallow prejudices and assumptions all leading to a seismic shift in the thinking all round and all bestowed with a slow steady and magical hand by Robin Jenkins. He really has achieved something quite miraculous and intensely readable with his cast of fully formed characters, I wonder if this has ever made it into TV drama territory? If not it's sitting waiting to be done.
Meanwhile if you do decide to read it please feel free to join Andrew Marr and me snivelling over here in the corner and could you please bring along some clean hankies ?

Ondaatje divides and rules

Now that I have emerged blinking into the brave new film-free dawn that heralds my affinity with all things Michael Ondaatje I have been welded to Divisadero like a thing possessed, inseparable if not slightly confused on occasion, but have emerged the other end in one piece and awash with his writing again. I now trust Michael Ondaatje to sort it all out in the end and he did.
I think this book must more than live up to its title at every level,

'I come from Divisadero Street. Divisadero, from the Spanish word for 'division'...or it might derive from the word divisar  meaning 'to gaze at something from a distance.'

Aha, I said as I reached that point on page 142, now I see what you're up to Mr Ondaatje. Intentionally I haven't read the reviews but I'll bet they are divided and polarised from brilliant to ghastly. I'm in the brilliant camp me because Michael can't put a foot wrong now. No word out of place, if Michael meant it to be there then that's where it belongs. If Michael wants to twizzle me round his little finger and tie me in knots with his divided story then I'll cope with that too.
Life in all its strangeness held within these pages from lives lived on the basis of mere transactions, the rapid decision to adopt a baby, the bartered bride, the 'layers of compulsive secrecy', the loose connections that echo and reverberate through this book, leitmotifs that surface and re-surface to bridge time and place from Vegas to off-the-beaten-track France and bind the story together. Shards of glass stun and blind and that blue table certainly gets around a bit,

'The past is always carried into the present by small things'

There's that little Ondaatje gem that I sense he buries in every book, the concentrated essence of what he wants to tell me.
And another one that helpfully contained my anxieties,

'Not knowing something essential makes you more involved.'

This is indeed 'Terre Inconnues' traversed time and again as reality, memory and history intertwine seamlessly.
It's a difficult plot to precis beyond the very beginning and an unusual family set-up which originates in Northern California with the farmer whose wife has died in childbirth.(divisadero uno perhaps) He brings home another orphan daughter from hospital , Claire, to raise with his own daughter, Anna, whilst also adopting a neighbour's child Coop, orphaned by a fire.
Put quite so blandly I see it reads like a quick way to enlist child labour but that never feels quite the case, though as a constructed family they do all work very hard. An act with staggering and far-reaching repercussions cracks this fragile network apart (divisadero next, blue table, first shard of glass ) and Michael Ondaatje picks up the threads of the lives and the yearning down the years with the emphasis on Anna in France researching the life of a French poet, Lucien Segura (divisadero many, but only one eye, more shards of glass, blue table)
Heck, I'm going to stop there because I've made it all sound barmy and it most certainly is not, Michael Ondaatje does not do barmy.
What Michael Ondaatje does is to write with a keeness of perception that I am now in tune with, the pulse has been found and I have my finger on it and for me Anil's Ghost was the key.
I have succumbed to the style and can now embrace it. A style that never does the obvious, there's a point in this book when I turned the page and said  'what the...' 'goodness me what's happening here', because I felt as if I had walked into the wrong room completely, had I picked up the wrong book? The pace changes from high octane to snail's just like that and there are moments of  dazzling and illuminating skill yet all done with I sense a careful reverence for his art.
Nothing seems pretentious or ill-placed, or perhaps I'm incapable of seeing it now?
There's a fine self-reflexive Michael Ondaatje moment, a writer himself, writing about a writer writing about writing and buried in there the suggestion that a writer can write in the conclusions he wants, that his own life may never quite have achieved. It's moving and clever as you read an alternative plot to the main one, those nesting stories again.
Intertextuality is a bit of a high-risk word to throw in here because in the post-modernist world of litcrit it's been severely touted around and the meaning now probably many stages removed from the original. I did once kneel with some comprehension at the foot of Julia Kristeva but I quickly got up again, so I'll borrow it for the dgr scribbles school to mean something very simple, the referencing by one author of the text of another.
Michael Ondaatje uses plenty. There might be one book I'd read now to spot any secret Divisadero codes and that would be The Black Tulip by Alexandre Dumas, but Victor Hugo, Balzac, Colette, The Leopard and even Annie Dillard get a mention.
But final words to the esteemed Mr Ondaatje because yet another reassuring little Divisadero line written especially for me and by the final page beautifully fulfilled,

'Oh, this older need for a lullaby not a storm.'

Mr Darcy's Dilemma

Mr Darcy has returned from hunting across the Pemberley estate whilst avoiding that ridiculous lake and, before his rest, he powdered his paws and made his choice for the five free copies of Mrs Darcy's Dilemma by Diana Birchall. The winners have already been notified by e mail  to avoid any terrible confusion on here with duplication of names and they were
Joanne
Barbara
Annette
Lizzie
Jane
The Fedex brougham will be dispatched forthwith to deliver once destinations are confirmed.
Thank you to Sourcebooks and to everyone last one of you for entering.

Sunday Salon - Oppositional thinking

From my soapbox, ( and if I could have used this picture legally I would) a place I rarely stand on here and I definitely don't do politics and I'm not doing that now either, but I do have to report a first and I make no apology for it.
I have never heard a politician stand up and announce at a conference that the nation needs MORE health visitors and must have them, but I was indeed startled to hear David Cameron (leader of the Opposition) say exactly that on Sky News yesterday, and with an understanding in just a few sentences of what we are trained to do and do well, and what families say loudly and clearly that they really want us to do.
I think he really meant it too and today I feel slightly less of an unwanted old community-nurse-in-her-spare-time dinosaur than I did yesterday.
A universal, trusted, non-stigmatised service available to everyone whenever needed and for all the right reasons, best and safest practice always in place, not diluted, not targeted and not crisis-led.
Better be very quick indeed, because the baby's nearly gone out with the bathwater and, like the dodo, we are a species on the brink of extinction, within the next five years a high percentage of us will have been put out to grass  retired and taken our lifetime of professional expertise with us.
One of the most useful and reassuring (apparently) bits of advice I offer anyone who is struggling to negotiate with the terrorist tendencies of their tiny children is, if what you are doing isn't working try doing the opposite. It's all about containing and reducing anxieties and guilt and can be breathtakingly simple but stunningly effective. If you are shouting at them start whispering, if you are having a nervous breakdown because they won't eat five portions of fruit and veg a day and therefore won't be intelligent, (how in heaven's name have we led people to worry so much about this?) start to take no notice whatsoever.
If nothing else it all relieves the pressure and everyone can retreat from the frontlines of the battle without losing face and have a rest and a reconfigure.
Well it occurs to me that the same thing applies to my reading pile at the moment.
If what I'm reading isn't working I must do the opposite, relieve the pressure of a pile of books that are not obeying my need to enjoy, not beckoning me to devour them five times a day, I must reshelve and reconfigure, choose some more. Heavens to betsy something's rotten in the county of Devon when I tidy, dust and hoover the sitting room rather than curl up in the detritus and read a book.
I regularly have several books on the go at once and every so often I get it completely wrong. Wrong book for the moment, the mood, the weather whatever. So casting no aspersions whatsoever towards the lyrical writing of John McGahern and That They May Face the Rising Sun, it must return to the shelves after eighty pages. It's beautiful, mellow and paced but  I've overdosed on beautiful, mellow, paced Irish of late, I'm sated to the brim with it and this book is not having the profound effect I know it can.
Likewise The Map of Love by Adhaf Soueif is a book I know will knock me for six at the right moment but it's not this moment, that's going back on the shelf after 120 pages.
Annie Dillard, well I was full of enthusiasm last week and The Writing Life was an excellent read and yes I'm enjoying Pilgrim at Tinker Creek but I'm not enjoying it enough. It overflows  with the bounty of nature and closely observed natural imagery, that after all is the object of the book, but I'm not in the mood for reading about that either and I know I'm not appreciating it in the way Annie Dillard intended, so I'm swiping those off the Now Reading List this morning and replacing.
I seem to be in the mood for books that delineate families, spotting the similarities between parent-child relationships that may be in settings as diverse as it's possible to be. I've read Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje this week and my thoughts on that on here tomorrow, to be followed by a book that will be in my top ten reads of the year without a doubt, The Changeling by Robin Jenkins. If that cover doesn't strike a chord then the first few pages of this amazing book most certainly will, and me and Andrew Marr ( his Introduction that Stewart cleverly spotted is actually an Afterword) are both in snivelling uncontrollable 1950's (me 1953, he 1959) children's tears over it all, our hankies are wringing.
So I've inadvertently slipped into family therapy reading and that's where I want to stay because suddenly the synapses start to crackle and spark, arcing across completely disparate books as I spot the connections, from California to Glasgow and now to Winnipeg as I add in Holding My Breath by Sidura Ludwig and thence Rome as I draw Death In Rome by Wolgang Koeppen into the scheme of things.John Self lauded this over in his Asylum this week.I'll report back to the Salon later.

Happy Birthday to...

...the Kayaker who turns a quarter of a century today, and I suppose really I should make an effort to finish this quilt (note the Laura Ashley fabrics circa 1983) which I started when he was born, or has the moment passed?
Is this a record ?
Please tell me that you have an older unfinished object than this...please.

The Lane in March

I'm sure I've told you before that we live about a mile along a very narrow single track Devon lane. Mostly barely the width of the car and with grass growing up the middle and Devon banks either side, it's very picturesque. Ours is the only house you come to about half-way along and anyone who visits says it is incredibly difficult to find, though we never have any trouble, but the lane is a little world of its very own and perfect for a short stroll if you don't want to do the grand circuit around.
I'll try and take you out there month by month this year.
Often muddy up to your ankles at the moment and washing a car a complete waste of time and tide. Cows and sheep are moved up and down from field to field regularly and what they strew offers a distinct aroma to what settles and heats up on the exhaust pipe of the car and only seems to become evident to me and the rest of the world when I park in the surgery car park.
So a few lane pictures for you, out through the gates and turn right.

I should really go out and take a better picture because now we have great swathes and drifts of wild daffodils in the hedges.Tiny delicate, pale yellow miniature ones, nothing cultivated,blousy or bright and garish about these and you ponder how on earth they got there and just how long they've been there?
I often wonder, did Georgiana Duchess of Bedford see them too on her famous carriage drives out of nearby Endsleigh in those first decades of the nineteenth century?

Now this twig may look boringly insignificant but I am reliably informed it is ash because it has those black bits on it. The hedge trimmer has spent the last few weeks doing its stuff which nowadays mostly resembles the maceration of a hedge rather than the careful trimming and layering that happened of old and probably helped make the hedge what it is today. But grumble me not because the by product of hedge massacre apart from neat hedgerows, is trillions of ash stalks, and ash has a very good use. It is the one wood that will burn on a fire instantly, in an emergency it doesn't require drying.
My emergency when lighting a fire is actually lighting a fire.
If I had to set the house alight I've proved I can do that within two minutes, when it comes to a woodburner I struggle and talk sweetly to reluctant kindling wood and vanishing screwed up newspapers (it's why we buy them) for hours. Well ash stalks offer an endless free supply of wonderful kindling wood so at the moment, as we approach home again...

...we are always laden with ash twigs to add to this.

A sprinkling of Salt? Nay 'tis a veritable pillar.

It's not difficult to see that I've been seduced by some of the grand hitters from the big publishing houses of late and I'll confess the teetering booktowers of Babel have been far too tempting while I've been home having myself a restful convalesce. Analysis reveals some very satisfying reads and I'm going to say it now, I can't wait for the Booker Prize to come round. The dgr Bookerthon will most certainly be on again, anyone else up for the challenge?
But always trilling loudly alongside are the independent publishers, and I don't like to neglect their output for too long, especially when it slots so neatly into my short-story-a-day-for-a-year attempt.
Right so just to update, I've fallen off the short story wagon for the last couple of weeks, brain a bit wishy-washy and bizzarely demanding big long involving novels into which I can completely disappear. Short stories have however become the ambrosia (food of the gods, not the rice pudding) for my working brain, focusing as they do on the minuitiae of life in just a few pages and perfect preparation for the day ahead.
Adele Geras has written a marvellous defence of the short story over at normblog so that saves me the trouble because Adele articulates it far better than I could, but I am going to confirm the delights currently emerging from Salt, that most eclectic of independent publishers and I have a veritable pillar (will I get away with that?) of Salt books to read at the moment.
I've lapsed but will pick up where I left off with Some New Ambush by Carys Davies because, like Balancing on the Edge of the World by Elizabeth Baines, these stories capture the essence of a moment to perfection, the mistakes we all make and the solutions we find as we deal with everything life throws at us.
Hwang, the quiet revenge on the cheating adulterous friend had me cheering, yes cheering I tell you over a lost dry cleaning ticket. And just wait until you discover its demise, it's hilarious.
Waking the Princess reveals a unique way to a woman's heart and I guess, yes is the answer, I'd have been delighted with this gift of invention too all those years ago. To tell what would be to spoil.
The Gingerbread Boy almost too disturbing to read in the light of recent headline-hitting child abductions and this one, quietly powerful short story left me anguished. There is an aspect to child abduction that is rarely considered, we invariably assume we know the worst outcome but Carys Davies cleverly explores another outcome, one that should be far more comforting, except it was far from that. No word of a lie, this single story will stay in my mind for ever.
Sifting through the rest of the pillar of  Salt, I have gathered in Richard Bardsley's Body Parts (not his actual body parts you understand) which will apparently shed a whole new light on the human body.
Then Broken Things by Padrika Tarrant.In her early thirties, based in Norwich and enthusiastically endorsed by the Hungarian poet and translator George Szirtes as

' an instinctive wanderer down knife edges...intensity of vision luminous...perception deeply humane, tender yet terrifying '

I love the idea of that seemingly impossible combination, I'm sold already, Padrika's world is likened to that of Angela Carter, and may both horrify and entertain at the same time.
I've started these and they absolutely do.
Read Darling and be equally sickened and moved to tears of empathy and sadness in the space of a mere five pages. Read Coffinwood and step for just five pages into the world of the psychotic mind and just see how real it seems.I'm just four stories into Broken Things but already I see precisely what George Szirtes meant when he wrote of Padrika Tarrant,

'It is the nature of her understanding that is perhaps the most remarkable...her poor crazy stuffed houses are overflowing with life, rich with spirits, miracles and creatures who, like the writing itself, shine and darken, jostle, sing and die.They are tangible, furnished visions, wonderful and humbling.'

Then The I Love You Book by William Guy looks quite unique. Monologues which gather together the thoughts of a hundred different men and women speaking about the people, places, life and things they love, The Footballer, The Twin, The Supermarket Checkout, The Night Angler, The Social Worker to name a few.
No The Health Visitor which is probably a relief.
However I've come to the conclusion that there's a unique correlation between the short story and my working health visiting day world but let's not confuse things for now, more on that another day.

P.S. I discover good news for Carys Davies and Some New Ambush here, congratulations to Carys and to Salt.

Birchall alert

Don't for goodness' sake miss Diana Birchall here guest-writing on Austenprose, coping not just with one bit of excitement in her life but two, the third surely can't be far off ?
Could life bless one more deserving soul with any more drama in a single week?
Not only is Mrs Darcy's Dilemma now on the bookshop shelves across the US, and the subject of a very important prize draw here at dovegreyreader scribbles and to be performed by a cat temporarily assuming the mantle of Mr Darcy, but there's much more.
In fact let's make this National Diana Birchall Week and be done with it.
Diana is to be flown to New York by her employers, Warner Bros Studios to give evidence in the JK Rowling - Harry Potter - Lexicon lawsuit currently hitting the headlines.
Read her account Brouhaha in the Haha here and don't miss that picture of Diana, slumped on the floor, glazed but satisfied look in her eyes, as she holds a copy of her book in a Barnes & Noble store whilst pointing helpfully at a neighbouring copy of a Maeve Binchy.
Maeve should be thrilled at such an endorsement.
But yes, you too could win a book written by someone who will find themselves standing in the same room as J.K.Rowling...names still welcome in comments here for the draw at the weekend.
Mr Darcy currently out hunting across the estate again.

The All Of It - Jeannette Haien

If I'm casting around for blog-benefits it's really not difficult and one of the many is the two-way book traffic, the suggestions back and forth in comments and e mails about other good books suggested by the zillions of book-lovers from across ninety or more countries who visit here each week.
I think we have all discovered many brilliant reads this way and up there with the best a little book kindly sent to me recently by Wendy, who comments here. Wendy thought I might enjoy The All Of It by Jeannette Haien and Wendy wasn't wrong.
I hadn't heard of the book or the author and I wonder if this one just passed us all by back in 1986 when it was first published in the U.S.? Truth be told, everything passed me by in the 1980's because that was our three babies in four years decade and mostly I was either a beached whale or a frazzled sprat.
I don't even know if it was published here in the UK but it's one of those books you're just really pleased someone has pointed you towards.
As Father Declan de Loughry chooses his lures, should it be a Hairy Mary, a Blue Charm or a Silver Doctor, and casts his flyfishing line into those sublime peat coloured Irish waters he ponders the deathbed confession of  one of his flock.
Parishioners, Kevin and Enda Dennehy have been living a double life for almost fifty years and Father Declan's shock at Kevin's revelations on his deathbed, and then Enda's story as they keep vigil over Kevin's body, sit very uncomfortably with Father Declan's role as parish priest. He has reluctantly, and against his better judgement, allowed Enda to talk outside the confessional thus seriously compromising his jurisdiction over any perceived sin along with his integrity, and he struggles to reconcile what he has heard over a long day's solitary fishing.
Suddenly, as I write this, I see the confessional in a new light, not that I've ever been in one but there it is,  a physical box in which to contain and leave the sins and a barrier that perhaps protects the listener from the full impact? Certainly without his protective barriers in place, Father Declan might leak empathy and understanding like a sieve.
The writing flows as quietly and gently as the river and is ultimately redemptive as Jeannette Haien explores her potentially harrowing subject matter against a backdrop of  Father Declan's constant casting into the river to catch that perfect salmon. How I understand by osmosis that particular obsession and how possessed is Father Declan by it all.
Reading slowly my awareness grew apace, of the way a tragedy can impact on peoples' lives, cause them to act in ways that may not be in keeping with expectations and then come to an understanding of how cruel it is to judge people as a result. Devotion by Nell Leyshon covers similar moral territory now I think about it.
As the murky waters clear Father Declan learns lessons of his own and a good deal more about himself and his own intrinsic human flaws besides.
Firstly, prepare for an utterly heart-wrenching ending.
Then, if the book affects you as it did me, prepare to be mildly surprised by your own reactions and the outcomes you crave. Careful and intuitive writing from Jeannette Haien to land me there so unexpectedly.
So a real live concert pianist of thirty-five years turns her hand to writing and you have to envy such latent talent and be very grateful that it emerged, because there is nothing I can find to criticise in Jeannette Haien's style, it flows like a perfect little sonata all of its own. Nothing mawkish or sentimental about it and she has captured the Irishness, the lilt of it all pitch perfectly. The scandal of the 'sin' and its origins still have the ability to shock twenty years on from publication but nothing dates this book in the slightest.
Many thanks again to Wendy for sending me this one, I'd have missed it for sure.

The Oxford Literary Festival...be there or be square.

It's probably high time I let this cat out of the bag. Sandwiched neatly as I am between the two esteemed Johns and the inimitable Mark, I am really looking forward to this.

JOHN CAREY, LYNNE HATWELL, JOHN MULLAN AND MARK THWAITE
Blogging the Classics
Monday 31st March, 8.00pm Marquee, Christ Church £7.50
Whose judgements are more trustworthy when it comes to books? Do amateur bloggers online do a better job than established literary critics in the press? Hear two highly regarded literary bloggers – Mark Thwaite, founder of ReadySteadyBook.com, and Lynne Hatwell, founder of dovegreyreader.typepad.com – battle it out with two professional critics – Sunday Times chief reviewer John Carey and broadcaster and journalist John Mullan. Sponsored by Oxford World's Classics

The Concert Pianist - Conrad Williams

In light of Cornflower's post yesterday I've shuffled this book up the list a bit because you will see that it is all a lovely example of telepathic blogendipity at work so do head over to Cornflower and take a look.
Nowhere in The Concert Pianist blurb is any mention made of Conrad Williams' musical pedigree though I make the assumption that he must have one somewhere. Grade Eight piano or music critic of the something-or-other surely, because he writes with such complete confidence about a world that to me at least would have remained remote,strange and mysterious unless you've been on the inside.
Here's a book for all music lovers everywhere, all concert goers, all pianists from pub to Wigmore Hall and everything in between, a book that takes the lid off the piano and lets us in on the workings of the rarified atmosphere of the concert pianist.
A series of lack-lustre reviews have flayed the increasingly fragile confidence of world-renowned concert pianist Philip Morahan. Fifty-two, unmarried ,childless and seemingly incapable of sustaining any relationship beyond that with his ivories, Philip visibly crumbles in the run-up to a series of concerts and recording contracts that are about to cement his reputation alongside those of the greats.
Betrothal to his piano has meant a lifetime of emotional denial for Philip and the crunch builds slowly and inexorably as circumstances toss Philip around like the lost soul that he feels. Visiting an old flame, now happily married with children only exacerbates the pain

'There was children's stuff all over the kitchen...this was the primary colour world that bachelorhood had denied him. Suddenly, you saw yourself staring longingly into other people's lives, and realising the outcome of decisions made long ago was quite irreversible.'

Conrad Williams spread before me Philip's rarified, cossetted and pampered world and the awesome talent of the pianist with precision, and balanced it all with the precariousness of a glamorous world peopled by plenty of shallow, self-serving prima donnas. If Philip is to reach the truth and honesty his musical interpretation is lacking then he must decide who to listen to, but he has some huge emotional hurdles to leap first and Conrad Williams has written a lyrical and passionate book that took me as near to the heart of this strange world as it must be possible to get. Not being a subscriber to The Gramophone, I was particularly entranced by the language of music appreciation, it's really like no other.
One or two plot deviations head in unexpected and unusual directions but serve well to demonstrate that great musicians are as flawed as the next person and in that case normal human beings too, and I accepted these twists and turns very much as an integral part of the novel. A great deal in this book serves as a reminder of the potentially fickle nature of fame and fortune, breeding as it does its own unique set of problems.
Then there's the music.
This is all enough to make a musical klutz like me head for iTunes and start downloading the Waldstein Sonata, the Chopin B Minor sonata, Bach's A Minor Prelude and Fugue, the G Major and B Minor Rachmaninov Preludes Opus 32 et al just to hear that concert as I read. An Equal Music by Vikram Seth  does indeed come with an available CD of the music in the book and has certainly contributed to the fact that I have now read that book three times.
I'm not placing The Concert Pianist in quite the same league but it really should have its own CD too.

Run - Ann Patchett

Here we go again, Brilliant Book Wins Orange Prize, Devon Bookaholic Misses it Completely.
To this day I can't imagine how I have missed reading Bel Canto by Ann Patchett.
Where was I?
What was I doing in 2002 ?
I've just turned the final page in Ann Patchett's latest novel, Run published by Bloomsbury, and will be quickly seeking out Bel Canto and four other novels as well, treats in store I hope.
Run is set in snowy Boston and as widower and ex-Mayor Bernard Doidge and his adopted sons Tip and Teddy leave a political rally and walk out into a blizzard, Tip's life is saved when an apparent stranger pushes him out of the path of an oncoming car and falls under the wheels herself. Tennessee Moser is seriously injured but her young daughter Kenya mysteriously seems to know all there is to know about Family Doidge and Tip and Teddy in particular.
I've given the barest bones of plot and even if you think you've guessed a bit from that, think again, Ann Patchett makes it very tricky to second-guess.
What happens next and ever thereafter kept me riveted to the pages of this book as Ann Patchett reveals gentle plot twists and turns that make up the lives of these families and one revelation that I definitely didn't see coming. When it happens Ann Patchett draws you into the most amazing few pages of reading as the truth slowly dawns, incomparable writing of the highest quality.
There's something confident and warm about Run, as Ann Patchett explores so much around her very simple title. Just about every character beautifully and carefully drawn, is knowingly or unknowingly on the run from some event or occurence in their lives with the young Kenya doing the opposite and running towards her ultimate goal. Often those events are merely touched on very briefly, glanced at a tangent and then left alone and that suggests to me the skill of a writer who has the confidence to leave it at that and let me decide on the hidden impact for myself.
There are several moments of undeniable sadness too, but Ann Patchett refuses to dwell on those either, I knew they'd happened and in a way that's all I needed to know. From the blurb

'...a moving story about overlapping lives, our fragile hopes and fears for our children, and the lengths to which we'll go to protect our families.'

I often take issue with blurbs, except I'm taking issue slightly less now that several extracts from this blog are being used on forthcoming titles. I'm now acutely aware that you can extract words from a sentence and make it mean something else entirely but when Penelope Lively says of Bel Canto

'...is a tour de force. Gripping and absorbing...I couldn't stop reading.'

Then I know I have to read it soon.

Venture within for free copies of Mrs Darcy's Dilemma

Is there no end to the bounty?
Well I'm trying now to make sure you all share in it and in celebration of dovegreyreader finally reading Emma by Jane Austen, and the forthcoming publication of Mrs Darcy's Dilemma by Diana Birchall (you can place those in your own order of importance) I have very extremely exciting news so you'd better sit down.
Sourcebooks in the U.S. have very kindly taken me up on my suggestion of some free copies of Mrs Darcy's Dilemma for readers of dovegreyreader scribbles and will send a copy direct to five lucky winners. Don't fret if you've already won something on here recently, enter away, all's fair in sense and sensibility give or take a bit of pride and prejudice.
For this one occasion only, and just this once, Rocky has agreed to assume the mantle and be called Mr Darcy for the purposes of the draw and will make his selection when he deems it appropriate. I think you'll agree there's a certain likeness in the bearing, the handsome features and noble mien, his quadrille is second to none and of course his manners are on the whole impeccable. I feel Jane would have approved.
So names in comments if you'd like Mr Darcy to choose YOU and may the mirth and merriment commence.

Neither barometer nor cat doth lie...

Indeed we don't think the needle has ever been to this bit of the dial before and suspect it's like this across the UK right now.
We're used to bearing the brunt of the south-westerly breezes  in our little hilltop home but this storm has been of quite a magnitude and noisy beyond anything we can remember. The wind shoots down the Aga flue and reverberates around the kitchen and upstairs it's like trying to sleep in a cauldron.
Eventually we resorted to hot chocolate and battenburg cake at 2.30 this morning, wondering if the roof would hold, would the dogs be whisked off Toto-like to Oz complete with kennels attached?
By this morning just ten foot off the top of a tree that needed lopping anyway, but by this evening the shed is starting to disappear bit by bit.
If anyone finds a door it's ours and the shed roof is also heading abroad in gust-sized pieces.
The cats meanwhile are exhibiting behaviour as peculiar as the barometer. I don't ever recall one sitting at my elbow on the desk before, ever.

Anil's Ghost - Michael Ondaatje

There is no question this was a snail's pace book for me and for the benefit of John Self sitting over in his Asylum who I know finds this mildly eccentric (if not completely batty) , I can tell you with confidence that the last time I picked up and read a book by Michael Ondaatje was 1997 and, along with the rest of the nation, it was of course The English Patient.
In that year I also read amongst others, The Magus by John Fowles, Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt, Victorian Ways of Death by Pat Jarrard, The Crow Road by Iain Banks, Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood and quite a few Robert Goddard's. How I arrived at those choices I have no idea but I suspect reading was media-led or study-induced and I know I was forced to read The Magus for a book group.
I do remember that as I read The English Patient one thought turned itself over and over in my head, thank goodness I've seen the film or I might not have a clue what's going on here. As it was the book and the film were slightly at odds, but I gathered the gist and the book made a huge impact, consolidated as it was by the helpful vision of all that sand and Ralph Fiennes as Count Laszlo clutching his battered little copy of Herodotus, but everafter I have to confess to studiously avoiding all things Ondaatje pending a film of the book to watch first.
But I have Divisadero sitting here waiting and the online list has chosen Anil's Ghost as the next read, so feeling thirteen years on that perhaps I was a bit more grown-up, I'd risk another bash at Ondaatje and without the scaffolding of a film to bolster my confidence.
Anil's Ghost gets rave reviews in the blurb

'This is why I read, this is why literature matters, this, in short, is IT!..By the closing pages Anil's Ghost has come as close to a holy book as a novel ever should.'

waxes anon in The Independent. For some reason I still wasn't hopeful but it took a mere ten pages to convince me that here was indeed 'a truly wondrous book' unfolding.

Anil Tissera returns to her native Sri Lanka, to assist in her role as a forensic anthropologist in investigating the organized murder campaigns that are sweeping the island. As if seeing her country anew 'with a long-distance gaze' Anil is paired up with the enigmatic archaeologist Sarath Diyasena, selected by the government for the investigation.

'The streets were still streets, the citizens remained citizens. They shopped, changed jobs, laughed. Yet the darkest Greek tragedies were innocent compared with what was happening here. Heads on stakes. Skeletons dug out of a cocoa pit in Matale. At university Anil had translated lines from Archilocus - In the hospitality of war we left them their dead to remember us by. But here there was no such gesture to the families of the dead, not even the information of who the enemy was.'

and all this by page three.
It was another ninety pages and several hours later before I surfaced thinking to myself how relieved I was that I hadn't got any filmic visions in my mind because for this book they were completely unnecessary.
In a book where 'the past was always useful' and 'secrets turn powerless in the open air' the bones gradually yield their secrets of life and death and I frantically had to e mail news of Anil's Ghost to my quilting friend Dr Ann. Dr Ann is an osteoarchaeologist who will be reading this with a very tutored and book-loving literary eye combined. I can't wait to talk to her about this book the next time we thread our needles.
There is tragedy and heartbreak in Anil's Ghost all handled in a very undramatic way, so undramatic that you often have to read twice maybe three times to take in the implications of what has happened. A hundred blog posts could not elucidate the nuances of this book effectively, but one repeated image stuck in my mind.
As Anil discovers so much more about her country and herself she frequently walks to a nearby well and sluices herself over and again with cold clear water from deep below ground, it's almost a ritual cleansing which seemed to me of huge significance, a washing away of the old into a pure new thinking, a baptism into a new understanding.
In many ways this epitomises Michael Ondaatje's writing because I feel likewise that I have emerged blinking into a whole new genre of spectacular and matchless writing, an understanding of what it is to read a novel that

'satisfies one of the most exalted purposes of fiction: to illuminate the human condition through pity and terror...no less than a geography of the soul...faith in a humanity that flourishes...ultimately a hopeful fable of our times.'

All this and much more that I suspect subsequent readings will reveal for a long time to come, Michael Ondaatje's moment has finally arrived here.

Sunday Salon - Annie Dillard

Having clearly been asleep under a stone for the last half century and a bit I was none the wiser about who Annie Dillard was until a beautiful little hardback copy of The Maytrees arrived from Hesperus last year.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author it declared, loud and clear, in that case better read thinks I.
I have started and stopped The Maytrees three times now and, despite the accolades, I have just not been able to get into this book properly. I'm convinced that this is a great, bordering on brilliant book from what I've read elsewhere and I've picked it up at the wrong moment or not read enough in one sitting to get a feel for the whole. I've done this countless times with Gilead by Marilynne Robinson and I haven't given up on that yet either.
But back to The Maytrees and I'm definitely stuck outside the window looking in at a great party going on in there,

'an exquisite book...a shimmering meditation on the ebb and flow of love...Annie Dillard is a writer of unusual range, generosity and ambition...bracingly intelligent, lovely and humane.'

Beyond this there is stellar praise for Annie Dillard whichever way I turn on Google.
Years ago I might just have dismissed  as 'not my bag' and moved on to the next book, but I rarely do that these days especially when I source the pedigree and the path that a writer has taken and Annie Dillard's life seems particularly fascinating and her writing extensive.
This is a book I absolutely don't want to be defeated by and I have come to the conclusion that I need to go back to the beginning with Annie Dillard. I want to try and properly grasp and fall into step with her prose style, so I bought a triple decker Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, An American Childhood and The Writing Life and so today, fellow salon visitors, I have been mostly Dillarding.
I knew I was right not to surrender and now I'm very hopeful of progress even if it is at snail's pace.
Does this happen to anyone else ?
Is there an author you are really glad you persevered with?

Sunday Salon - Book Classification

I'm embracing a neat new book reading classification for the blog at the moment based on some inspirational little postcards I found on my trip to Cowslip Workshops a while back.
Just sometimes, very occasionally, you find something new in the world of textiles that speaks to you and I spent an age perusing a book by picture-maker Janet Bolton. who has exhibited widely and will also be at The Country Living Spring Fair in London this week
At first glance these pictures seem a bit naive, slapdash, even a bit, well basic. Except look closely and see just how clever they are in their seeming simplicity. So often for us first-generation rotary cutters patchwork has become a precise, measured, symmetrical and very formal art. One millimetre out and we've thrown the whole project into disarray and we despair. When corners don't quite meet and triangles refuse to align we flip and fret over our mistakes.
Well actually I don't because perfectionism is not a word that sits comfortably with my craft efforts.
But there seems to be something incredibly freeing about Janet's pictures and I have fallen in love with them, nor do I think I could easily re-create them. Janet does workshops over at Cowslip and I shall get there one day because I should imagine they are huge fun.
Having splashed out on lunch and fabric I decided the book was pushing it so I settled for a set of picture postcards of Janet's work. Once I got home and started looking more closely however  I realised that several pictures related directly to how I read a book or how a book affects me and no doubt the book will be mine next visit. I love to make connections between two intrinsic sides of what is basically 'me' like this and I'm not even going to tell you the answers because I think, now I've set the scene, you will spot the reading connections to these pictures with ease.
More on today's reading later which I think is likely to be ...well we'll see.
I'm also very grateful to Janet who has given permission for me to use her pictures here and stitch some whacky off-the-wall dgr thinking to them in the process.

The Tinker on Tour

I thought I'd give you an update on The Tinker's (father of dgr) progress since becoming an internationally acclaimed author on the publication of his little memoir Bugle Boy, life as a fourteen year old in the Royal Marines at the outbreak of World War Two, with it's lovely foreword from The Duke of Edinburgh.That's The Tinker on the cover, the little one on the left of these three.
Never one to sit idly thumb-twiddling he's been quite busy on other projects through the winter. As many of you may recall he does have a huge talent for tapestry work and was asked to produce a church kneeler in memory of a deceased comrade which he has been working on with a great precision and the tiniest of stitches in recent months. It's now completed and is indeed a beautiful memorial to a good friend, almost too good for knees and he's also got through stacks of audio books while he's been stitching.
Bugle Boy seems to have been selling well and The Tinker himself is never without a copy upon his person for anyone who enquires where they may purchase one. The lady behind the chemist's counter presented hers with a flourish for him to sign the other day. Vulgar though it may be deemed to discuss money, he was delighted with his first ever royalty payment at the age of nearly eighty-four, but that aside he has received some wonderfully kind and very flattering communications from all manner of people in high places. Being the humble chap that he genuinely is, this has all been quite a surprise for him and he is treasuring all the kind words.
Coming up, two exciting little ventures.
Anyone who has read the book may recall the story in which he recounts his first and only charge of mutiny at the age of fourteen for refusing to clean the ship's bell. The re-cleaning was ordered by the Captain five minutes after poor little Tinker had just polished it to within an inch of its life whilst the ship was anchored in the middle of a very murky misty Scapa Flow. The Tinker was already smartly dressed in his best uniform for Sunday service on board HMS Iron Duke ready to blow all his bugle calls. Punishment was either a public flogging (yes,seriously) or loss of pay and extra duties. He's now thinking he should have opted for the flogging and he could probably now be claiming some compensation.
Well to our complete surprise that very same bell is still in existence.The ship was eventually sent for scrap but the bell is lovingly preserved in Winchester Cathedral and he has been invited back to give it a bit of a spit and a polish in fond memory of that day. Truthfully it was the source of so much grief I think he'd rather see it melted down but he's looking forward to the day very much indeed and I of course will give him instructions to go and pay homage at Jane Austen's resting place while he's there.
Then he is also off to a sort of Guest of Honour Day at Eastney Barracks in Portsmouth, for a guided tour and a 'see how we do it now' presentation. Eastney of course where he pitched up for duty as a wee nipper back in May 1939 and where he carried out his first order after the declaration of war on Sunday September 3rd 1939.
If you've read the book you'll know what that was, those poor cats again.
So again, many thanks to all visitors here who have bought the book, read it, written about it, written to him about it and if you haven't read it yet, well it's spreading around the libraries, will be going into Large Print and of course is still available to buy.

Mrs Darcy's Dilemma

There has been a flurry of interest around the blogs this week in Diana Birchall's sequel to Pride and Prejudice, Mrs Darcy's Dilemma, originally written in 1994 I think, so I hope this post won't tip you over into a bout of hyperdarcyitis, that would be vexing indeed. Harriet Devine has contributed her thoughts to the round of  reviews of Diana's book and Diana herself is blushing away madly in California because here's the first point Harriet makes,

'Reports of Jane Austen's death must have been greatly exaggerated -- she is obviously alive and well and living in California. And at last she has decided to publish her long-awaited sequel to Pride and Prejudice.'

Let's cut to the chase, no time to mess about, because Diana and I have had some hilarious e mail conversations this week.
I mean is nothing sacred?
An American writer has had the audacity to take a revered chunk of our finest English literary heritage and plump up a sequel.
And why not I hear you rightly cry?
But how very dare she will cry others.
I've been doing some background reading on the unholy tug-of-war that seems to have raged down the years between the Janeites claiming Jane Austen for popular culture and the academic literary corps hanging onto her for grim death and their own purposes. As Claudia L. Johnson elaborates in her excellent essay Austen Cults and Cultures in The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen , ' the process by which academic critics deprecate Austenian admirers outside the academy'.
It's all terrifying but when you've had cause to read or study Pride and Prejudice in whatever guise, you do at least have a feel for the basics, the language, appropriate literary devices, the tone, what feels right, what sounds so completely out of place as to be ludicrous and many sequels that I've read have fallen into all the traps. To my admittedly lowly knowledge Diana doesn't fall into any of them and Mrs Darcy's Dilemma was a complete, very unexpected and surprising reading treat.
It's twenty-five years on, the Darcys and their three children are happily settled at Pemberley but the social demographics around them are shifting, Victoria is about to accede to the throne and life as Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam knew it is on the cusp of huge change.I don't want to give away a single thread of the plot because finding out exactly what hand life has dealt to the Bennet family and exactly which paths the children take in life is part of the joy of reading this book, quite a few little surprises in store.
There is so much to admire in the way that Diana handles all this that it's difficult to know what to flag up , but I particularly liked the way that she cleverly identified all those character traits we associate with the young Elizabeth and Mr Darcy and then has taken into account maturity and developed them further. Then very ingeniously all those traits are genetically merged and divided out amongst the DNA of the offspring. I leave to your imagination what to expect of one of Lydia's children and there are a few surprises amongst the Darcy brood too. Nor will I divulge who has to face up to the inevitable audience with Lady Catherine de Burgh, suffice to say Diana doesn't do the obvious.
Irony was of course Jane Austen's speciality and Diana doesn't miss a trick here, she has that mischievous and witty way with words, measured and accurate when it must have been so tempting to go completely overboard in twentieth century style.
Mr Bennett's brief death bed utterance absolutely priceless (sorry that might be a spoiler, Mr Bennett dies, but give him his due he must be getting on)
So what purpose can a sequel like this serve?
Well,I suspect this will be different for every reader but for me, as well as sating that incurable curiosity of the 'what happens next' variety I am now living proof that well-written books like this can bring reluctant or ambivalent Jane Austen readers back into the fold.
These books and their power to do so should not be dismissed out of hand.
The purists can and indeed may choose to leave this book to one side and that's absolutely their choice. However then there's the likes of me who admire but don't love, or what about those who may often feel themselves a bit excluded from the party? Nose pressed to the glass, gazing in through the brightly lit windows at everyone else dancing the quadrille and wondering what's so good about it?
Well we may all suddenly find ourselves hooked back into Jane Austen by default after reading Mrs Darcy's Dilemma.
Let me confess.No amount of cajoling by those who rate Emma highly has ever induced me to read it.
There I've said it
My name's dovegreyreader I'm fifty four (honestly) and I've never read Emma.
But this week I have picked it up. It's a bit of a moment indeed, and I am reading eagerly with refreshing new eyes for dialogue and all those clever little things that Jane Austen did which it's so easy to miss. There, perhaps I do have the sense and sensibility gene after all.
I have Diana Birchall to thank , so I think we should award her Honorary British Citizenship for at least salvaging the precarious reading reputation of dgr scribbles, let alone writing a truly worthy Austen sequel...if she wants it that is?

Peninsular Arts - The SP comes to Plymouth

Happy World Book Day everyone!
I'm not venturing far at the moment having been signed off work for a couple of weeks to recover from my virus + iatrogenic moment, but as reward for good behaviour I was allowed out to the last of The Great Writers Series at Peninsular Arts yesterday evening on the condition that I rested up beforehand.
I need no encouragement on that score and stayed in bed surrounded by plumped up pillows to the tune of one breakfast, two cups of tea, all of Simon Bates programme on Classic FM as I read eighty-eight very exciting pages of Sophie Hannah's latest book The Point of Rescue, and another fifty of Henning Mankell's Faceless Killers , a sift through emails and I cleared up here on the blog after that raucous birthday party.
I was delighted not to miss out on Professor Stanley Wells (now known the world over as The SP from Susan Hill's blog )speaking on Is it True What They Say About Shakespeare published by Long Barn Books.
I had an odd senior moment in the truest sense as I collected my reserved ticket though.
I proferred the requisite £5 and the lady behind the desk gave me £2 back.
Surely it's £5 I said...no £3 she assured me gently and pressed the £2 back in my hand with a kindly glance.
As I sat down I looked at the ticket and to my complete horror I noticed in brackets after the £5 (Over 60's - £3). I mean I know I haven't been well...but was I really looking that six years older all of a sudden?
Obviously yes, and the rest is the easy answer to that.
Needless to say this drew hysterical laughter from fellow Endsleigh Salon friends minor acquaintances already seated, and much worse from Bookhound when I got home.
But up leapt a very sprightly Professor Wells in a very natty tie I must add, and if I said he had us rolling in the aisles that would have been true if we hadn't been governed by university lecture theatre decorum and rules of conduct.
This talk definitely the most entertaining of the series from, let's be honest, the world's leading authority on Shakespeare. Stanley has a way of reading Shakespeare that had us entranced, I think he's probably a bit dangerous with those sonnets, we were completely and utterly transfixed. Fools not suffered gladly, myths about the Bard dispensed with much scholarly hilarity, various sensational news stories dissected and disproved and all littered with fascinating anecdotes and an encore in the shape of a Woody Allen piece on Shakespeare that had us in tears.
I'll need to rest up for a week now to recover, might see if I can blag a few free rides on a bus or two, but if Professor Stanley Wells is speaking at a venue near you, don't miss him.
I was able to report back to Mrs Wells that the boy done good and Plymouth loved him.

Anna Akhmatova

I had no idea until my daily Bloomsbury Day in Literary History e mail arrived in my inbox, that today was the anniversary of the death of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Requiem would rate in my top ten poetry choices if ever required, some previous thoughts on Anna Akhmatova here.
Here's a transcript of that e mail and suddenly perhaps it adds a yet another perspective to my choice of book today  

Anna Akhmatova dies 1966 in Leningrad

Born in 1889, Akhmatova was a founder member of the Acmeist movement in Russia with her husband, the poet Gumilev, and Osip Mandelstam. Gumilev was executed in 1921 on a charge of anti-Soviet activity, and the years of terror which followed under Stalin led to the banning of Akhmatova's work in 1925 and to what became known as her 'years of silence'. Although unable to publish, Akhmatova was writing what would become her major works: the cycle Requiem for Stalin's victims and Poem Without a Hero, started after Mandelstam's death in 1938 and worked upon for twenty years.
Her other close contemporary Marina Tsvetayeva committed suicide in 1941.
Akmatova ensured her own survival, and that of her work during these years, by committing her poems to memory and writing nothing down. Respect for the Word was a Acmeist principle and Akhmatova is seen as a true keeper of the Word:

'we will preserve you our Russian Language,
the great Russian word.
Pure and free we will uphold you
and hand you on to our children's children,
and save you from captivity
forever!'

(from 'Courage').

Child 44 - Tom Rob Smith

I've been trying to pin down yet again how I cope with violence in a novel and this time it's proving tricky.
We've been through it on here before.Once you've worked in the A&E department of a London, or any hospital you have  a strong stomach and can cope with most things.Then a lifetime working in child protection and you build up more essential filters, people hurt and abuse children and I have to sit in the same room as them, talk to them, deal with it.
But I suspect it's that vocational, nursey, healing thing that does me no favours and has me in a terrible quandary when actually reading about torture.
It's the intent, the perceived reasons, the outcomes and the actuality, it near kills me.
I absolutely can't cope with it on the page or on the screen but Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith did come with a warning. I had politely refused an offer of the book from the publishers in the first instance on the basis that I physically can't read torture.Then they assured me it was only a brief bit of torture and the rest of the book was far too good to miss because of it, so I relented.
I mean I pride myself on tackling most books on here right?
So the book arrived, a signed copy, ugh, speech in italics, what's that all about, and I quickly shelved it out of sight.
Then I also discover there is a massive PR campaign backing this book, big wads of cash will place it everywhere and there has been a rare old fight to get hands on it, now I'm even more of a reluctant reader given all the fuss.
Do these books ever live up to the hype?
Not often.
Do I want to be part of that?
Not really.
Then Cornflower, that most genteel and delightfully insightful of bloggers, read it and had obviously coped, was dashing back to pick it up again and I thought in that case perhaps I'd just take a quick look.
What a dilemma. I hate to tell you but the hype is 100% justified and Child 44 is an unbearably brilliant read, but I don't think I can let any scruples around high profile bankrolled marketing endeavours stand in the way of bringing news of a great book. A young writer has written a very good first novel indeed and you'd better just decide to discover that for yourselves if you want to or leave it. I also can't bear to add to the subliminal trolley temptation at the checkout at Sainsbury's, so be prepared because that's where you will see this book perched this week.
Reserve it at the library, quick.
Ministry Security Officer Leo Demidov lives and breathes the communist manual to the point where he will even investigate his own wife. When a series of gruesome child murders are exposed, along with the inadequacies of a political system that is inacapable of even acknowledging the existence of crime, Leo has to make some tough decisions 'out of the rubble of his moral certainties'.
Some are of course made for him and he and Raisa find themselves deported to the Urals as Leo struggles to reconcile the harsh reality of a lifetime spent imposing the will of the regime alongside Raisa's observation that 'he never did anything without believing in it.' Now Leo really does have to decide just what he believes in.
The machinery of fear and terror in Stalinist Russia is cranked up to full throttle, trust no one, check those you do trust and it infiltrates every pore of this book.

'To stand up for someone was to stitch your fate into the lining of theirs.'

Italic speech apart you can't rest easy as you read because you are looking over everyone's shoulder for them, you even worry about the cats.
In fact you especially worry about the cats.
Tom Rob Smith's writing is exceptional; pacey plotting and narrative are breathtakingly fast, there is little time to sit back and take in the scenery here and I marvelled constantly at the filmic qualities of a book that I think has already been optioned.
Mel Gibson wanted it, Ridley Scott got it.
With all the deceit and counter-deceit, the plot twists and turns with alacrity but there was an incredible moment of sudden dawning realisation for this reader about two thirds of the way through the book. So stunned was I that after a bit of hyperventilating and a bit of back-tracking I was now desperate to see how this was all going to play out.
Eventually I reached the final hundred pages late one evening and mad-keen though I was to finish the book, I knew I wouldn't sleep a wink once I had. This needed to be early morning book finishing with a whole day to assimilate events. I picked up Diana Birchall's Mrs Darcy's Dilemma and went to Pemberley instead. Except I've started this Stalin Goes to Pemberley / Jane in the Gulags book in my head and I kept thinking what they'd make of it all. Most vexing.
So be reassurred gentle readers, if you are as averse to torture as I am, read pages 86-94 with your eyes shut, perhaps pages 369-370 too, just to be on the safe side, but don't miss out on a book as good as this just because of those pages or because of the massive hype or the italics. Rest assured I shall be first in the queue for the film...with a bucket of popcorn to sink my head into at the appropriate pages 86-94 / 369-370 moments.

Time to go Home...

Well, that's it, the party's over but what a great celebration we've all had, thank you to everyone for stopping by and for all your good wishes.Now we will have to scrape the jelly off the ceiling and get the mess cleared up before normal service is resumed tomorrow.
I'm pooped after such an exciting day, we've had the draw and the following ten lucky inner children can expect one of these super fabulous books in the post once they e mail me their addresses.
Simon T
Maggie May
Holly
Angela Young
Peta
Sheila -triple blessings
Karin
Kirsty
Carolyn
Anne Brooke
Perhaps get a grown-up to help with the email and could you ask them to put PARTYBAG in the subject line or I'll get in a terrible muddle. Anything remotely outside these shores will be sent surface mail and so will be a big surprise in about six weeks time. Hilary at the village post office will be delighted to test out her geography again and will probably give me a Malteser.

Afternoon nap

Well what an exciting morning of blog-birthday frivoling all us inner children have had.
But I think it's time for a little afternoon rest before the excitement of the games, the birthday tea and the prize draw so we are all going to settle down for Watch With Mother.
Everyone go and get their blankies and teddies...no Sally, mummy will be coming to collect you early if you do that again, Simon's only little.
I know it's Tuesday and that means Andy Pandy but as it's my party I get to choose and so we're going to pretend it's Friday and watch

Then as Anne has asked so nicely we're all going to do dot-to-dot pictures.

Keep those names coming in comments for the ten prize draw books which will most certainly connect you to your little inner cantankerous, rebellious, subversive self in the nicest possible way.
More later...now Sheila, dry those eyes, we did say that would happen if you let go of the balloon in the garden, didn't we?
S-a-l-l-y...I'm not going to tell you again, now I'm going to count to three...one...two...

Happy Birthday to...

....me again, yes two birthdays a year now just like the Queen.
Don't expect anything remotely serious on here today because I'm sick with excitement at being TWO YEARS OLD !
Yes today is dgr scribbles' second birthday and I was awake early and tuning into my inner child. I've already had a big helping of chocolate hedgehog button cake and drunk lots of fizzy and will have a big tantrum later because it's all too much and I'll probably be sick as well.
No plans to wax lyrical about how many blog posts two years old equals, (oh alright then 1212) or how many comments (oh if you insist 6120) or how much I love you all, or how grateful I am to you all for pitching up to read day in day out, because you must all be sick to death of hearing all that. Please accept that it is all a daily blessing to us all chez dgr scribbles and one that is never ever taken for granted. I love to get all your e mails off-blog as well as comments on, and I do reply eventually.
I look back and am grateful for the day I decided to take the plunge and see if there was anyone out there.
But what on earth can we do all day?
Well, wherever you are you absolutely must have a little frivol because don't you think life just gets too serious sometimes?
Just try not to end up on the naughty stair.
And I think we should have also have a blogparty so please ask a grown-up if you can come and then we'll play musical blog chairs and musical statues and probably do a round of pass the parcel and at the end of all that we'll have jelly and ice cream, and then we'll blow out the candles and if there's any cake left you can all take some home wrapped in a serviette.
But no party complete without party bags and I have ten fantastically super special fabulous surprise books to give away which I've bought out of my pocket money especially for all you inner children out there.
So if you fancy having a frivol and being two years old again, names in comments and we'll have a good old fashioned prize draw if it turns out that more than ten people in the whole world can prove they are as young as me.
Meanwhile here's some colouring for you to do and perhaps check with a grown-up that it's OK to use wax crayons on the computer screen?

The Rowing Lesson - Anne Landsman

It's strange if not unusual to read a book where you never actually meet the main character face-to-face as it were. I'm trying to think of others and suddenly I can't because my mind is just brimming with thoughts on this book, I can hardly think beyond it right now, but I expect all of you will.
My only perspective on Dr Harold Klein was mediated through the eyes of his daughter Betsy and recounted as Harold lies dying in end-stage renal failure after routine surgery to repair a broken arm.Things seem to have gone horribly wrong as Harold submits to the ministrations of his medical colleagues.
The Rowing Lesson by Anne Landsman is one of those bench-mark books, a dazzlingly elegiac read and the current trend for half-of-something on the cover lives on, this time half a boat rather than half a person.
It's a deft and clever exploration of a life lived through the eyes of one who actually wasn't around for a great deal of it. Betsy, newly pregnant, has made the trip from New York to Cape Town to sit with her comatose father in his final days and imagines his life right back to his childhood in a Jewish shop-keeping family, living amongst the white Afrikaaner population in South Africa.
In 1939 Harold enters medical training at the Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, eventually marries radiographer Stella and then, on the advice of his father-in-law becomes a GP.
This will hearten all the GP's out there; urging Harold in a letter to travel to England his father-in-law suggests,

'I find that the General Practitioner or what we used to call the "family doctor" who qualify in South Africa is found wanting. Very few doctors are born "General Practitioners," the rest grope blindly in the dark, in spite of the fact that some of them possess superior knowledge and are far above the average. In England, on the other hand this handicap or drawback is not so prominent. The average English General Practitioner possesses polish, manner and poise, the English doctor's bedside manner is well known and appreciated...'

I had to second guess whether Harold took that advice and eventually suspected not as he settled down to life in rural South Africa.
Loved by all as Doctor God it is left to Betsy to reveal the reality behind the facade and what emerges is a doctor who cares for his patients with a visceral passion but one who lacks many of those sensibilities that would make a likeable man of him too. I've worked with scores of GPs down the years and patients often used to tell me that they divided them into two varieties, go to Doctor A if you want someone to be nice to you, go to Doctor B if you actually want to know what's wrong with you.
Fortunately, and perhaps thanks in part to another Harold, Doctor S, (Shipman for those who may be unaware) I think we now have a healthy number of Doctor A+B = C.
Betsy portrays her father as a man of power, controlling, brash and uncompromising, frequently an embarrassment, a man with a huge and self-aggrandizing personality. One of those people we probably all know, give them a space, no matter how large and they will fill it. But at those moments throughout the book when Betsy removes Harold from his familiar territory, he is the proverbial fish out of water, and you suspect a personality largely unsustainable without its props.
Meeting Stella's father for the first time a fine example

'...the Old Man's gaze scraping you like sandpaper.Are you good enough? Are you big enough? Your name and college, sir. This warden of all wardens has cracked the shell of this year's confidence, shaking the fragile mannikin of selfhood that you've patched together on the eve of becoming a doctor.'

Betsy traces Harold's life back to his childhood, recounting it all as an intimate conversation with her father and Anne Landsman cleverly draws out all those moments that may have made him into the man he is as she builds up a portrait for the reader of a character it is truly difficult to love.Yet of course Betsy does love him but it's a love tempered with misgivings and a great deal of uncertainty.
Anne Landsman pushes the boundaries of narrative that little bit further, nothing tired or weary about this writing, it is vibrant and involving and, at those rare moments when I could drag myself out and step back from it, I marvelled at her style as I read. The imagery of Betsy's first rowing lesson at Ebb 'n Flow with her father beautifully played out as she in turn metaphorically rows this most complex and difficult of men out on his soul's final journey.
More information on Anne Landsman and a fascinating article in this month's Red magazine which has given me a whole new perspective on an amazing book.
In my humble opinion this one deserves to win prizes...someone, somewhere, please.

Sunday Salon - Pemberley and The Gulags

So my Mothering Sunday reading time today has been shared equally as follows, Pemberley - Moscow - Pemberley - The Urals - Pemberley. I have flitted between the savagery of Stalinist, and now post-Stalinist Russia in the gripping and terrifying Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith and the delicate and occasionally indelicate world of  Mrs Darcy's Dilemma from Diana Birchall.
Could the contrast be greater, what on earth would Jane have made of the Gulags?
What would Stalin have got up to at Pemberley?
Two books waiting to be written there I think.
It was Karen over at Cornflower who persuaded me to pick up Child 44 and I have to agree with her, it is compelling, shout at the page stuff and the only viable reason to put it down is go and toast my toes back to life by the warmth of the fires Chez Darcy.
Things are hotting up on all sides, Leo Demidov is suspicious of everything that moves, banished and on the trail of a grizzly murderer, whilst Fitzwilliam Darcy Junior has repeated a history of sorts and taken himself off slightly in flagrante with an available cousin and both are in for a very rough ride as far as I can tell.
Strangely two books poles apart are drawing me in with equal degrees of reading anticipation and I can hardly manage to put one down to pick the other one up, let alone put them both down to come and tell you so.
But now I'm deserting all books to go and watch Wife Swap on Channel 4 because this week it's a local family, the wife of a falconer with six children is about to swap places with a glamour model.

Sunday Salon - Mothering Sunday reading

Mothering Sunday, a day of flower posies and nice cards and good wishes from mine offspring, so what on earth am I doing engrossing myself in Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith and Stalinist Russia at its most disturbing, alternating with my first Henning Mankell, Faceless Killers and a very gory murder in rural Sweden?
This should be a day to read sweet and lovely books so the fortuitous Fedex arrival of Diana Birchall's Mrs Darcy's Dilemma from the US has saved the day.
I'm not a fully signed up member of the Jane Austen fan club and have fessed up frequently in the past. An admirer but not a devotee so sending me a sequel is a bit of a risk, except no risk because I'm loving it. This is a blessing because I have known Diana, a California-based story analyst at Warner Bros Studios, for a couple of years via various online reading groups, however I think I know her well enough to have been able to say privately, ' not my sort of thing Diana' and she'd have been fine about it.
Life has moved on for the Darcys, Mr never did catch pneumonia from that foolish escapade in the lake and he and Elizabeth, now happily married for many years, have three children on the cusp of adulthood, daughter Jane and sons Fitzwilliam and Henry. The arrival of poverty-stricken Aunt Lydia's two daughters is just livening Pemberley up a treat and I can't wait to get back to the book.
Diana has a mischievous way with her writing, which doesn't surprise me one bit, and is sliding in some new twentieth century meanings looked on with all innocence in the nineteenth century, one about dogs has had me in complete hysterics.
But didn't Jane herself have a little of this witty and unexpected way with words?
So it's a pleasure to report that it absolutely is my sort of thing and I suspect it may even tempt me back to the Chawton Wonder with renewed enthusiasm. I can't really comment on the entire Austen oeuvre because, no, I still haven't read them all. It is a bit like pulling teeth to sit me down with one and get me to the other end, I think I lack the right gene, the sense and sensibility chromosome.
That probably gives you all an attack of the vapours but Diana may just have supplied the right ingredient so fear not, Chawton adulation may happen yet.

The Reader

Good morning Liverpool and let me tell you I'm agog with anticipation over the latest edition of The Reader Magazine published by the English Department of the University of Liverpool and my copy is in the post.
Number 29 harbours some amazing talent and then me.
There's Mark Rylance the Shakesperean actor, Gabriel Josipovici, Howard Jacobson, Jane Davis, Joanna Trollope, lots about Joseph Conrad ...gasp A.S.Byatt and loads more besides...and then, well then on page ninety and lurking between Hayes and Jacobson in the List of Contributors there seems to be me.
I had great fun writing a piece on my passion for reading groups of all descriptions, postal, online, face-to-face, and of course the best of them all, with apologies to all the others, The Endsleigh Salon.
There was a problem with my photo which kept coming out blurry apparently and, though blurry is probably safer for the nation, Phil Davis eventually persuaded me to submit something useable. You can read Phil's editorial here and sense the excitement mounting around Liverpool as the 2008 Capital of Culture. The Reader will be hosting a Literary Festival in November which is going in my diary right now.
I'm hoping to take the blog out and about to a few literary festivals this year, the first was supposed to be Abingdon yesterday by kind invitation of Mark and Nicky at Mostly Books and sadly I was unable to go. I've had an unfortunate week of annual-leave-wrecking virus which like most viruses heads for your Achilles heel, in my case my Achilles neck, and then was knocked right off my perch by some new prescription painkillers. I have the constitution of an elf when it comes to drugs, being prescribed sufficient for an elephant was a recipe for disaster.
If anyone needs to take out a stray elephant just ask me for details.
However I think I owe it to my Liverpudlian inheritance to be there in this special year and what a great opportunity to explore all those places I grew up hearing about and was taken too but barely remember, Elswick Street where my mum was born, Matthew Arnold where she went to school, Sefton Park, the Liver Buildings. I may have been born in Devon and then grew up in London but by crikey a bit of our home was always Liverpool and the Mersey.
Sunday Salon reading later I expect.

Peninsular Arts, Dickens and a bonfire

Tripped down to Plymouth early on Wednesday afternoon for a stroll around the Barbican before the Professor Sally Ledger lecture at Peninsula Arts on Dickens and the People.
The Barbican was looking a bit winter-weary, all deserted with scaffolding and building in progress before the tourist season begins, chill wind off the sea. As we were leaving smoke wafted across the sky and Bookhound did his usual Victor Meldrew piece on inconsiderate people lighting bonfires during the day in the middle of a city.He gets most agitated about such things.
That's quite a big bonfire I said as a great plume of smoke billowed up into the sky and the sirens wailed in the distance, got nearer and police and fire engines screeched to a halt.
Of course we had to go and gawp as The Plymouth Gin Distillery belched out some very dramatic-looking smoke and you can read all about it here, but even funnier, the comments afterwards.
My camera goes everywhere with me but sadly on this occasion the battery would have been helpful too, however that was at home in the charger. Undaunted I then adopted a high risk strategy and with a flourish produced from my bag my new Sony Ericsson K800i mobile phone with David Bailey quality camera contained within.
Now mobile phones mean little to me, bit like cars, as long as it fulfills the function designated I'm happy. This phone then new to me but old to the Kayaker who had given it to me about two hours previously, which should all be enough to tell you that it would be mid-2009 before I'd mastered the on-off button never mind the camera, but needs must, this was an emergency.
Then off to Peninsular Arts and Professor Sally Ledger.
Is it me or are Professors getting younger?
Bit like doctors and policemen?
But a brilliantly informative and listener-friendly lecture on just how Dickens championed the people and mobilised such a huge audience and still does with great references to Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and Bleak House and I could have listened for hours.With the wonders of modern technology Sally Ledger was also able to click a button and show us the film clip of David Lean's Oliver asking for more, cleverly reminding us how we have become even more familiar with Dickens.
I sat there thinking how that moment of instant visual reference in itself was magic.
In the old days it would have involved a flustered teacher ordering us all to pull the blinds down, we'd make a big fuss about doing this and one or more blinds would detach or stick.Then there was palava of the reel-to-reel projector and a lot of hairpins falling out as the teacher dashed to stop the thing runnning too fast or catching the film tape as it flapped wildly and flew off the spool at the end.
None of that with Sally Ledger of course who then shared with us, on questioning, that the latest BBC adaptation of Bleak House is amongst her favourites.
Next week it's the last in the series, Shakespeare with Professor Stanley Wells.