dovegreyreader scribbles

Early signs...

'The inundation of the Spring
Enlarges every Soul -
It sweeps the - tenement - away
But leaves the Water whole -

In which the Soul at first estranged -
Seeks faintly for it's shore -
But acclimatised - pines no more
For that Peninsula.'

Emily Dickinson (No 1423)

One of my favourites and why have I only just noticed that perfectly placed apostrophe and the difference that makes to the meaning?

Just to let you know, early days but it's happening here in the Northern hemisphere because we've just been for a walk and spotted these...

Any early signs where you are?
And early signs on the reading front because you know that feeling when you realise you're reading a winner?
I am really, really, really enjoying the new biography of Emily Dickinson, Lives Like Loaded Guns, Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds by Lyndall Gordon.
I knew only the basics but Lyndall Gordon has made this into something of a page-turner, an honest and astute, gradual delineation of Emily's character which allows me some room for manouevre too. Space to indulge in some of the might-Emily-have-been-like-this-because-of-that thinking and where the biographer has to defer to the evidence-based information and ration their guesses, I can guess and surmise to my heart's content and I am.

I'm sure Virago also realised that this beautiful hardback edition would match my beloved volume of The Poetry of Emily Dickinson to perfection; same size and weight, same superb paper quality, everything about it makes me want to sing, but I think I've done enough of that this weekend.

Just to say...

I may be lying down in a darkened room for much of today, because last night was my first ever proper performance with the ladies choir I joined last September, who were singing in concert with the Loveny Male Voice Choir down in deepest Cornwall in aid of the Shelterbox appeal for Haiti. More of that eventually but I have even more exciting (for Devon) things to report.
It's been eighteen years since this little boy sat as a six year-old, transfixed by the film of Roald Dahl's Danny Champion of the World and I sat transfixed by father and son, Jeremy Irons and mini-Jeremy.
As the titles rolled, we all cheered because was that clever or was that brilliant to drug all the pheasants with aspirin and sabotage the whole thing, the good guys won and Robin (for that is what we know him as) announced that he was going to be a gamekeeper.
We were still rural town-dwellers at this time...
'But no one does that these days and besides, the gamekeepers were the baddies' we said.
'Well I'll be a good gamekeeper.'
We looked at each other and thought thanks a bunch Roald Dahl and I sent the wannabee GK to violin lessons to transform him into a Yehudi Menuhin instead.
But the dream had begun, he was already living the gospel according to the Outdoor Survival Handbook, and would soon worship at the altar of Ray Mears, the late Steve Irwin, Bush Tucker Man and anyone else who lived off their wits, nature and the land around them.
Moving to the middle of nowhere when he was ten fell right in with his plans and he was soon teaching us that the natural world needs people that truly understand what makes it tick and he was going to be one of them. He'd be out walking and watching at crack of dawn and squeamish old me has had to learn that conservation is a question of balance and animals sometimes have to die if others are to survive, and that occasionally I might trip over the evidence on the verandah.
Much of it just can't be learned from a book either so it's been a very long hard slog from those days on the year-long Gamekeeper's Course at Sparsholt College when he was sixteen, to now, and no young man could have worked harder 24/7 to achieve his dream.
Encouraged no end by his father, his mother would like to apologise for those odd moments when she may ever have doubted that he'd live that dream one day and suggested he go off and be a policeman ....you'd look lovely in navy instead of all this realtree stuff, it's like having a mobile forest sitting at the kitchen table.
So Family dovegreyreader just want to say congratulations and good luck to the Gamekeeper who starts his first full time, salaried head keeper's post tomorrow and we are all just bursting with pride.

And if you could know how nail-bitingly tense things have been here since that knock on the door four weeks ago when a local family-run estate came head-hunting through the snow ; the interview, the job offer, the contract signing, the winding up of his own business (and my hair dryer wrecked as he heated the sign-writing off his van) and so much more besides, well you'd wonder how on earth I've ever managed to pick up a book.

Kennelwatch

Honestly this is worse than children, I wish we had a kennelcam out there because I think it could all rival Springwatch. Any minute now one of them is going to whine 'He's looking at me' just like argumentative children did from the back seat of the car...remember that?
I think I might have mentioned some disruption out in the kennels with the arrival of new pupil Rusty, and how Bookhound had resolved the middle of the night howling with the judicious use of a saw.
The problem rested with Head Labrador, Barney.
Barney never really made the grade gun dog  training-wise, in those days when we didn't know that you're not supposed to throw things for them to fetch too soon and we let him chase anything that moved. But he's a fine old dog to have around and has had a kennel of his own for a while.
The big kennel shuffle involved adding Ben the aging Cocker Spaniel

to Barney's home

and Barney was having none of it.
The middle of the night howling was actually Ben sat out in the run, freezing his bits off because Barney would not let him through the door to the bed and the straw.
Things were little better the next morning when the invader was still laying seige outside the door, falling asleep sitting up, whilst kingpin was tucked up snuggly in his straw defending the kennel of his own against all-comers.
The answer was surprisingly easy but effective according to Bookhound (who is surely turning into the Gina Ford of the puppy world) this was a behavioural problem requiring deliberate and incisive action and off he marched at crack of dawn with the saw under his arm and we all held our breath...as he cut a second door into the single bed space.
Simples.

So there it is, one kennel, one run, one bed of straw, two dogs, two doors, and daft though it may sound it works. Barney established a valiant rearguard action in an effort to defend the front line, but found himself defeated by two doors and he has now surrendered. So there they are like a little Bavarian weather house of their own, as they each pop in and out of their respective doors.


We've added an optional heat lamp for them because it's gone cold again and a radio because they love Classic FM, and if they are good perhaps we'll install a microwave and a television.
Rusty meanwhile loves the very tolerant Sticks and they have settled down fine next door, this all-round settledness aided and abetted by a mid-week bribe of some juicy pig's trotters, of which Gina may not have approved.
Rusty has currently taken to grabbing his cuddly sock, jumping on top of a very tolerant and sphinx-like Sticks and he sleeps like a baby.
Rocky meanwhile is quite relieved that the alien indoors is now outside where he belongs and he can roam and rule his domain again with confidence.

Postal confessions...

It's been a back-breaking week for Jim the Postie, not least because I had ordered the books for the Not the TV Book Group, but plenty of other arrivals recently too.
Incidentally a surfeit of doves in titles and covers this week. I added The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich into my online order because I have got very behind with Louise and having loved The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse I want to keep up. Then kimbofo's choice for the Not the TV Book Group (NTTVBG from now on) The Illusionist by Jennifer Johnston also sporting a very nice dove-ish cover.
Consolation by Anna Gavalda has a little duo too.


Has anyone read Anna Gavalda?
I've been meaning to and have recently read a few short stories from I Wish Someone Were Waiting For Me Somewhere and I like. I have had Hunting and Gathering on the shelves for a few years, but Consolation the new novel has arrived and I'm interested to know more, here's a blurbxtract (that would get me dazzling points in Scrabble if only it was a word)

"Consolation, "La Consolante" (this French title is what players of boules call the consolation play-off match between the losers) was the bestselling French novel in 2008, with sales of over half a million copies and translations into thirty-two languages. Darker and more complex than "Hunting and Gathering" ("Ensemble, c'est tout"), but just as dazzling ....A 47-year-old successful architect hears about the death of a woman, whom he once loved  and his life starts to unravel. Charles seems to have everything, but turns his back on the present to go in search of her past and his childhood, falling a long way down. One day he finds himself on a Paris pavement covered in his own blood..."

More next week about French novels into English, (and it's not Les Elegants Porcupines which sadly didn't work for me) but still in France, I was sent a proof copy of How to Live  - A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts by Sarah Bakewell and I have been reading it slowly ever since, the real thing has now arrived. It's always good to see how a proof translates into a real book. I still haven't got hold of a copy of Montaigne's Essays but I will on the strength of this book's suggestion that 'readers come in search of companionship,wisdom and entertainment - and in search of themselves'. Sarah Bakewell builds her biography of this Renaissance writer around his essays and the questions he posed, and it makes me think perhaps an eventual foray into a Renaissance reading trail might be interesting because I don't know a great deal about it all. Any suggestions of good reading that would offer an accessible  overview  of the Renaissance would be very welcome.

I'm grateful to June Hutton, a Canadian author who kindly sent me a copy of her debut novel Underground. The novel follows the life of sixteen-year old Albert Fraser through the trenches of the First World war and onto the Spanish Civil war, life as a wanderer is abruptly halted when an encounter with Picasso's Guernica reveals where his life went wrong and what he must do to set it right. Since reading Dave Bolano's Guernica I do at least feel more informed about those events so I'm hoping this one will add more.
I think I am going to find The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy with their foreword by Doris Lessing utterly irresistible.

'31st July 1868
It makes me laugh to read my diary. What a lot of contradictions - as thought I were the unhappiest of women! But who could be happier? Could any marriage be more happy and harmonious than ours?'

When you discover that Mr and Mrs Tolstoy had an agreement that in the interests of honesty and openness they would read each others diaries, you realise that occasionally Mrs T has to do a bit of back-pedaling.
Russia still seems to be drumming that steady bass note here though perhaps slightly less forcefully for me than for Lesley Blanche of Journey Into the Mind's Eye fame. Incidentally praise be because Lesley has finally made it to Russia this week. I read a little each day because her enthusiasm for her cause is utterly infectious and addictive... still no samovars to be found in the charity shops here but I haven't given up hope that Bookhound will find one in the Mare & Foal Sanctuary shop for £1 any day soon.

Did anyone read Jeremy Paxman's The Victorians when it first came out?
I have the paperback edition and I'm tempted by it, but didn't I hear a rumour that he hadn't 'actually' written it himself ?
John Crace's digested read is predictably scathing

'Hang on, I can't read Jeremy Vine's writing. Look, you don't imagine I've got time to look all this stuff up in the Ladybird Book of Victorian Paintings, do you? That's what my researchers are paid to do. Ah, it says, "Here's a load of paintings. Describe them in your usual condescending way." That sounds like a good idea. Here's one by Hubert von Herkomer with some Chelsea Pensioners. And here's another by Ford Madox Brown of people hanging out in the street.'

I'm still tempted.
Being the prize-list geek that I am I had made a note of a few of the books shortlisted for the Book Critic's Book Circle award and Lark & Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips was on my list, so I was delighted when it arrived unbidden the next day. Two children raised by their aunt in West Virginia in place of their mother Lola and while their father is caught up in the chaos of the Korean War, relationships slowly unravel and it  seems truths are to be revealed. Reviews suggest this has echoes of Faulkner, Woolf, Kerouac and McCullers which sounds like an interesting combination.


Lastly this week, The Given Day by Dennis Lehane. Set in Boston (US...not the bulb fields of Lincs) in 1918, this one has had solid and glowing reviews and recounts the story of two Boston families at a time of political and social unrest 'swept up in a maelstrom of revolutionaries and anarchists, immigrants and ward bosses'. What appeals is the suggestion that this is something of a literary, historical epic by a writer best known for his skills for writing crime thrillers, so I'm hoping for a blistering page-turner with a bit of depth.
I'd love to know your thoughts, has anyone read any of these?

Flush , a biography by Virginia Woolf

How do I love thee, let me count the ways etc and having read Flush, the biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's dog in homage to Virginia Woolf's birthday on Monday, it was but a step to lay hands on a favoured book on the poetry shelf.
I'm afraid the visual bookish seduction that occurred with this volume far outweighed my acquaintance or adoration of the contents. Mrs Browning's Poetical Works languished on a local second-hand bookshop shelf for several years, just tantalisingly beyond my price limit for buying a book I loved the look and feel of.

This was the early 1980s and it was £10 but that probably did shoe a child then. No deal could be brokered and so the book sat there, regularly checked on, stroked and coveted by me, until the day the shop closed down and sold everything off for a song and triumphantly I brought Mrs Browning home.
Look at that rich deep red, slightly cracked and worn leather cover.
I'd call it maroon derived as the word is from maron the French for chestnut.
Then what about the glittering rounded gilt-edged corners, how I wish more books had rounded corners, they have a certain gentle appeal.
Then there's the old M.Macphail bookseller's sticker and the inscription, sadly the name torn off but the book presented to someone for 'good and faithful service to Church & School' by Fr. Jenkins (I think) Rector of St. Peter's Church, Galashiels in 1902. But look, you may just be able to see, he's so used to writing 1800 that's he's made a mistake so early in the new millenium.
Then there it is, To Flush My Dog, Mrs Browning's poem to dear Flushie.
Oh dear, poor Flushie, what a life Virginia Woolf has invested in him and it wasn't long before I spotted the Woolfian parallels with the mind-numbing restrictions of the rest cure as Flushie, confined to a bedroom with his mistress, is forced to repress all his natural hunting instincts and sinks regretfully into lapdog status. Compelled to accept partridge off a silver fork when doubtless he'd much rather have been out chasing it himself when it still had uncooked legs and wings I suppose.
It's heartbreaking to read and surmise that Virginia Woolf is weaving her own life's sadness into the mind of a dog, as if the world may be more empathic to the travails of a dog where it may be merely sympathetic to the travails of a woman.
I always sense a subtle difference to those expressions of feeling.
Sympathy somehow an arm's length offering which may leave the subject pitied but alone, empathy suggesting I might have somehow been enabled to walk a mile or two in their shoes (or paws) and find myself a bit nearer the truth.
It's also not long before I am forced to reflect on my own attitudes because I have to own up, whilst I have gradually come to admire her enormously, I do sometimes lose patience with all things Bloomsbury and Virginia's seemingly privileged plight whereas Flushie's really tugged at the old heart strings.
How does that work, to feel worse about the dog than the woman and thereby come to understand both?
And how perhaps Virginia Woolf imagined her own freedom from constraint as Flushie becomes Flush again, as the Brownings marry and move to Florence and set up home at Casa Guidi. The dog, once so sadly confined, is given his freedom to roam the streets of Florence, just like Virginia used to roam the streets of London...though perhaps she didn't have quite the same ...er...amorous encounters that good old Flush did or have to be unceremoniously shorn by Mr Browning when the Florentine fleas took up residence.
And quite what was Virginia suggesting as Flush, now revelling in his freedom and the much-reduced quantity of dog-focused attention from his mistress, is finally able to make a friend of a previous enemy.  It's as if Flush's true, complete and happy inner self has been allowed to flourish and how deeply did Virginia Woolf, famed for her rather waspish attitude, crave likewise for herself ?

Flush has come as a complete surprise to me, it's quite stopped me in my reading tracks this week because I really had no idea this little book was so good. Dare I suggest Flush as an excellent route into Virginia Woolf's writing if you have ever been scared off because you picked up The Waves first and wondered quite which literary land you had been washed up in.

On opinion...

I subscribe to the London Review of Books in order to try and keep the grey matter moving and to read opinion and formulate my own. It arrives on a Friday fortnightly and sometimes I have the thing worn down to its very staples within an hour, whilst at other times, if I'm truthful, little seems to grab my immediate attention other than the Personal Column which always does...

'Free on Wednesdays...On January Ist my husband informed me that he would now be spending every Wednesday with his mistress. Impossibility of disentangling our library means that separation is not an option. Writer with senior railcard, still beautiful, seeks diversions.'

An interesting piece in The Times about LRB tribulations on Monday (I wrote this on Sunday) and it seems we've all spotted that Personal.
Last Friday however I was late getting to the Personals because there were far too many diversions of my own to contend with en route to page thirty-nine. In fact it all nearly spontaneously combusted in my hands, not only for Anne Enright's piece on the Mrs Robinson affair rumbling on over in Ireland and about which I have no comment to make, but also for Michael Hofmann's review of The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig about which I think I do.
Now I have had the utmost respect for Michael Hofmann, the translator. I'm an amateur but I have read a great deal by Joseph Roth in recent years, in the hands of Hofmann he is a great writer, in the hands of others Roth sometimes seems merely  good.
In 2001, in a piece entitled A Chilly Extravagance, Michael Hofmann made clear his dismay at the popularity of W.G.Sebald, ( read about it here at Vertigo) and he has now done likewise with Stefan Zweig. Well, of course he is entitled to express his opinion and my own discomfort is not about an inability to accept negative critical opinion of an author I love either, but bludgeon me with unmitigated disdain and you've lost me.
Michael Hofmann's critical appraisal of the The World of Yesterday is fleshed out with the pejorative, he's a master of words after all and can read in the original which I cannot, and he seems to have spotted what I have failed to on the subject of  'this absolutely natural, but absolutely dreadful writer.'

'...the book of the week here, rediscovery of the century there, and indulgently reviewed more or less everywhere; this uniquely dreary clothy sprog of the electric 1880s...this professional adorer, schmoozer, inheritor and collector...'

Stefan Zweig according to Michael Hoffman 'just tastes fake, he's the Pepsi of Austrian writing.'
In certain parts, The World of Yesterday is declared 'slobbering and sanctimonious' and 'full of adulatory humbug', and, lest there be any doubt in my mind about the veracity of this, a litany of Stefan Zweig's failings, barrow-loads of them, are wheeled on to persuade me of  my foolishness.
Every last literary acquaintance of Zweig's mined for a derogatory anecdote, even Stefan's teeth are fair game, even the post-suicide photograph comes under scrutiny.
Now of course what do I know?
Michael Hofmann will forget far more than I can ever hope to know about Stefan Zweig's world (and he hearts Hofmannstahl above all others it would seem)  so I don't doubt there are kernels of truth to his opinion, but I can't believe Stefan Zweig never did a single solitary good thing ... he must at least have helped an old lady across the road or given a literary friend a leg up the ladder somewhere along the way?
I'd love to read Hofmann's opinion in a form untrammelled by his painful dislike for his subject, because perhaps I'd come away with some legitimate access to that kernel of truth, but a piece like this does me a great disservice, denies me that knowledge.
Clive James  wrote a very informative essay on Stefan Zweig and he makes a very pertinent point.

'He [Zweig] would have been horrified to find that Thomas Mann thought of him as mediocrity. It would have been one horror too much...that Mann had uttered such an opinion was the simple truth. But we should not put too sinister a construction on a snide remark. Mann was never at ease with the idea that some other German writer might sell more books than he did in the world market.'

Michael Hofmann feels there must be 'odd moments of honesty' in these expressions of dislike from Zweig's peers and wants me to believe he has found them.
Clive James elaborates further,

'The natural state of affairs between exponents of the humanities is one of tension, suspicion, rivalry, and, all too often, enmity. Only a catastrophe can bring about, among its survivors, any degree of mutual regard that Zweig dreamed of so fondly.'

Stefan Zweig didn't survive that catastrophe so we can never know, but I do know that fear does different things to different people, for a man of Stefan Zweig's disposition it was disastrous. His flight was clearly far more honed than his fight, who of us can be sure we'd act differently given the circumstances and the capability?
The message by implication of Michael Hofmann's opinion is that I am very stupid.
I have been duped and seduced into buying into the latest Zweigzeitgist, (can't you do that with German? Just keep adding bits on the end? ) this revival 'plotted' by Pushkin Press with their 'nice paper and pretty formats' and who knows, perhaps occasionally I have been, except I've read most of this latest book in the old University of Nebraska edition.
In his final paragraph Michael Hofmann utilises a form of second-person narrative thus slightly divesting himself of the ultimate responsibility for his final damning indictment, positioning his reader inside the mind of Stefan Zweig in the time leading up to his suicide and suggesting that Zweig, confronted by his own duplicity has a bit of a revelation,

'...the rottenness of your writing isn't just confined to your style, because rottenness isn't like that, and perhaps more to the point style isn't like that either - didn't someone once say ' le style c'est l'homme'? - and you admit, not before time, that you are just putrid through and through.'

It's all backfired badly here because just supposing you've written a piece about someone popular but who you heartily dislike and you desperately want to convince others of their folly, except in writing that piece you may have unwittingly revealed far more about yourself than your subject.
And what about your reader?
Far from being persuaded or inclined to reflect on their position, far from informing them or staying their hand or their imagination as they reach for another book by your subject, perhaps instead they find themselves subliminally inclined to cut off their nose to spite their face and hesitate over your books in future...it's a funny old world.

Is it just me or does this happen to you sometimes?

The Abbess of Crewe by Muriel Spark

Spark Season continues with The Abbess of Crewe, and hot on the habit of The Convent by Panos Karnezis you may recall it was all a bit too close and I was getting a bit muddled, so I started again having bought a neat little US copy of the book. I also added some more books by and about Muriel Spark to the order.
Muriel Spark, Brian Cheyette's contribution to the Northcote House Writers and Their Works series and Muriel's autobiography, Curriculum Vitae, because if ever there was a writer whose life is reflected in her fiction apparently it's Muriel and I want to know more as I read.
I also have a copy of the recent biography by Martin Stannard from Wiedenfeld & Nicolson for which my thanks. Not a bit like Jean Rhys perhaps but the same principle seems to apply, life was going to supply the very best plots and characters so why not use them, thus all things Muriel are the current tenants of the desktop bookshelf.
For The Abbess of Crewe published in 1974, think Wimplegate because this was the era of Nixon and Watergate and I might have lived through it but for reasons various my memories are hazy.
1973/74 would have seen me in my second and third years as a student nurse, enjoying a new life in London, being a bridesmaid at my brother's lovely, funny, happy wedding and then three weeks later having to come to terms with his diagnosis of Acute Leukaemia. Life truly would never be the same again and looking back on that phase of my life really no amount of scandalous news was going to penetrate that sadness with any permanence.
However, intrigue is afoot at the supposedly traditional Benedictine Abbey of Crewe where prayers are said around the clock including Lauds at 3am, and where the senior nun stands at the refectory lectern reading the from the great and ancient Rule of Benedict.

'To fear the day of judgement.
To be in dread of hell...
In every place to know for certain the God is looking at us...
To keep our mouth from low and bad talk...'

And so it goes on to the percussion of forks clinking on plates and on this occasion fish pie on the menu, but the unsuspecting nuns are frequently served something 'unnamed on toast' which might be either a cat-food by the name of Mew or some rather tasty dog food.
As one reading stops the nun calmly closes the book and begins another...

'A frequency is the number of times a periodic phenomenon repeats itself in unit time.
For electromagnetic waves the frequency is expressed in cycles per second or, for higher frequencies, in kilocycles per second...'

It is clear, if the bugging of the trees in the first chapter hadn't already alerted me to the fact, that the Abbey of Crewe is up to its bell tower in corruption as Sister Alexandra vies with the rather emotional Sister Felicity for the election to the post of Abbess. Sister Alexandra certainly stoops to conquer, employing the lowest of methods and all in the name of God to achieve election, and I roared.
The inner sanctum contains a bank of electronic equipment monitoring every word spoken in the Abbey, though they have stopped short of bugging the Confessional, and even I, with the scant facts of Watergate to hand, spotted the significance of the characters and much that happens which mirrors the original political scandal.
Be assured you'll find the peripatetic Henry Kissinger in a wimple.
It's pure Sparkian humour, deliciously funny as she casts her ascerbic eye over religious and political hypocrisy and delivers her verdict.
So I wasn't as up on Watergate as I should have been and it has been Martin Stannard to the rescue filling in the gaps and offering much more detail about how Muriel's imagination, fired up by political scandal translated it into her convent setting and 'high theological comedy'.
Martin Stannard (who I also thank immeasurably for his book, it will be a golden read through Spark Season) quotes Frank Kermode and so will I because, as you'd expect it throws even more light on the novel,

'If you impose [the novel] on Watergate you get not a simple transparency but a distortion: and it is in the distortion that the real interest of the book resides.'

In retrospect I can see that distortion clearly but I'm not going to elaborate because if you decide to read the book you will want to find it for yourselves. In amongst the humour, as is always the case it seems with Muriel Spark, there is a huge amount to ponder.
An interesting anecdote from Martin Stannard, Muriel Spark was at the height of her writing career and in the midst of a lucrative three book contract when the rather slender Abbess of Crewe was submitted. There was a sharp intake of breath and undisguised alarm at the publishers, thin pickings for the money on the table and actually had the Nixon debacle passed?

'the former President was now a broken man, confined to a wheelchair'

as Martin Stannard suggests, was this really the best moment to market a political satire?
Muriel Spark exempted The Abbess of Crewe from the contract, negotiating a separate deal for it and the book received excellent reviews on both sides of the pond.
Reading thirty-five years on there is much that translates into 21st century life too. The thought had occurred to me as I read and I was about to seize on it as original and my own and present it for your delectation, except I've had to concede that David Lodge also read The Abbess of Crewe and thought of it first back in 1974,

'a parable on the familiar theme that absolute power corrupts absolutely.'

Google checking my spelling of wimple (because I was getting confused with Whimple in Exeter), imagine my astonishment at discovering a Benedictine nun who blogs here.
Don't miss Colwich Novitiate, it really is a joy to read.

Happy Birthday to...

A slightly different Monday post, but as it's Virginia Woolf's birthday today, her 128th, I decided I could be a little self-indulgent. I have no idea why I remember it year on year but I do. I like to pause and mark time with a return to Woolf and thought it might be nice to award myself a reading set aside day, which all feels a bit decadent on a Monday. However once I've finished my day job, and done whatever else needs to be done, I'm going to settle down and read Flush and raise a pot of Earl Grey in memory of dear old Ginnie.

The canine theme feels pertinent given our own current state of canine discombobulation. Rusty, the cocker spaniel puppy, the Gamekeeper's new gun dog in training, having outgrown his indoor nursery has been promoted to primary school and one of the two adjoining outdoor kennels and runs, and therein begins the dilemma. It's like Malory Towers out there, swapping the dorms, new room mates to be accommodated...

'That's my door old chap, don't think you can walk in there whenever you feel like it...'

'Oi sonny, get your snout out of my feed bowl,'

Thus far it's involved some middle of the night howling and the judicious use of a saw but I'll explain more another day. Strangely the new arrival has settled in fine because he took his blanket and his cuddly sock with him; he's in the kennel with the heat lamp, and sharing with Sticks the dog he will be working with eventually. Prefect Ben (also a Cocker) and recently retired due to his Queen Ann shaped legs and feet (poor Queen Ann) that give him a bit of bother now and again, has moved in with head boy Barney (Labrador) and they are both slightly disconcerted at this influx of youthful energy. Barney in true Virginia Woolf style is holding out for a kennel of his own again soon.

Having just lived through it  heaven only knows what happened at Wimpole Street with the arrival of one of these because he doesn't sit still for a minute.

So I have little idea what to expect from Flush, but skimming (for fear of spoilers and ideas) Sally Beauman's excellent and lengthy introduction to the Persephone edition gives me something of a clue; a pedigree gundog puppy is to be tamed into city life much to the horror of his breeder, a Miss Mitford. Flush, a 'real old cocking spaniel' now to be the companion of the sofa-bound Elizabeth Barrett Browning and about to become the very fussy and particular Flushie, the lapdog who will eat partridge from a silver fork.

I don't want to know too much more before I read because I understand there are layers to unearth here, as Virginia Woolf suggests in a letter to Sybil Colefax

'...it was all a matter of hints and shades and practically no one has seen what I was after.'

But Happy Virginia's birthday to all you Woolf fans out there, let's raise a cup of tea to her today.

Not The TV Book Group - the selection

What a busy day but we've got there, and after our online meeting at midday we have our Not the TV Book Group choices and a schedule for Series One.
I am also aware that I douse you in book experiences aplenty, so I don't want anyone feeling overwhelmed or panicked by all this reading being laid before them. It's not compulsory and every list of this nature is bound to include some books that you may prefer over others. That's all up to you, pick and choose, read them all, read a few chosen ones, pick those that may suit your reading mood, leave others or read none and just come along and enjoy the discussion anyway, or  take the dog for a long walk instead. 

Who knows whether we have diamonds or turkeys on our list, we won't know until we read, but I think we've put together quite an eclectic reading mix, a few books destined to challenge and unsettle and which may take me well out of my comfort zone, but I feel equally sure they will all give us plenty to talk about.

February 7: Brodeck's Report by Philippe Claudel (Quercus Publishing, 2010) - dovegreyreader

February 21: The Girl with the Glass Feet by Ali Shaw (Atlantic Books, 2010) - Savidge Reads

March 7: Vanessa and Virginia by Susan Sellers (Two Ravens Press, 2008) - Other Stories

March 21: The Illusionist by Jennifer Johnston (Headline Review, 2007) - Reading Matters

April 11: The Boys in the Trees by Mary Swan (Henry Holt & Company, 2008) - dovegreyreader

April 25: Skin Lane by Neil Bartlett (Serpent's Tail, 2008) - Savidge Reads

May 9: A Short Gentleman by Jon Canter (Vintage, 2009) - Other Stories

May 23: Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler (Hachette, 2007) - Reading Matters

In the end it was interesting to set ourselves that 'Published in the last 5 years' boundary but imagine the potential we have for setting different boundaries for future choices and taking your suggestions into account too.
Head to Reading Matters, Other Stories and Savidge Reads. to read how and why kimbofo, Kirsty and Simon have chosen their books and here are the reasons for mine.

Sunday February 7th 2010

Brodeck's Report by Philippe Claudel

This came highly recommended and as soon as I read the synopsis and checked out a few reviews I knew Brodeck's Report would be high on my list. I was very impressed by the quiet power of  Grey Souls and am really looking forward to this one and thrilled that everyone else wants to give it a try too.

"From his village in post-war France, Brodeck makes his solitary journeys into the mountains to collect data on the natural environment. Day by day he also reconstructs his own life, all but lost in the years he spent in a camp during the war. No-one had expected to see him again. One day, a flamboyant stranger rides into the village, upsetting the fragile balance of everyday life..... it becomes the story of a community coming to terms with the legacy of enemy occupation. In a powerful narrative of exceptional fascination, Brodeck's Report explores the very limits of humanity."


"Brodeck's Report has one of the most moving dedications of any novel I've read: “For all those who think they're nothing. For my wife and my daughter, without whom I wouldn't be much.” It is, perhaps, unusual to begin a review by quoting a novel's dedication page, but in this case any clue as to how Claudel came to write such an original, brilliant and disturbing book is welcome. "

Ruth Scurr  The Times


Sunday April 11th 2010

The Boys in the Trees by Mary Swan

A dovegreyreader follower very kindly sent me this when it was nominated for the Canadian Giller Prize and the books were proving very tricky to get hold of here in the UK. The moment passed and the book was shelved unread but the premise has always intrigued me. I gather the narrative presents challenges of its own so we'll see, some have 'got it' and raved others haven't, but it has a ringing endorsement from Hilary Mantel on the cover
"After finishing it, I feel as if I am still listening for it. It has the compelling logic of a lingering powerful dream."
I'm really hoping its moment has come.

"Newly arrived to the countryside, William Heath, his wife, and two daughters appear the picture of a devoted family. But when accusations of embezzlement spur William to commit an unthinkable crime, those who witnessed this affectionate, attentive father go about his routine of work and family must reconcile action with character. A doctor who has cared for one daughter, encouraging her trust, examines the finer details of his brief interactions with William, searching for clues that might penetrate the mystery of his motivation. Meanwhile the other daughter’s teacher grapples with guilt over a moment when fate wove her into a succession of events that will haunt her dreams.
...A supreme literary achievement, The Boys in the Trees offers a chilling story that swells with acutely observed emotion and humanity.

“This is a mesmerizing novel, that can truly claim to be filled with a ‘terrible beauty.’”—Alice Munro

Not The TV Book Group...

Well someone had to do it...do you remember Not the Booker?
It was the Guardian's good-natured and respectful peek around the edges of the Booker Prize to try and find the books that the people out there were reading whilst the judges deliberated over their choices.

So I wonder if the world is ready for Not the TV Book Group?

Hang up your coats, make yourself at home and pour yourself a drink because you might not know it but you've stumbled in on a quarter of a low-budget launch party here. Over the next few months I'm delighted to be sharing the Not the TV Book Group virtual sofa with three other esteemed blogging friends, Kimbofo, Other Stories and Savidge Reads as we read, share and talk about our chosen books.
'Goodness me, this must have been months in the planning' I hear you exclaim as you fill your glass...no this is the blogworld, just four days, 83 emails, job done. As if we'd struggle to find good books we wanted to talk about with you all!

Before we get to the interesting part as in the books, there are just a few housekeeping details and several things to make clear.

Firstly and most importantly and despite that name, which was too good to pass up once we'd thought of it, this is not an attempt at spoofing or denigrating the TV Book Club, none of us want to do that.
The TV Book Club is there, it's happening and it's currently filling that vacant TV book niche and, despite those first show misgivings, we applaud that.
This will be about offering something different, a two-way online reading experience that will allow us and you the chance to read and talk about what we hope will be some enjoyable books around our blogs. Perhaps for me also a little bit of freedom from some self-imposed constraints because finally I will allow myself spoilers. I expend more energy than you can ever imagine trying not to give away a book's special moments whilst trying to do it all justice here, so the shackles will be off and I am looking forward to spilling the beans occasionally.

The choice of books has been ours and ours alone. There is no seduction involved, no publisher endorsements, no marketing money or funding coming our way, no pitches from publishers suggesting we choose their books either. Nor is this about book sales, we have little interest in those and they are likely to be unmeasurable in relation to this because we will be urging you to get the books from your library if you want to or find them for 1p elsewhere.
For Series One we have given ourselves a preliminary list of four choices each, to be whittled down to two by group consensus, making a list total of eight books and we have also set ourselves a few early boundaries

• Books to be unread by us personally.
• Books to be readily available from libraries and in paperback versions here in the UK at least.
• Books to have been bought, won or borrowed by us, but no freebies from publishers allowed.
• Books to have been published within the last five years.

Point Four is perhaps the moveable feast for future series (well, who knows, we might get to like this) because therein lies the opportunity for bookish variety and innovation.
Choosing the books has been much harder than I had thought. So much to consider just for four books that will become two and it's not necessarily about chasing the ace of the moment either; we could slot in some choices we might have missed and would love to read in the company of other opinions.This will also be like any book club, we could plump for the diamond for one of us that reads like a turkey for another (or heaven forfend is a turkey all round) if so we'll say so around our blogs and we'll say why and we hope you will too.

We're almost ready to share our choices and the Book Club will be hosted around the participating blogs in rotation on a Sunday each fortnight for sixteen lovely bookish weeks starting very soon.
If anyone wants to join us you will be most welcome, there will be room on our virtual sofas for as many of you as want to stop by, and when it's my turn to host, Bookhound has agreed to serve tea and cupcakes (that's your fault Rhys, he's gone off the idea now)  Rocky will keep feet warm as necessary.

Knitting update...

Perhaps the downside to finally abandoning the faltering satellite dish and installing the shiny, new and very efficient digibox, is that we watch more TV, especially now that it's not hiccoughing, barking and going onto freeze-frame every three minutes. Gone are the days when the picture would stutter and one of us (Bookhound) would go out in the pitch dark, fight our (his) way around the back of the shed and remove the snail that was crawling up the satellite dish receiver. The dish is finally to be left to the mercy of the climbing rose Albertine which will no longer have to be cruelly hacked back, let it ramble.
All these new channels...Dave Ja Vue...who thinks of these things?
I wonder if anyone else caught that programme over Christmas on BBC 4, Electric Dreams?
The premise was a bit worrying, an intrepid, nay plucky family had valiantly agreed to surrender all their high-tech 21st century electronictrickery for a month and revert to living through the dark ages and horrific deprivations of the 1970s and 80s.
That's right, not the 1870s, the 1970s.
They progressed through this torture by a year each day, the family dressed accordingly (yes, bell bottoms with the floral V-shaped leg insert, big shirt collars and puffed sleeves) and the house was decorated and kitted out accordingly and it all began with a twin tub washing machine just like my mum's...then a cooker just like the one we had in our first flat...then a sound system with cassette deck just like the first one we bought...and a Sony Walkman just like the one's we bought our children...and the family car was the same as ours...and the one painted wall in the sitting-room was just like ours...and the Laura Ashley curtains...and...
The funniest moments for us were the back-up technical team tearing their hair out as they scoured the country and eBay for the requisite antiques when all they really had to do was pull up in our driveway and empty our loft.
Anyway the viewing has all been a plus for the knitting and with the arrival of the Hebridean Wool Blend from Blackers this week I just had to cast on and see.
No different to a new book, a bout of startitis cannot be quelled.
I'm still in Cardi-land.
My dodgy thermostat of a certain age requires ten layers one minute and two the next and when out and about cardigans make for a much less obvious de-layering than the flustering and fighting my way out of endless jumpers whilst forgetting to take my glasses off first.
The wool is chunky and solid, and is knitting up quickly and beautifully on 6mm Size 10 (make of that what you will, bring back the old UK sizes) and after a false start, where the stripes of blue and white I had added in the rib were far too redolent of M&S a la 1976, I frogged and plumped for highlights in a stray ball of Noro Kureyon Colour 173 which I am going to add sparingly but I hope interestingly around the edges.

Postal confessions...

New books are arriving and I just have to talk to someone about them and Rocky's had enough, but I've procrastinated about doing this because firstly I don't want to brag about getting free books and nor do I  want to be a publisher's marketing device, plugging books like the front window of Waterstone's. But as you know no one slips me a few grand to get anything on my photostacks so I hope you'll trust me and my judgement and know that what I put before you is there because I've had a look and I like what I see, not because I've had e mails from publicists promising me cruises or anything.
If they do you will be the first people I ask about what I should be wearing for cocktails on the poop deck.

So time to look ahead and see what I'm looking forward to reading this year and, if the 'new arrivals' shelves are anything to go by there seems to be plenty of reading excitement in store. I am becoming increasingly disciplined about shelving the books under month of publication after an initial browse, or I just want to read everything the minute I lay eyes on it....there's a lot of oohing and aaahing over the post right now so I'll share the latest arrivals every so often.
It's not quite Sunday Confessions but almost.

I have a proof copy of  Lives Like Loaded Guns, Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds by Lyndall Gordon to be published by Virago in February and let me tell you it's a scorcher and I can't wait to settle down with it.

Now would I be so shallow as to read a book just because I liked the feel of it?
Yes I would I'm afraid and I'm wondering why it has taken so long for the softhardpaperback to arrive in the UK when I've been getting books from New Zealand in this format for some time?

Even the Dogs by Jon McGregor, and having really enjoyed So Many Ways to Begin I am really looking forward to this one...a man's body is found lying in his ruined flat, the dispassionate state inquest starts to reveal a stark story, love, loss, despair and a glimpse of redemption. That'll cheer up the January days.
Then just a few more

In March a new title from a favourite author Stevie Davies, Into Suez, 1949, the Cold War passionate love and murderous violence and a story for our times.
In April three titles which look intriguing.

We, The Drowned by Carsten Jensen, and someone from Denmark has already e mailed me having seen this in the sidebar and offered to buy it off me as he's desperate for his English wife to read it, had to say no. Voted the best Danish novel of the past 25 years, in 1848 a motley crew of Danish sailors set out to fight the Germans, not all of them return and those who do will never be the same again. The novel spans four generations, two world wars and a hundred years and nearly 700 pages so I may be gone some time. It's the e mail from Denmark that's sold me on it.

A new novel from Maggie O'Farrell, The Hand That First Held Mine .... fresh out of university and in disgrace, Lexie Sinclair is waiting for life to begin, 1950s Soho art scene and in the present day a couple reeling from the difficult birth of their first child and an extraordinary portrait of two women is revealed. Good, because I loved  The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox  so I have high hopes for this one.

From Helen Dunmore, The Betrayal, a sequel to The Seige which I might have to read again because I think I gave up when everyone was boiling their shoes to eat, that sort of thing always does for me, I moved onto the Gillian Slovo's The Ice Road where they boiled other things, just not shoes.

I have read in several reviews of What's To Come in 2010 that The Widow's Tale might be the breakthrough book for Mick Jackson. I just didn't get Ten Sorry Tales, I think I was being too grown-up and out of touch with my inner child about it so I plan to try harder with this one.

Finally also out in April, The Reluctant Tommy, Ronald Skirth's extraordinary memoir of the First World War. This one looks important and is getting a big advance publicity wind up, including this from Jon Snow,

'one of the few "Tommies" who not only experienced and survived the First World War, but also managed to write vividly about it. The memoirs of the officers and politicians are legion; the offerings of the underclass are sparse...one of the rarest of perspectives...a man who came to hate the killing and who came to find the mechanisms for frustrating it. He misdirected his guns to give the enemy a chance of escape.'

My proof copy has a beautiful handwritten letter of thanks to the publisher, Macmillan from Ronald's daughter Jean, enough to make me well up before I've even started.

I'll do a few more next week.

Purple Prose

Given more hours in the day who knows what I'd fit in, though I'm not sure it would be that thing some book lovers do, arranging books according to colour and creating those rainbow shelves...for a start I'd never find anything.

But just this week I happened to glance at my reading pile and noted that it was all of an unplanned but nicely coordinated purple shimmer.

Journey Into the Mind's Eye by Lesley Blanche in there just to reassure Laura in comments that I really am reading it and I am loving it, and if only she'd told me how good it was I'd have read it ages ago:-) 
Obsessed with Russia from an early age thanks to the regular visits to her family of an enigmatic chap known only as the Traveller, Lesley Blanche really goes the whole banana with the help of the gifts the Traveller brings ,

'A chunk of malachite, or a Kazakh fox-skin cap (which smelt rather rank) and once, a bunchuk, or standard, decorated with the dangling horse-tails of a Mongol chieftain. I was enraptured.
               'Nasty dangerous thing. ' said Nanny, holding it at arm's length and depositing it in the umbrella stand. 'Why can't he bring you dolls dressed up in national costumes? You could have had quite a collection by now.'
               But the Traveller knew better.'

Volume 4 of The Paris Review Interviews from Canongate has been close to hand for the interview with Marilynne Robinson; now that I've read Home (more soon) I needed to know much more...

'After I write a novel or a story, I miss the characters. So I was braced for the experience after Gilead. Then I thought, If these characters are so strongly in my mind, why not write them?...I couldn't see the point in abandoning them.'

Purple somehow a beautifully Russian colour and The Russian Countess by Edith Sollohub is also feeding those Russian fires nicely. I'm wanting a samovar again (Lesley Blanche had one) which is always a sign that I'm there in mind and spirit.

Hang all the difficulties of keeping it going with the charcoal burner, I'd manage it somehow just to have that simmering, warm and gentle sound in the background.
Purple also a spiritual and bishop-like colour in my mind and amongst the selection from Impress Books, Exeter Cathedral The First Thousand Years 400-1550 by Nicholas Orme.
Sounds dry?
Well, not a bit of it, fascinating, readable and informative history which I'm already halfway through and which has me champing at the bit to go and look at somewhere very familiar with new eyes.
I do love a good cathedral, all that splendour mixed with awe and wonder and towering roof vaults and buttresses and tombs and wondering how on earth they built it, and then the stained glass, awe-inspiring. I really should know more about Exeter Cathedral, the current one the third that has dominated the city of my birth, and for more than six hundred years.

How disgraceful that I couldn't even have told you roughly when it was built...finished in 1340.
Or why it's seems so oddly offset to the surrounding streets... faces east.
Bookhound said that was obvious when I did that 'do you know why?' question with him, but seriously I had no idea cathedrals faced east.
And the times we've sat on that Cathedral Green little knowing what once lay beneath and only last summer discovered the delightful little tea room and benches out in what had once been the cloisters .
Also included in the parcel that came through the snow and also by Nicholas Orme,  The Cathedral Cat - Stories From Exeter Cathedral.

I shall be up there with my camera once I've finished the book because I particularly have to find the cat hole in the tower door.

There was a cat on the cathedral payroll in the 1300s and Rocky is particularly keen to see the position revived and would like to apply, being entirely bored with his life here and sensing a promising future in Ecclesiastical mousing.

Meanwhile we, and no doubt you, can see an obvious and girth-related challenge in his plan but don't quite know how to break it to him.

Last and first... A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro

For some reason I always feel the need to choose something special to read on New Year's Eve, start to finish if possible, and then again something that will set the scene for what's to come, that first book of the New Year, and looking back it never seems to fail.
I strolled along the shelves finger-brushing the spines and wondering were it would lead until my eye fell on Kazuo Ishiguro, a writer I have long felt I have not done justice to in my reading.
I read The Remains of the Day as my first book of 1990, the year after it won the Booker and Never Let Me Go in the year it was shortlisted. Nothing in between and I was left slightly non-plussed by Nocturnes last summer deciding not to write about it here because I couldn't actually think of anything constructive to say.
True, I'd read it in the depths of those sweltering June days when  we thought we were in for a scorchio summer; several drowsy garden reading sessions later and it was clear I'd missed something and perhaps needed to pay more attention, return to Kazuo Ishiguro's beginnings and work back through his books in chronological order.
There can be real benefits to the Read In Order strategy for me, a chance to spot an author's growth and development from one book to the next and so my hand settled on A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel and already I'd learned something. I'd always thought it was A Pale View of the Hills and there is a subtle difference in the meaning and inflection if you take away the suggestion that this is only one set of hills we're talking about here.
In fact this became a strange and haunting end of year read, reflecting as it does on that period of time when Japan was also undergoing cataclysmic change in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, one era was ending and a new one was finding its place, and all beautifully demonstrated through a small cast of characters who find themselves all positioned slightly at odds with each other on the spectrum of change.

Narrated by Etsuko who had survived the bombing of Nagasaki, now older and living in England and reflecting on her past as her younger daughter Niki visits for the weekend. 

The past reveals Etsuko's husband struggling to maintain a balance between the old and the new, her father- in- law who firmly rejects the new, a friend Sachiko who, having fallen into near destitution from a life of privilege, is desperate to embrace new opportunities with a daughter Mariko sadly caught up in the confusion. An old family friend Mrs Fujiwara who is determined to make good with what is left her despite what has been lost. Etsuko herself is expecting her first baby, and there are startling things to be revealed about that baby, Keiko, during her sister Niki's visit  to her mother many years later. Thus does Kazio Ishiguro provide, through his characters rather than his plot, a means of delineating a changing world.

Plot is light in terms of what is told and that felt right. That lightness contrasts well with the unspokeness of what has gone before, all too monumentally unsayable and requiring only the briefest of references as a reminder if one were needed. No reminder is required, every page of this book seemed to have the tragedy and sadness of Nagasaki engraved on it, the fall-out from the bomb that you never see or hear somehow echoed in my mind with great clarity.
But how refreshing plot-lightness can be, that less is more approach, offering that chance for attention to focus on the minutiae. A game of chess always attracts my attention, such a good literary device for telling so much and the one between Jiro and his father is no exception as it explores themes of strategy and patience, traditional etiquettes fast disappearing and the growing rift between father and son played out on the board.

There is a delicious amount of ambiguity that kept me pondering, the merest hints that all is not as it seems and doubts to be cast on the reliability of Etsuko's telling of her history. All manner of reader guides and author interviews online throw up any number of possible scenarios and outcomes, making A Pale View of Hills one of those remarkable reads that really earns its cover price.
Pale is a word used by Kazuo Ishiguro throughout and cleverly in several contexts. Not only for the title, and the meaning that could be invested in Etsuko's depth and accuracy of recall, but a quick check of definitions proved invaluable for the variety of other interpretations which could apply. Ultimately it returned me to a real sense of the bleached-out colourless aspects of a once proud and colourful country left decimated. That melancholy sense of a dilution and weakening of the old ways, a loss of brilliance to be replaced with the insipid until it can be reborn, if it ever can.
In mourning we grieve the dead; in melancholia we die with them according to Freud and for some reason it was something that came to mind as I read A Pale View of Hills.
So that's me successfully launched on a complete start to finish re-read (or first read), and a better appreciation of Kazuo Ishiguro and it anyone fancies reading along through the year you can't go wrong with this one, next up An Artist of the Floating World and I'd love to know your thoughts.

On memory...

It was fascinating on my recent trip to London to see behind the scenes at some of the publishing houses and talk about how I read and how I write dovegreyreader, and interesting to try and explain all my own systems which I tend to take for granted because they just happen. Can I also confirm that I do it, in the inimitable words of a two year old I once met, 'by my own', someone recently had felt sure it had to be a conglomeration of people, no, just me...while Bookhound does the cooking and cleaning and shopping and... and...
But who knows the wealth of differing skills that we all bring to our reading?
I have quite surprised myself in that analysis because whilst talking to people various it became clear that the old working life, the one which I am so relieved to have moved sideways from, has given me many skills, one of which is that ability to read several books at a time and visualise, perhaps even take some mental video footage to keep something in my memory.
I'm sure everyone has their own methods and I'd be interested to know yours, it's basic memory skills after all, and I wouldn't go so far as to say I have a photographic memory because if I have I'd like to know where to buy new films, but a skill I had to learn in health visiting seems to be standing me in good stead with reading.
If I did four home visits in a morning I would have to settle down after those and write up the records, and I think you can see the potential for chaos if there was no method for separating out each visit and the vast amount of information that each one generated. Unwittingly I perfected the art of mental video and replay/rewind technology and storage of information that could be retrieved at will.
Of course it all comes to the fore when you are called to give evidence in court which hopefully won't happen as result of reading a book or writing a blog, but frequently happens as the result of being a health visitor. A subpoena to appear in court was definitely capable of spoiling my day and the weeks and months that followed until you got there.
My most memorable appearance was, as they always are, born of sad circumstances and a case of child abuse that I won't detail beyond an early indication of problems ahead when I had been the first to spot large and livid bruising on the leg of a nine month-old baby.
It's not a good moment let me tell you because the real 'inner you' feels momentarily sick to the core before it allows the 'professional you' to take over, but what I did next proved to be crucial when the case eventually came to court two years later.
I turned to the parents, pointed out the bruising and asked very simply how it had happened.
I knew them well, they had both had a poor experience of being parented themselves and were struggling with basic childcare but we had a good rapport, they were both very open about the difficulties and there was a lot of support in place.
As I turned around they were both looking at the floor.
Neither of them could make their usual eye contact with me and as they spoke to the floor offering an explanation my every instinct told me in an instant that it was untrue and this baby was at risk.
Unfortunately the paediatrician accepted their explanation later that day, and a great deal more happened with that family before  the case went to court, but it was that single moment of memory amongst others about which I was questioned most intensely and by five different barristers.
Each time I replayed the footage in my memory of that moment and I was able to answer and share those misgivings and eventually, as the case progressed over the next few days, the awful truth emerged. I had been very right to be worried on that day two years previously.
Sorry that's all taken us off the reading track but the book I had picked up to try and recapture the mood it left me with, to reframe again a week or more, a trip to London and two theatre trips since I had finished it, was My Father's Places by Aeronwy Thomas . A book itself about memory, who knows what video-footage Aeronwy Thomas had re-played as she wrote of her childhood, but her account would need to offer me clear pictures if I was going to do it justice as I wrote about it here.
I opened it and read a bit to remind myself...

'After a few days, gradually my parents began to speak to each other again in cold, subdued tones, the atmosphere chilly like the deteriorating weather. Autumn was on its way. Now my parents quarrel had filtered down to me and I felt the lack of warmth,
    'The trouble is you look  so much like your father, ' Mother said when I asked of an explanation.'The harder I pull your curls the better I feel.'

I think that gave me enough to be getting on with, but I'd love to know what eases a book into your memory...

The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark

I'm feeling completely enthused about, and infused by Muriel Spark's writing and that wonderful feeling that I have all those novels ahead of me waiting to be either rediscovered or read for the first time. Peter Kemp's book, the Cleveland County Libraries (Throston branch) reject, Muriel Spark in the Novelists and Their World series published by Elek Books in 1974 is providing useful background information too.
Muriel Spark is the master disconcerter, her writing subverts, unsettles expectations and is certainly leading me into unknown reading territory.
Or perhaps it's that my reactions all feel slightly alien to my usual way of thinking?
Whatever it is it's quite exciting  and very refreshing.
 If I'm reading a novel that deals, for example with mental illness as does The Driver's Seat , then I'd approach any thoughts I might write here with an element of respect and compassion for  the subject. I wouldn't slip into any of that behind the scenes medical black humour. Except perhaps the responsibility isn't all mine, it's also down to the author to lead my thinking in that direction.
So after a few pages I wouldn't normally be describing the main protagonist as several sandwiches short of a picnic, that would be a step too far, so blame Muriel Spark for the creation of the character of Lise who by page three I realised really was as mad and as disturbed as a bag of frogs. With that came the awareness that I was reading a book that could, and probably would, take me anywhere and everywhere and it did.
Lise...and I couldn't help but tranpose those last two letters to spell 'lies', is due a well-earned holiday from the seemingly mundane office where she works and setting off to buy a new travel outfit purchases something quite outlandish, the colours and designs clash with garish abandon and you almost get that sense of visual disturbance that a Bridget Riley painting offers
'a lemon-yellow top with a skirt patterned in bright V's of orange, mauve and blue.'
and a coat over the top
'narrow stripes, red and white with a white collar.'
It's the stuff of migraines that's for sure but perhaps a true reflection of Lise's state of mind, and in sharp contrast to her 'meticulously neat', minimalist, uber-modern and very functional apartment. Everything has a place.

'Lise keeps her flat as clean-lined and clear to return to after her work as if it were uninhabited.'

Rightly or wrongly, I'm quickly leaping to assessments about the distressing nature of mental illness and the impact of uncontrollable mind processes which can so often reflect in a need to control something external such as immediate surroundings.
So Lise boards her plane and heads off and really I can't tell you any more without spoiling the plot, suffice to say Lise is in a driver's seat of her own and searching for slightly more than a rest by the pool and a suntan.
What transpires is dark, deranged and shocking.
Just about every sentence will make you stop and start, because nothing is as it should be, much is quite bizarre and absurd, nothing is what it seems or what you might expect, or what you might even call normal. Nothing Lise says quite connects to what has gone before or what is to come either so don't expect to feel in the least bit settled whilst you are reading this book.
It makes you want to jump up and pace around as you try to get a handle on it, to understand what is going on and interpret and reframe the black humour with which it seemed to begin

'I'm a strict believer, in fact a Witness, but I never trust the airlines from those countries where the pilots believe in the afterlife. You are safer when they don't. I've been told the Scandinavian airlines are fairly reliable in that respect.'

It's all imperceptibly replaced by something far more serious, forget bags of frogs and picnics, Muriel Spark left me no room for levity or flippant analysis of Lise's mental state as I reached the final pages.
There are moments too when you wonder why Muriel Spark has chosen a particular word or phrasing over another and marveling at this book's tightly constructed cleverness. I came away knowing that I had read as serious an account of the deranged, paranoid mind as it was possible to find, Lise's purpose and destiny is unstoppable,

''Dressed for the carnival!' says a woman looking grossly at Lise as she passes, and laughing as she goes, laughing without possibility of restraint, like a stream bound to descend whatever slope lies before it.'

Except deranged or not Lise takes control of her destiny and you know you're just going to have to close your eyes when she meets it.
Spark season continues.

Channel 4 TV Book Club

There has been so much ado in the press in recent weeks about Amanda Ross (of Richard & Judy book club fame) and the new Channel 4 TV Book Club that I had decided to watch.
Amanda Ross has been telling authors how to write a book for a book club etc and what constitutes a great read for a book group, there has to be plenty to talk about, that sort of thing.  There was all manner of hoo-haa about the choice of panel members who would be discussing the books but you know egalitarian old me, I'm all for the book-lovers out there having their say whoever they are.
I had even been wondering whether to read alongside and talk about the book choices here because they are arriving from the publishers.
Well, I've just watched the first in the series and remain completely mystified about the programme which is supposed to be 'inspiring Britain to get reading' and to be honest I'm a bit lost for words... unlike the programme which spent some time out and about on the streets holding up obscure words on boards and explaining their meaning to us, one of which was bavardage...empty foolish chatter.
Then it was "guest author" spot...good this should be of interest, wonder who it'll be....
Chris Evans (yes, that Chris Evans) got a full long ten or was it fifteen minutes of the available twenty-four  telling us how he writes, whilst Sarah Waters and The Little Stranger, the book up for 'discussion' seemed to scrape the merest five.
Gok didn't really like it and was disgruntled but then the copy of the book he was waving around looked a bit pristine anyway, and who knows what Laila Rouass thought, she looked gorgeous but didn't get a word in edgeways.
I seem to remember the great British public coped with some fairly intelligent debate about a book when Richard and Judy were at the helm, books like Cloud Atlas gained a huge audience of everyday readers who 'got' it. I used to dash in from work on a Wednesday and really enjoy the discussion.
Jo Brand can always be relied upon to salvage a sinking ship with some comedy and bless her she did, but it may not be ever thus.
I'm sorry to have a moan so did anyone else watch (and if you didn't you can see it here) and see signs amongst the wreckage, a glimmer of bookish hope that I could perhaps cling on to?

Tranquility Base

After such a terrible and tragic week in the news, and those harrowing and desperate pictures, how can thoughts not be with the people of Haiti right now, so I thought we'd have some Sunday tranquility today after a week of words.
It's a well-known fact chez dovegrey that I am the one person in the house least likely to witness the moon set and the sunrise in all its glory, so it's fortunate that Bookhound is a lark and occasionally takes his camera with him to record it, just so that I know what it looks like.


and there in our little apple orchard, the summerhouse, now officially the mousehouse... Rocky has work to do.

Team Ulysses - Camp Seven

'...in the convex mirror grin unstruck the bonham eyes and fatchuck cheekchops of Jollypoldy the rixdix doldy'

Sort of trips off the tongue doesn't it and I'm feeling a bit skippy light-fantastic because I can see the end and I've loved doing this.
But dear Team Ulysses, where are we exactly?
Which side of the mountain are you all on?
On a week-long stint of night duty we used to call night four rather indelicately 'Over-the Hump' night, and Team Ulysses we're there, past midway, but this is perhaps a good moment to pause, rest and take a compass bearing and plot our course June-ward and make sure we're all on the same trajectory for that Bloomsday 2010 party.
I've stuck roughly to the 60-70 pages a month rule, which in my Oxford World's Classics edition has settled very conveniently into two chapters, so this month I'm up to Circe which, for those without notes or headings, is the chapter beginning in italicised stage directions

'The Mabbot street entrance of nighttown, before which stretches an uncobbled tramsiding set with skeleton tracks, read and green will-o'-the-wisps and danger signals...'

Once I surrendered all hope of sense and sensibility I was into Circe and will be going round in circles for some time. This the longest section of Ulysses, in my edition 160 pages, and I plan to eke this out through February and March too, leaving Emaeus to talk about in April, Ithaca in May and ending in a blaze of glory with Penelope on Bloomsday, June 16th 2010 and already I'm starting to feel a twinge of excitement about crossing the finishing line with you all.
I think we'd better plan to hold hands around the world and run through that tape and head for the party food together.
Perhaps this gives us time for a breather too, time for others to catch up if they want to and I also have a personal plan to take stock and reflect on what's gone before, perhaps revisit Oxen of the Sun which got rather short shrift from me in December.
I've stumbled through the haze of words this month and kept Erika's wonderful advice to the fore, remembering to laugh and see Joyce's humour and that hasn't been difficult, there seems to be a great deal of laugh aloud humour in Circe. Thanks are also due to Frank Delaney and his Guide to the Dublin of Ulysses for giving me some meaningful context and shedding some light on what I have been reading. Much as I have wanted to read with that naivete of the ordinary reader, there's a bit of me that can't cope without an element of understanding.
Plus how could I go through life a minute longer not knowing what a pig's crubeen was?

The setting is Nighttown, the red-light district of Dublin where, according to Frank Delaney, two thousand prostitutes plied there trade, Montgomery Street (Monto) considered to be the worst slum in Western Europe with a reputation for 'unlimited bawdry.'

One of Frank Delaney's anecdotes made me smile

' Julia Hooligan, engrossed in conversation with a friend in Grafton Street one day, was unwittingly barring the path of a well-known lawyer. "Out of my was woman," he throated. " And who do you think you are?" Julia nipped back. "Madam - I am the most famous Crown solicitor from here to Balbriggan." "That's nuthin'," chuckled the undaunted Julia."I'm the most famous half-crown solicitor from here to Belfast."

The pictures alone reveal two different Dublins I think and it's clear from Circe, as if wasn't clear enough already, which one James Joyce inhabits.
And thanks again to Frank Delaney for confirming what I thought I knew from reading, but then you can never quite be sure with James Joyce because nothing is as it seems, but Circe is indeed fantasy merging into fact, a heady brew of

'psychedelic hallucination and fantastic nightmare written as dramatic performance,characterisations and descriptions embodied in stage directions - reactions, imaginations and subconscious fears in the verbal exchanges.'

Echoes of Macbeth, Tennyson and The Charge of the Light Brigade and heaven knows what else, it's all in there and echoes of Ulysses itself with the return of Paddy Dignam from the grave and not looking his best it must be said.

The notes in my copy suggests the text is 'recirculating itself' with 'hundreds of displaced repetitions' and a multitude of minor characters reappearing, so I feel sure Circe will be a good test of how much I have taken note of what has gone before.
Frank Delaney suggests this is all a

'long, mad, luminous swirling saraband of images that fog and fill your mind and drag you along in a crazy punk rag-doll dervish dance.'

I have to say, and not that I'd know, but this must be like a drug-fuelled journey without the bother of the drugs.
James Joyce rewrote Circe nine times, and who can know what he was on each time, before declaring it 'the best thing he had ever done' and on that verdict I couldn't possibly comment, but I have laughed out loud and gone with the flow especially when treated to the The World's Twelve Worst Books.
Meanwhile I've been hunting around for more old pictures of Dublin because the city previously unknown to me is starting to shape up in my mind's eye, and I came across this site from whence I have 'borrowed' today's pictures.

Glories await there for anyone else interested in matching up that mind's eye picture to the reality and also a chance to eavesdrop on the ongoing and sparkling conversation between the Dublin expats as they debate the locations of the old photos, hundreds of them.
Talking of pig's crubeen as I was, here's Marco Pierre White deciding what to do with his.

...trotters to the rest of us and let's hope Joan, Lesley-Ann et al are there in comments with the soup as usual.

The Night Following by Morag Joss

So the unnamed wife of Jeremy the oft-named anaesthetist discovers some highly incriminating evidence in her husband's car (Saab - yellow convertible) which she has borrowed while hers ( Renault...I think) is in the garage for a service. His extra-marital affair confirmed in her mind she drives off in a state of turmoil and distraction and hits and kills a cyclist called Ruth along a quiet country lane.
This much the blurb will tell you but by the time you read this far in the book you will also have been introduced to the unnamed wife living in an unusual set of circumstances and it's clear the novel is going to be flashback.
One of the many interesting facets of Morag Joss's book was that unknowing, followed by a vast amount of speculation then invested in what might happen before the final page. I doubt anyone approaching The Night Following will second-guess quite what is to follow.
Some of it, if I'm honest, involved a serious stretching of even my imagination, based as it is on the knowledge that many of those extraordinary life situations I have found myself involved in on a professional basis would be entirely 'unbelievable' if I ever found them in a novel.
So there's a bit of a lesson for me there in the aftermath of this book, I think and often say 'I've seen it all' but according to Morag Joss, I haven't.
I did visit an elderly spinster many years ago, isolated, alone and grief stricken since the loss of her parents years previously, a complete recluse living in a house stacked to the rafters with rubbish and all her money, vast amounts of it, in carrier bags in the cellar...but that's perhaps the nearest I've come to what pans out in The Night Following.
The novel follows three distinct narrative threads which interweave.
That of the unnamed wife of the anaesthetist who is appropriately numbed first by her marriage and then considerably discombobulated by the shock of the accident from which she had fled, locking the Saab in the garage but not before she has wreaked a bit more hammer and chisel revenge on her husband via his already damaged yellow paintwork.
Then there is the victim Ruth's bereaved husband Arthur, distraught and driven to the edge of insanity by his grief,  who writes letters to his wife on the advice of his bereavement counsellor...more to stop her nagging him than for any therapeutic benefit. The letters are fine, but Arthur's life is most certainly not as he descends into a state of confused self-neglect and bizarre behaviours. It's that moment to question if and when does a grief reaction ever become complex.
Finally, Ruth's novel The Cold and the Beauty and the Dark which also occasionally intervenes. Ruth was a creative writer who belonged to a writer's group and always had a WIP (Work In Progress) and this is one of the clever bits of the book because as well as offering some uncanny coincidences to the fabric of the unnamed wife's life, of which Ruth can have known nothing, it is also a much 'lesser' book. The writing style and the plot is vastly amateur compared to that of Morag Joss thus making clear literary distinctions between a published and a non-published author.
The unnamed wife insinuates herself most bizarrely into Arthur's life and between them they both suffer from a grieving process riddled with guilt and sadness that would probably challenge the most competent of psychiatrists to unravel, nor do I  want to dig myself into a deeper hole by trying to explain and thus unearth more plot details...you'll have to read it to find out.
I'm never very good at deciding when a book can manage without words, when a bit of an edit might add to my enjoyment. I tend to read what's there because it is and don't give it another thought unless something starts to shout at me and I think something did start whispering to me during The Night Following.
There is no denying it, Morag Joss writes quite beautifully, her way with words is often haunting, they echo off the page long after you've read them, but often I felt a fraction less would have given me so much more. This is an intense book made both more and less so by its length, and there were moments towards the end when I could feel myself flagging, much could have been distilled and I would have come away with a very different and I suspect more profound reading experience.
So what with that and the plot continuing to stretch my disbelief just an inch too far as it worked its way towards tying up all the lose and flailing ends, I ended up in need of resuscitation by the time I had turned the final page.
But I just had to know what happened, forgetting that I sort of knew that already from the beginning, and as a novel about accidental death, grief and loss this one is remarkable for its depiction of so much that could happen. The nameless narrator denying herself an identity and denying us as readers too, a lifetime lived with the increasing burden of guilt unassuaged, the intense suffering of those who mourn and the ease with which we judge those whose lives and reactions seem beyond our ken and quite alien to us.
Morag Joss has explored it all here and if you've read The Night Following I'd love to know your thoughts.
The community nurses are regular visitors to Arthur and to be honest, if I came across any of this in a day's work I'd be dashing into the GP to drag him out to do a home visit, the GP would be on the phone to the Crisis Team within minutes, we'd be calling in the Elderly Care Team who wouldn't take no for an answer when safety is as compromised as Arthur's was, so there'd be no novel.
Morag Joss can surely be forgiven for handling it all very differently to me.

Life is not one long mushroom, The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks.

I kept the faith with Katherine Mansfield through last year, not in that gorging-and-reading-it-all way that can sometimes overtake me, this time round her letters have been to hand and I've turned to them regularly through the year along with the occasional short story.
I started with Volume Five, ridiculous I know but it was about following Katherine Mansfield through those final years of her life which seemed like the right way to read.
 I am very grateful to Peter who reads here and who e mailed with news of a real bargain over on the Katherine Mansfield Society website and a big thank you for the heads up because within minutes I had bought Volumes One and Two of The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks edited by Margaret Scott, published by Lincoln University Press and going for a song. Too good to pass up, and everyone else must have thought likewise because they quickly sold out.

I do spy a few copies in this edition and reasonably priced elsewhere though, so all is not lost, they are out there.
Thinking that the KM society seems to be based in New Zealand I had quite thought I wouldn't see the books much before 2010 but to my surprise they arrived within days and then I had to do that awful thing and go to London and be parted from them when I actually didn't want to put them down.
And what about the covers?
All those pictures of the original notebooks just speak to me very insistently.
These are dip-into browsing books to rank with the best, the source used by John Middleton Murry to compile the 1927 edition of the Journal of Katherine Mansfield, published after her death and despite requests in her will for 'as much as possible' to be destroyed. Yet he is credited with being faithful to his source whilst dealing with some very painful information, it can't have been easy to read so much about himself and often less than complimentary.
As well as diary entries there are short story outlines and ideas, poems, brief synopses of possible stories, shopping lists, household accounts, the intricate minutiae of a life lived, loved and lost. Open by chance on any page and it's hard to know whether you are reading fact or fiction but I can guarantee instant and complete involvement. Sometimes the doses need to be small because it is in these pages that the depth and blackness of Katherine Mansfield's frequent bouts of  despondency and depression at her debilitating physical state come to the fore, sometimes the briefest of lines conveying so much.

'Jack left for London. The house if very quiet. I was ill all day - exhausted. In the afternoon I fell asleep over my work and missed the post. My heart won't lie down...how can I work when this awful weakness makes even the pen like a walking stick.'

But then the next page might be riddled with wry humour and I'm smiling again,

'Putting my weakest books to the wall last night I came across a copy of Howard's End and had a look into it. But it's not good enough. E.M.Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot. He's a rather fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain't going to be no tea. And I can never be perfectly certain whether Helen was got with child by Leonard Bast or by his fatal forgotten umbrella. All things considered I think it must have been the umbrella.'

The transcribing itself must not be overlooked, Margaret Scott must have slowly developed an affinity with Katherine Mansfield's handwriting,

much of it to the new observer quite indecipherable.

I worked with a colleague many years ago whose handwritten records we would live in dread of having to take over. She used what can only be described in electrocardiogram parlance as a flatline script, minimal elevations and depressions with long deathly intervals in between. The only conceivable method of coming close to reading what had been written, and which we one of us discovered out of desperation when tasked to write a court statement from them, was to hold the page horizontally and at eye level and then to squint.
I plan to carry on with my journey alongside Katherine Mansfield, with the short stories, the biographies, the notebooks and the diaries, it is all an endless cycle of readerly insight and fascination and frequent little moments of wisdom,

'If only one could tell true love from false love as one can tell mushrooms from toadstools. With mushrooms it is so simple - you salt them well, put them aside and have patience. But with love you have no sooner lighted on anything that bears even the remotest resemblance to it that you are perfectly certain it is not only a genuine specimen, but perhaps the only genuine mushroom ungathered. It takes a dreadful number of toadstools to make you realise that life is not one long mushroom.'

Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary by Ruby Ferguson

It's Persephone tea with Cornflower today but before we get onto that I must say that I'm following Karen's exquisite Alice Starmore knitting with much reverence, it's quite beautiful.
Karen's Persephone selection for this month and she has chosen Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary by Ruby Ferguson.
How interesting it is that I can have a book on the shelf for several years and not have read it, mainly because a member of an online list had declared it slight and of little merit. Sufficiently scathing in their opinion for me to pass it over when so much else was clamouring for my reading time, so my thanks to Karen for suggesting this one because it really is a little royal diadem of a read.

I have feeling my encounter with Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary, written in 1937, was also governed by the knowledge that the late Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother admired the book so much that she had invited Ruby Ferguson to dine at Buckingham Palace. Read this book and imagine royalty with all their privileges, but likewise all their social constraints, sitting reading in the throne chair opposite you and it somehow offers a much deeper dimension to the book. In fact I quite wished I'd had some royal company to be able to ask 'Was it really like that?' every so often, but had to make do with Rocky snoring by the fire as usual.

Firstly, yes it's that Ruby Ferguson all you Jill and the Pony Club fans.
Oh how I tried to love ponies, it seemed like the right gang to be in with, except I didn't have a pony, but everyone was reading Jill books and I couldn't be left out. I did give up quickly and for those that don't know, the reason that horses and I don't get on is oft mentioned on here; one of the horses at Horseguard's Parade in London sneezed very messily on my new white ankle socks and sandals when I was standing nearby, I was about seven and I've been right off horses from that day to this. Can't be helped but good to see Fidra books are keeping the Jill books in print.

Described, like Winifred Watson's Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day, as a fairytale for grown-ups I was instantly smitten by the Scottish setting of Keepsfield, the sprawling fictional country estate into which Lady Victoria Elspeth Rose Graham-Rooth-Targanet is born.
Silver ladles rather than silver spoons in the mouth, this is a life of prestige and privilege rivaled only by Royalty, yet Rose is a child of many delights. By rights her garrulous, precocious exuberance should have rankled and had me very irked but you can't help but love her, a little heart of pure and innocent gold beating 'neath that

'new frock of soft grey merino with a wide-coloured sash and a rose-coloured ribbon round her dark hair, brushed back from her brow'

as the happiest girl in all Scotland dresses (or is dressed) on the morning of her sixth birthday in 1861.

The story is being told in flashback by an old retainer who has been discovered at the house many years later by a group of tourists who, noticing the To Let signs outside the wrought iron gates, make their way down the mile-long carriage drive and pitch up at the stately pillared front door of the late eighteenth century classic mansion to look around.

Rose's life one of pure happiness, the freedom of the Estate, audiences with her mother at 5pm which is enough to satisfy everyone's requirements, life at school, being presented to Queen Victoria at Court and the debutantes ball, plenty of Highland flings with marriage as the ultimate aim and achieved to the leaden Sir Hector Galowrie. A marriage of convenience and social propriety that will entwine Keepsfield with Sir Hector's neigbouring estate of Redlace, but one that will also trap Rose in a loveless state with her three children, the heir, the spare and the daughter.

I won't dwell a minute longer on the plot but expect trouble, Rose was not blessed with that excessively exuberant, free-spirited nature to allow life to get the better of her, but expect sadness too. These are class-ridden times when to cross social boundaries was deemed too shocking for words.

Little wonder that it all touched a chord with the Queen Mother  with its frequent mentions of Balmoral and perhaps a nerve too; the 1936 fall from grace of Edward VIII and the abdication doubtless still an open wound when this book was published.
But I have loved it for its characterisation of Rose, for its themes of women's lives, class and the burdens of wealth and title, not always the blessings they were perceived to be in the 1930s, and of course with hindsight we know just how much was about to crumble into dust and ashes.
Right time for tea, head to Cornflower where I'm sure a regal spread awaits.

On snowreading...

I'm wondering where this snow and enforced sitting by the fire might have taken your reading?
I've tried to look on it as a meteorological gift of time and not to be shovelled out of the way too fast and for me there's only been one reading place to go when it's officially colder than the South Pole outside and a troika would be just the ticket.

Russia...and it all began with Jim the Postie trudging through with a barrow-load of post including a registered parcel of books from Impress Books, a small Exeter-based publisher  which felt like a gift from the gods and I'm very grateful to Jim for delivering it and Impress for sending it.
All as welcome as the sight of our gas lorry would be too, anyone seen it?
In that Impress parcel a fine selection including The Russian Countess - Escaping Revolutionary Russia by Edith Sollohub, the only prompt I needed pending that thaw to head eastward.
Edith Natalie de Martens was born in 1886 in Pavlovsk, near St Petersburg and into the comfortable upper echelons of Imperial Russia, the daughter of a high-ranking diplomat and a girl whose destiny was to join the social and intellectual elite had not the 1917 Revolution put a swift end to that. By this time married to Count Alexander Sollohub and with three children these memoirs are an account of how Edith faced up to the loss of her husband and separation from her children as frontiers closed, surviving eventually to make a new life for herself and her sons in Western Europe.
I don't know how yet because I'm still reveling with young Edith in the summer holidays at the family's country home Waldensee.

'Summer was really on the threshold and when the huge suitcases and travelling baskets appeared in our nurseries and playroom - then no learning could penetrate my head anymore. The maid was packing, I was pushing my own treausures in between layers of clothing and only concerned myself with the packing of my violin, my gun, my tennis racquet and riding kit. Books went in large wooden boxes...'

Note the cover picture, Edith no slouch with a gun and perhaps a skill that was to be her salvation, we'll see.

The book which launched me on all things Russian a few years ago was also a memoir, The House by the Dvina A Russian Childhood by Eugenie Fraser. I moved swiftly on to Natasha's Dance by Orlando Figes and all things Romanov which has all made that return to reading Russia a real treat every so often.
Last weekend, happily thinking Russia here I come again, I also reached for Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy and only stopped myself in the nick of time.
What on earth was I thinking?
I was about thirty pages in and oblivious to anything else around me when I suddenly realised that another 800 page book, as well as the 800 page Mystery Trollope for The Reader magazine with a deadline of this Friday to submit my thoughts and my rating, and then the 732 pages of Ulysses in progress, well it was not a good idea this week.
I don't quite know how I tore myself away and perhaps I'll settle for some short stories from Chekhov or Pushkin instead, but Anna Karenina is still calling, I'm hankering after it, could someone please talk me out of it ...

What Becomes by A.L.Kennedy

'No one can teach you how to write, or how you write or how you could write better – they can assist you in various areas, but the way that you learn how you write, the way you really improve, is by diving in and reworking, taking apart, breaking down, questioning, exploring, forgetting and losing and finding and remembering and generally testing your prose until it shows you what it needs to be, until you can see its nature and then help it to express itself as best you can under your current circumstances.'

This was A.L.Kennedy writing recently of her experience as a Creative Writing lecturer, and having just finished reading her collection of short stories, What Becomes, I'm mindful that she may have made something intrinsically difficult look very easy, and she has something to say about that too

'And don't remind me of the conversation I once had with a prominent academic, who intended the phrase "But it's so effortless …" as an adverse comment on a novel. I simply couldn't rant convincingly enough to ensure that particular book could win a small but useful prize. The narrative's illusion of ease – and just you try creating an illusion of ease, matey – was too convincing. A parallel idiocy might involve refusing to applaud Derek Jacobi at the end of a performance, because he looked as if he wasn't acting.'

So what exactly are the requirements of a good short story?
There's probably a checklist somewhere about content and structure and narrative but forget all that, what I want is the Japanese water flower effect. Something contained but only barely contained within its boundaries, something that expands and blooms with ideas and memories when its planted in my mind, thoughts that hover and stay there all day as the story continues to explode with possibilities.
I want them to expose my own prejudices, perhaps make me read about things I don't normally like to read about but can cope with for ten pages, make me look at something from another point of view, walk those pages in someone else's shoes.
Try and imagine the other side of the story because there always is one.
There is absolutely only one best way for me to read a collection like this and test it for excellence and that's to read one story a day, preferable early in the morning and on consecutive days so that I can see if it gives me enough to think about all day and through however many days there are stories.
Will it flit into my mind at odd moments during the day and hang around for a while?
Will their be connecting threads, might the story on day eight trigger a memory from the story from day two?
Will I suddenly happen upon a new and startling insight as I'm driving into town or shoving the washing in the dryer; out of the blue will something amazing strike me dumb and I have to sit for a few moments and think about it?
How can ten or twelve pages of writing be quite so powerful?
Add them together and you have the 200 stunningly good pages of What Becomes and perhaps be prepared as you proceed, to slowly interpret that clever cover design as I did. That precarious grip on a superficial, glittery world to big to contain; when it crashes to the ground that glitter ball is not going to bounce back unbroken, it's going to smash into smithereens and you can only wonder how on earth it will be put back together, if it ever will.
Despite the fact that these are very twenty-first century stories riddled with present-day anxieties and damage done, they are also timeless, the moments people have agonised over since forever, all those things people are so good and clever at concealing often out of consideration for those around them.
How do people stop themselves at the edge of the abyss and why do they?
In the words of the song, what does become of the brokenhearted?
There's too much within in each story to detail each one separately, but take Wasps as an example.
The wife and her children and the travelling part-time husband with perhaps a mistress in every town, who knows. Her fear and anger exude from the sons who can legitimately give voice to the injustice in the way that adults can't and A.L. Kennedy pins the entrapment down against the glass just like those dead wasps on the windowsill...and why wasps?
Perhaps the parasitic insect that can repeatedly use its sting...
Or  As God Made Us, the camouflage of bravado and extremes of laddish masculinity concealing the post-traumatic anguish of the returning soldiers, the amputees as they take their regular swim at the local pool, but the schoolchildren are in too and this is all too real, the schoolteacher has to say something. I had to gulp and blink as the full impact of this story hit home.
Saturday Teatime and the lifelong impact on a child exposed to the fear of domestic violence; the adrenalin's insistence on that decision between fight or flight when a child can do neither can have a long-lasting impact, a life built on shaky foundations is perfectly exposed and just how can those memories be dealt with.
Just three of the twelve, the other nine stories pack the same punch.
There's no denying it, the grim, harsh realities of life stalk these pages in many guises but so profoundly explored that each story has seared an image into my mind. Re-opening the book over a month later feels as real as that day when I started my daily read of these twelve stories.
Final word from A.L.Kennedy to her students on the subject of rewriting and perfecting,

'But why wouldn't you want to express your voice, your story, your nature more deeply, more beautifully, more effectively? Fretting and worrying at something you made up, an intimate product of your hopes, enthusiasms, passions – it's bound to feel odd, unnatural, but it's also deeply rewarding. In time, you will willingly, if not always happily, put invisible hours, days and weeks of effort into offering someone you don't know and who will probably never thank you something that will appear to be "effortless".

Not quite the final word in that case, I don't actually know A.L.Kennedy, but I can most certainly thank her.

Knitting update...

Hope you are all safe and warm across the UK after that overnight snow sensation and with apologies to anyone from Oz and other hot places who must be getting sick of all this pom snow whingeing.
But now to matters woolish.
I've had a fortuitous and productive knitting season as well as a festive one and, having decided that I must use up the wool in the tbk stash before adopting any new stray hanks and skeins out there, I turned to the Blacker Designs Pure Jacob Wool with 50% Mohair which I had bought in some quantity during that visit to The Natural Fibre Company in nearby Launceston.I just bonded with it, seeing it come in still baaing and hot (or cold) off the sheep...oh look more snow

following it around the mill

and out the other end all neat and spun and ready for me.

The plan had been the long sleeveless waistcoat with the gorgeous cable design on the back.

Well plans are for changing, especially when
           a) winter took a turn for the cold and I realised I wanted sleeves and
           b) I panicked a bit when I saw the cable pattern in words...this is unlike me, I'm game for a challenge after turning heels so please can someone restore my cabling confidence and tell me it's a breeze.
So I opted to turn it into a good, plain dependable round-necked cardigan.
Firstly, can there be anything better than knitting with wool that has been on such a direct journey from sheep to needles?
The wool is soft and has that wonderfully sweet but natural aroma and the natural oils in the wool make for soft handling. It's just beautiful...enough to assuage my disappointment when an order for some Debbie Bliss chunky couldn't be fulfilled by another mail order company last week, and so I was back to Blacker's online for some chunky Hebridean wool in their January sales.
I'm into knitting up real proper sheep at the moment.
Anyway the cardigan has grown apace through all the Christmas TV viewing and I'm on the second sleeve, but to stave off knitting fatigue I slotted in the shoulder piecing and neck and button bands in between.
Here's where I went a bit off piste having decided that much as I love Pure Jacob with 50% Mohair in its natural state, this was all looking a bit too plain and samey and could use some imaginative enhancing.
I tentatively added a white stripe to the sleeve rib which then gave me the courage to go the whole Johnnie Boden eccentric for the neck and button bands.

Perfect for the task, some of the wool Offspringette had brought me back from the Shetlands.
I'd already got myself in a mess by transferring the Blacker's offset rib onto the Spin-a-Yarn cardigan pattern. Offset rib a new discovery and I will use it wherever I can for evermore and if you are not familiar with it and always produce wonky ribs that never look neat as I do, well it could be for you too. I've worked out this much, you definitely need the number of stitches to be divisable by four then add one (I've used 45 for the sleeves) and work 'K2 P2 to last stitch K1' every row.

Sorting out how many stitches I'd then need to pick up for the offset rib button band was a challenge that became an endurance test because offset rib is very springy and gathers in above and beyond the usual. It took three attempts, a lot of frogging, three complete films and my stitch numbers up from 85 to 105 before I'd persuaded it to lay flat enough and unpuckered of its own accord, without me stretching it and imagining it flat and thinking a heavy iron would do the trick...

and then remembered I hadn't worked the button holes...

Deep and crisp and even...

Deep and crisp and even for most of the country now and I know this is probably sub-tropical to Canada et al but night temperatures of -16 or lower are very unusual in the normally temperate Tamar Valley so we've had to do a bit of planning.

Wednesday night was definitely perishing, little Rusty was warm and snug indoors but the outdoor dogs barked us awake at 4am. I suddenly imagined them all standing there paws frozen to the run, or the water bowl iced and dogs gasping for a drink.
Whatever it was Bookhound had to get dressed and investigate.
In fact they all had a leap about in the snow before settling down in their straw...not Bookhound, I let him back indoors... so we had a cup of tea and all went back to sleep.
Since then we have borrowed a heat lamp from the farm, put all the dogs in together and we might all end up out in the kennel because it's very toasty warm out there now.

Rusty has had a walk out and thinks snow is the norm, grass is going to come as a big surprise and as you can see he knows who his master is already.

Magically still and silent across the back field and I know it's a nuisance and we're not supposed to be enjoying it, but this is the first snowtime I haven't had to struggle out to work and trek out to see new babies in the back of beyond and wreck my car doing it. Now working from home, I sit here in my thermals and don't miss a day.
It's costing the nation millions and everyone's supposed not to be coping and the schools are closed and our gas tank is eating £50 notes as fast as I eat crisps... thank heavens for those logs, and however did we manage in 1963 with knee socks and no central heating?
I'm remembering coal fires and a paraffin stove on the landing with net curtains frozen to the windows all day.
But actually I think people are coping and sometimes it's a beautiful nuisance and somehow this feels like the right way to start a year...hunkered down. I normally feel at odds with January, this year I'm strangely at one with it all.
Driving the Land Rover is for the bravehearts (not me) but it can get the two miles up to the main road so we have supplies.
We haven't had any post for ages and the dustman are a distant memory and naturally if the gas runs out, the pipes freeze or the electricity goes off, or we run out of chocolate then I'll be less enamoured; no power means no water for us so we'll be melting snow for pots of tea.


Rocky , that set of ribs on legs as you can see, is surviving with his inbuilt thermal layer of adipose tissue

and for cold nights only we've relented and made the cat flap two-way. Usually it's out and once out stay out..if he brings in a  rabbit he's in trouble and we know the take-aways are out there because suddenly the field is giving it all away.

Perhaps this was the cause of the 4am shenanigans...a single trail of small, neat and very deliberate footprints along the hedge, surely a fox?

Congratulations to...

...Anthea Bell.
So busy with the snow that somehow I missed Anthea Bell's OBE in the New Year's Honours for 'services to literature and to literary translations' and now the Times Literary Supplement's prize for her translation from the German of Stefan Zweig's Burning Secret. which I read and marveled at last year.
I always like to remember the translators, those invisible people for   'that intervention and careful mediation that allows me to read and appreciate yet again this amazing writer' so congratulations to her for all this well-deserved recognition.

The Convent by Panos Karnezis

My first sin of commission as I picked up the latest offering from Panos Karnezis, The Convent was to think I would be able to read it at the same time as The Abbess of Crewe by Muriel Spark.
Oh dear, oh dear was I in a tangle with my Mothers Superior Mother Superiors nuns in charge.
In the end The Convent won because what could be more enticing than the fall out from the 'surprise' left in the suitcase (punctured with airholes) on the steps of the isolated convent in an uninhabited part of the Spanish sierra which...and this might be a bit of a clue...had storks nesting on its chimneys.
Yes, what on earth were the nuns going to do with a ????
Can you tell that I'm desperate not to spoil this for you but it's nigh on impossible to say anything about the book unless I do and truth be told you know by page two that the nuns are about to unpack a newborn baby.
I had already tuned nicely into the writing of Panos Karnezis with The Birthday Party a couple of years ago and The Convent has confirmed early thoughts that he is a writer of great talent and scope.

I wrote then, July 2007,

'But Panos Karnezis then controls his material  well as he seamlessly moves between past and present to bring you the back story on a man with a very chequered past.'

and it all holds good for The Convent and despite the dissimilarities, no Greek tycoons to be seen here, yet it is the spotlight on human frailties, that means of scraping away the layers of artifice and reducing his characters down to their very being that Panos Karnezis achieves so adroitly, somehow he finds their soul.

As the sisters come to terms with the new arrival it swiftly becomes evident that this rather shadowy baby, more a presence than a real little person, is going to cause as much of an upheaval as it would in a family home, inducing change in both the people and the routine. Unexpected behaviours emerge and all those themes of guilt, love and forgiveness are explored as the past surfaces and stamps its authority on the present.

The greatest change is wrought in Mother Superior, Sister Maria Ines.
Devout and dedicated and a stern task master who, taking responsibility for the latest challenge, becomes increasingly isolated, creating an atmosphere of mutual distrust amongst the Sisters as her usually solid judgement wavers and their respect for her authority slowly declines.

'She began to mistrust everyone and became suspicious of the slightest sound:the rats in the corners of the room, the owls in the roof, the footsteps outside her door, the clanking of the pans in the kitchen. She trembled to think that someone might take the child from her. It was not an unreasonable fear. Sister Beatriz had told her that Sister Ana had been to the city and spoken to the Bishop.'

As her innate maternal instincts emerged along with details of her heartbreaking past I was holding my breath to discover what would happen, because despite not having given birth Sister Maria displays many of the signs of post-natal depression as she obsessively tends to the baby's every need. Mercy comes in many guises and whilst Sister Maria is convinced that the baby is her long-awaited sign from God, us readers know different.
Meanwhile resentments simmer away just beneath the surface and every less worthy character trait, perhaps submerged and veiled with the taking of holy vows, creeps out amongst the Sisters who just can't stop themselves. The jealousies and frustrations surface unbidden, almost instinctively as the Convent becomes less a place of quiet reverence more a sort of maelstrom of motherly and feminine anxiety much of which cleverly transferred onto this reader who was strangely fraught with worry about what might become of the baby.

There are two good plot curves which I won't even take you near but it's all beautifully written, slowly and very gently Panos Karnezis leads towards an ending that somehow has to be once the truth emerges; the sort or truth that had me wringing my hands with indecision. One of those books where you start imagining potential endings quite early on and mutter under your breath to the author (as if he's listening to you reading) 'Don't you dare...' and I couldn't possibly say whether Panos Karnezis did or didn't do what I was begging him not to, you'll have to read for yourselves.

One for the Nun's Shelf for sure, it has taken its worthy seat alongside In This House of Brede, The Black Narcissus, I Leap Over the Wall, The Corner That Held Them, The Nun's Story, Through The Narrow Gate, Lying Awake et al and of course any others you can add...

As the sun sinks slowly...

So the excitement's over for another year and I think we'd best ease back in gently.
The deccies are back in the loft but as the sun sank slowly on 2009...this was Christmas Eve, there seemed to be lists everywhere, the best and worst of ten years of everything, the decade reduced to its barest common denominator, those things memorable for their success or failure.
Frankly I'm having enough trouble sifting through the 2009 books, let alone what went before, and to list the year's best reads would probably be to replicate the Booker shortlist in part so I might not even try.
I cracked Suite Francaise and much more Irene Nemirovsky in January and had a privileged early read of Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows along with Doug Worgal's Thin Blue Smoke, both books touched different but memorable reading chords.
February was  Dave Boling's Guernica and The Blue Fox by Sjon as well as The Room of Lost Things by Stella Duffy
March was stuffed full of good reads and so I go on through the months and I could just go on and on; I'm not going to choose the best because this year has been full of 'best', the books don't get on here unless I have really enjoyed them.

But what about your great reads of 2009?
I must have missed plenty that you would have urged me to read if we had met, and thankfully many of you e mail me and do just that, but how about sharing some of your best reads of the year because I'd hate to think I'd missed some.
They don't need to have been published this year, just read.
Any good author discoveries, read one, need to read them all?
I'm going to start the ball rolling and silence Rev Cheryl in her tracks (sorry Cheryl I'm sure you'll be able to add another one!) because Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann came so highly recommended from over there in Cambridgeshire that I made a start on it over Christmas...over to you and here's some more of the white stuff in case you haven't seen enough.

and perhaps you remember this picture last week?

Here it is this week

Imran, leaping lords, piping pipers and drumming drummers and the winners are....

Rocky here...don't you think I look a bit handsome, sort of pensively deep and meaningful...I was just waiting and waiting for the crack of the lid off the Beef in Jelly can of Whiskas actually, but I have to play it cool. Not a time when I want to be fobbed off yet again with the rattle of those ghastly Munchie things or worse...and trust me this is terrible...Happy Shopper cat food from the garage.
Have you tried it?
No I thought not, go on just spoon some down and see what I mean, it's godawful stuff and who knows how much horse, elephant, giraffe etc I've been forced to eat in the last fourteen years. Make a quick move to the bowl and they think they've pulled off the Munchie trick , play possum, start the 'look at me routine', stretch the claws towards the sofa and be a nuisance and hey presto it's a tin of the real thing.
Greetings to more new friends too...Brutus, Oscar, Max and the elusive Rupert...hey chaps, us toms sound like quite a cool gang, hope you've all got baskets and rugs and things sorted your end, too cold here to move far from mine today, all this drama about the white stuff, just sleep on through life's little tribulations I say.
Anyone got one of those natty radiator dangly beds?
Or a little igloo house with a furry inside?
Always fancied one of those, fat chance here...what are you a real cat or a pansy they say.

Right let's get down to work, the last lot of prize draws and old Psychic Mike's been busy again with the random numbers and this will all keep her indoors cutting and pasting the right addresses into the right e mails for hours.

Firstly Imran Ahmad's very kind offer of a copy of his book Unimagined and an audio copy too and the winners are

21 Christine Coleman

24 Thelma (Psychic Mike often looks favourably on first and last Thelma, it's why we love him!)

Ten lords-a leaping and copies of Garrison Keillor's laugh and cry a minute novel Pontoon will be going to

4 Jan Toraason

13 Harriet Devine

23 The Dark Paw

33 terry go

Eleven pipers piping and ration books will be the order of the day as copies of Austerity Britain by David Kynaston head to 

8 Cheryl Collins (yay RevCheryl at last!)

28 Kate

53 Fiona

56 Ruth Ma

Twelve drummers drumming and don't you wish they'd just stop and go home, but that gorgeous, yes gorgeous picture of those me-like chums will be going to...well now please forgive the indiscretion people (and she's going to have my guts for violin strings over this) but I have flogged myself to a set of ribs on legs on your behalf this last few weeks and scant reward I get in this house for my trouble let me tell you. So I shoved old Mike the Psyche and his number generator out of the way because us chaps have got to impress a girl when we get the chance and we don't get many here so....er..and...well I closed my eyes and stabbed my paw at the screen and honestly you're not going to believe this but ..er...the winner is...er.......

25 Athena Pandora

So that's it my adoring public, Rocky signing off, all the draws are done, I know you'll all love your books when they arrive and I've been told I might be allowed the occasional blog post if I can come up with something interesting, meantime it's back to boring old books and reading for you lot tomorrow, never mind.

...twelve drummers drumming

Psst, Rocky again, bet you wondered where I was didn't you?
Well I've been everywhere, all over the shop, don't believe a word they say about me snoring in front of the fire here because we know different don't we. I've had a great time visiting you all, eating the delicacies which have been far nicer than anything I get here (huh) warming by foreign fires and meeting all your cats....sending love to Grace and Athena and all my new friends.
Anyway where are we, is it hens or geese or bagpipes today?
My thanks to Faber (and Faber) for this limited edition signed print by Axel Scheffler from that beautiful edition of Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.



Don't laugh but these are Jellicle cats, honestly what self-respecting cat would be caught lying on its back asleep with its paws in the air?
Not me, oh no fear.



Jellicle Cats are black and white,
Jellicle Cats are rather small
The Jellicle Moon is shining bright -
Jellicles come to the Jellicle Ball.

Jellicle Cats develop slowly,
Jellicle Cats are not too big;
Jellicle Cats are roly-poly,
They know how to dance a gavotte and a jig.

Names in comments for a chance to win this beautiful picture of me-like cats and then that's it, time to pack away Christmas until next year, down with the deccies, mothball the sleigh and thank you so much for joining in.
You may actually have noticed no sign of any books on the sleigh...sorry about that, all the publishers have been on two weeks holiday but it's all very organised here...well almost, only one or two natural disasters; the messages with winners' addresses are winging their way to the publishers now and the books will all be arriving any day.
It's probably a good moment to say a big thankyou to all the publishers too because I think we've given away over a hundred books in the last few weeks.
We'll close comments on all the draws this evening and announce the remaining winners later.

and the winners are...

We've just had a very exciting mass prize-drawing session, so hang onto your hats and here we go.

Eight maids-a milking and the OUP perfectly lovely gorgeous box sets will be going to

4 Lyn

13 Annabel

30 Margaret Powling

Right, are you ready for this?
Nine Ladies Dancing and 98 entries for the Margaret Atwood 70th birthday books, so Rocky asked the number generator for one number for the complete set

and the winner is....

trumpet fanfare and drum roooooooooooooooooooooooooll

28 Lena

Congratulations Lena, I'm sure you will love these and probably have to decorate a room to match!
Then we asked for seven more numbers and the winners of one each of the Margaret Atwood books are

5 Lizzie

8 Emily

22 Ellen Bernstein

30 Pat

48 Catherine

85 Carole D

87 Kathy Pereira

If you could check it's really you on the original post and send your address to dovegreyreader at gmail dot com and definitely put the title and I'm a Winner or something eye-catching in HUGE letters in the subject line and we'll do the rest.

Just Rocky's final Twelfth Day draw to go and we will close comments on that one tomorrow evening and then announce the last three sets of winners.
Also last call for entries to Imran's Unimagined prize draw and we'll do that one tomorrow too.

...eleven pipers piping

We're nearly there, our little Twelve Days of Christmas doors are almost all open and I hope you've enjoyed it as much as we have.
Tomorrow's draw will be for something slightly different but Rocky insists, so I'm giving him one last blog day while we take down the tree and co, before sending him up to the summerhouse to deal with the mice. I hear we have been invaded by a rodent battalion, latest reports from the Front suggesting that they have captured the bale of straw that 'someone' had put in there.
It is now occupied territory and I have no plans to go near.
I'm looking forward to getting back to talking about recent reads too, and pondering some new reading trails because I've had a bumper reading break over Christmas and New Year, lots of thinking time as well ...and I've knitted a cardigan (almost) so plenty to report eventually.

I hope you'll forgive me but I'm beyond looking for the links between the Twelve Days and the prize draw books now but I'll bet there's a bagpipe or a drainpipe or some other sort of pipe thing in here somewhere.

I am still enjoying Family Britain by David Kynaston and will continue to read it slowly through this coming year as well as catching up with the first in the series that I missed Austerity Britain.

And you can catch up too, or unlike me, start sensibly with Volume One.
My thanks to Bloomsbury for four prize draw copies of Austerity Britain, names in comments and the Utility Cat, whose biggest fear is food rationing, will do the honours.

Once in a very blue moon and the winners are...

Rocky dreaming of seven swans-a swimming and those copies of The Book of the Moon by Rick Stroud to sort out and goodness me, the Psychic Science Random Number generator is cleverer than I thought and sometimes turns up a nice surprise too, you've no idea how exciting it gets here.
OK I told it...I need 6 winning numbers between 1 and 50 and three of them must be living in the US and the other three in the UK or Europe.
So we entered the parameters and pressed the button and Rocky and I held our respective breath and purrs...
and would you believe it, I think we got it first time.

5 Lisa in Toronto (we've checked, no border controls for dovegreyreader purposes! )

7 Stacey (US)

11 Rosie H  (UK)

20 Sarah W  (UK)

32 Loretta (US)

50 IMRAN!!!! It's really you this is your lucky year (UK)

Check it's really you here , send addresses to dovegreyreader at gmail dotcom and having asked for the moon your wish will be granted very soon.

...ten lords-a leaping

I have a feeling Garrison Keillor might be on of those 'love him' or 'loath him' writers for many people.
Mostly I have loved him since first discovering Lake Wobegon back in 1988. There was plenty to catch up on back then and I kept up to speed too, but then I read one I didn't like and Garrison headed off into the wilderness for me.
He's back on song with me though, after my recent read of  Pontoon, and I have done a lot of that old wry smiling with a bit of falling about laughing at good old Garrison Keillor.

It's classic Keillor territory. Everyone from Lake Wobegon who may have escaped is drawn back eventually and that includes Barbara, Evelyn Peterson's daughter who has returned home to Minnesota after a lifetime of failed relationships and a close encounter with alcohol of all descriptions and in time to deal with the death of her mother.
Who'd have thought Evelyn had quite such a secret life?

'To look at Evelyn, most people'd never guess she had a Raoul in her life. She was a quilter. Summer, fall, winter, and spring, she and the six others in the Ladies Circle gathered in the Fellowship Room, cranking out quilts until she finally turned in her needles: she was 78 and her fingers hurt and besides, there was a quilt glut in town.'

Having stipulated that her ashes are to be sealed in a bowling ball and dropped into Lake Wobegon there is little doubt as the story progresses, everything is set up for a gloriously farcical Keillor final showdown.
My thanks to Faber (and Faber) for four prize draw copies of Pontoon.
I seem to recall that in 1988, when I first stumbled across Lake Wobegon, I was emerging from that three babies in four years mayhem and a good laugh was always welcome, so names in comments if you feel in need of a good laugh to get 2010 started too.

...nine ladies dancing

...and I feel sure you'll agree there are likely to be at least nine ladies dancing in amongst today's wonderful book selection and eight of you (male or female!) dancing out there soon.
But first and very importantly I have to say a Happy Birthday to Bookhound and here he is with the Kayaker.

We'll be scraping the icing off the Christmas cake (or would be if I'd made one) sticking a candle in and singing that song for him. He is a one-man behind the scenes support crew here at dovegreyreader scribbles, we'd be unlikely to eat if it was left to me, he offers massive and very important encouragement and support for the whole endeavour and he's always found my typos on here by 8am. On that basis I'm sure you'll agree he deserves lunch at the Devon Guild of Craftsmen today...at Bovey Tracey...and perhaps I'll nip to Spin-a-Yarn while he reads the paper.

Talking of birthdays, my thanks to Virago for today's prize draw. the very special Margaret Atwood 70th birthday editions of some of her best books.
Even if you've read them I think these are something to treasure for the covers and the colours alone which are saying Make a Quilt to me already.

The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, Cat's Eye, Lady Oracle, Wilderness Tips, Oryx and Crake and a book of poems, The Door.
Everyone will have their favourite book and their favourite cover but these are design magic and I love them all.

One complete set for one winner and we'll split up the second set and send one book to another seven winners, again it will be too complicated to specify so that will be the luck of the envelope, but eight very fortunate readers today.

and the winners are...

Copies of The Snow Geese by William Fiennes will be migrating to

9   Kathleen

19 diktynna

33  Laura

44 Caroline

Check it's really you in comments on the six geese-a laying post , send addresses to dovegreyreader at gmail dotcom and Rocky will accompany the birds on their passage...hmm, could be a worry.

New Year's Day stroll

Yes, we went on one, just a short turn along the lane with Bookhound and two dogs and that Rowan jumper.

All it needed was the sun's welcome brilliance on the eyes and the pure vibrant blue of the sky and all those pessimistic gloom-and-doom predictions for 2010 seemed to dissipate into the stratosphere.

We've watched more TV of late and there's a downside to it all.
I feel rather bludgeoned about the head, bruised and battered by all the climate change woe and the 'flooding of London in however many year's time' woe and the financial woe and war woe and nuclear proliferation woe.
Every time we switch on there's another prescribed dose of collective guilt and opprobium to be soaked up.
Of course everyone has to take it all seriously and we do, but in the end I think we've decided our best option is to try not to make any of those things worse and if it's within our power to do anything helpful we'll do our utmost.
I did a lot of gate leaning as you can see


I've kicked off the shoes and just had a wonderful read of Lisa's Team Ulysses posts and for anyone in mid-ascent I can highly recommend them. I feel in the zone, enthused and raring to go on this month's sixty or so pages and for anyone contemplating a read of Ulysses perhaps print them off and keep them handy because they have been like manna from heaven for this slightly confused reader.
GREAT BIG TEAM ULYSSES HUG & THANK YOU LISA IN OZ!
And my thanks to Catherine of Juxtabook for this lovely piece on our endeavours over on the ibooknet blog. and while I'm writing my thank yous I mustn't forget The View From Here Literary Magazine  who very kindly gave dovegreyreader scribbles their Gold View Award for 2009 and said very nice things too.
So it's home, I can hear Bookhound lighting the fire (and doing some hoovering???)  and an afternoon ahead to spend with my first new read of 2010, a book I always choose with care and as I started 2009 with Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, Home seemed the obvious choice.
There may indeed by a balm in Gilead but there really is no place like Home and I think I'm loving it even more.
Wishing you all a peaceful and  book-laden 2010.

...eight maids-a milking

A Happy New Year to every single one of you and yours.

Here's raising another glass to us all, wishing you much peace and goodwill for 2010 and as much happy reading as we can all manage.
Now, the eighth day of Christmas and I'm sure the milking maids are all in here somewhere.

An Oxford World's Classics boxed set each to three luck winners today and I think it might have to be pot-luck as to which one the winners receive or we'll cause big headaches everywhere and they could be bad enough today as it is.

These are perfectly lovely gorgeous things of beauty.

Essential Austen...Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility

Essential Bronte...Jane Eyre, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Wuthering Heights

Great Gothic Horror ... Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales , Dracula and Frankenstein

Names in comments as usual.

Happy New Year !