dovegreyreader scribbles

Comfort reading...

Inevitably, we are missing the old thing terribly and I hope you won't mind if I mention him now and again and I feel sure there will still be the occasional picture of Rocky on here. He was a real tart in front of the camera and I particularly like this one with his ear on the TLS.

So, no more thud of paws onto the worktop to help himself to a new dish of butter when the backs were turned (always a new one which then had to be thrown) and, despite having been 'done' as a kitten, no more furtive tom-cat marking along the lowest bookshelf in the right hand corner of fiction A-Z.
With apologies to Fay Weldon, her oeuvre has regularly suffered in this regard.
And now a sort of gaping space at the foot of the Aga as well.
This means you can now very easily get to the bottom oven, and likewise not fear dropping something on Rocky when you get a dish out of the top oven; you can cook without standing a foot away from the saucepan and gone is the fear that the boiling water might miss the teapot and go over his head.
All welcome anxieties that we'd become accustomed to.
But if we have been sad, that seems to be as nothing to the confusion of Muffin, Rocky's handmaiden, a year his senior but very much in his thrall, who would regularly curl up with him.
I'm not sure I had ever given much thought to how another cat might react in this situation... I mean how does it work?
What are they thinking?
Is it all about habit and a sort of sub-conscious constant proximity to something else warm and furry and purring?
If so Bookhound and I, and our other cat Tess (Rocky's sister, and seemingly OK with getting to the food bowl second rather than third now) seem to be poor substitutes, and Muffy has done a great deal of door-watching and waiting along with plenty of aimless wandering and pacing around the flower beds looking for him in all his old haunts since his departure. She even sat on his spot in front of the woodburner and watched the whole of Autumnwatch on TV the next night, perhaps in the hope he'd appear on the screen, and by this time I was beginning to hope he would too. We realised of course that they have never been apart, have been together here every single day for fifteen years, so it's hard to imagine what it must feel like, we can't ascribe human emotions to a cat but something must be happening in the pining department.
So we hunkered down last week and, with what must seem like indecent haste (on my part) had the big debate about when to start restocking our herd of ageing cats. It's all made us realise that our cat population is now reduced to two dowagers and we need to be thinking about kittens in the not too distant future, which has surprisingly cheered me up immeasurably, even if it also struck me very forcibly that when the next lot reach sixteen (deo volente) we will actually be seventy-three (more dv) ... tempus fugit very fast and it's pointless saying there's no use in thinking like that because I just couldn't help it. Not something that has ever occurred to me when thinking about pet acquisitions before, but the thought of a house without cats... well, living where we do it would be a house not a home.
Quite unexpectedly what happens next is that you then have no control over the direction your thinking travels. For several appetite-less days and wakeful nights there's no diminishing it or keeping it within the perspective of the loss of a much-loved cat, that is just the start of it because the sadness and melancholy rapidly connects to everything else that you love and treasure and have lost in the past, or may in the future.
I tell everyone else on a daily basis that that is normal, so I had to tell myself that too and howl it all out, and felt better for doing so, though poor Bookhound has had to keep his wellies on indoors and escape to his roof on a regular basis.
And, thank you again for all your comforting messages and e mails.
I know it's raised all sorts of old sadnesses for many of you, and for some a sense of dread that your own felines will be in this departure lounge one day, and I'm so sorry for those who have been really upset by it all as I know some of you have ((((((hugs)))))
The V.E.T. did several things that made a huge difference to our memories of that afternoon which are very quiet and peaceful ones, nothing traumatic, the gentle passing of a happy, purring cat in a warm sunny kitchen, and we did several things ourselves that also eased the way and I'm happy to share those with anyone off-blog, please do e mail me if you find yourself in that position and want to know more.
We've been blessed with an Indian summer here in much of the UK, and certainly in the Tamar Valley, since that day which has been really uplifting; a chance to sit outside and say 'serves me right for doing the summer-winter clothes swap,' time to get in the apples and do plenty of comfort baking and a bit of comfort reading which is really what this post was supposed to be about.
My huge thanks to Justine Picardie for answering questions in comments about Coco Chanel last week and thank you Team Tolstoy for a great discussion about our first thoughts this weekend, all fortunately prepared before the events of last week so ready to roll.
But it's all made me think about what makes a good comfort read and that has surprised me.
It's quite hard when your thinking is scattered with the distractions of a sadness that must be attended too, yet reading is a habit for me and one I can't quite leave behind, somehow I have to drag it along and make it fit the moment. Funny or light wasn't right at all, I needed a book that would chime with how I was feeling. I tried a bit of Barchester to no avail, War and Peace has been a comfort read before so I wasn't in the least surprised to find that ready and waiting, and I have decided to pick up and follow Roger Deakin's Notes From Walnut Tree Farm for another year having already done it once, but then I dabbled around with some new fiction.
To my surprise several very good books have emerged and seem to be working wonderfully which makes me think there's no rhyme nor reason to all this, no set reading recipe for melancholy moments, it's about what works for each person. I'd have put money on the English nineteenth-century novel but on this occasion I was mistaken.
Instead...
The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker, an Adele recommend when we met a few weeks ago, and I'm not sure I could have chosen something more melancholy and haunting yet so beautifully written, full of gaps and silences. The winner of the 2010 Impac Dublin Literary Award, a novel of 'restrained tenderness and laconic humour' according to J.M.Coetzee and the story of a man living on a remote Dutch farm with his ailing father.


Mr Chartwell by Rebecca Hunt, so far an impressive first novel that is knocking my socks off for its originality and has completely captured my imagination, don't be deterred by the idea of a dog knocking on the front door asking to rent a room, I can't wait to see where this one goes.
And Dark Matter - A Ghost Story by Michelle Paver, a riveting read that has me putting my warm woolly socks back on again as a 1937 Arctic expedition sets off for the remote and uninhabited bay of Gruhuken, home to the explorers for the next year and eternal Polar night is about to descend, but it seems they are not alone.
So that's me feeling much comforted, but I wonder which direction you would turn to on your bookshelves for moments like this?

 

dovegreyreading trails...

Do I have a keen interest in aviation?
Not really.
Would I happily sit at an airport all day watching planes take off and land and deciding which is a Boeing Thingummy or an AirWhatsit?
Probably not but none of that stops me loving John Gillespie Magee Jr's poem, High Flight, (he was killed whilst flying a Spitfire in 1941)

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings.
Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew.
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

Designated the poem for December 11th in Poem for the Day Volume Two, the book I have resting on the shelf behind the kitchen sink so that if you've got to be there you can at least read something nice, and this page stayed open for months,
And apropos of the flying connection, sometimes a book arrives out of that big blue yonder and knits together several others that have been lurking on the 'always meant to read' pile and a new reading trail emerges; all making one of the pleasures of a good book its hidden capacity to get me interested in absolutely anything if it's well-written and accessible.
So it was The Flight of the Century Charles Lindbergh and the Rise of American Aviation by Thomas Kessner (to be published by OUP on 2nd September) that started this most unexpected trail. Please note that I've tried hard to refrain from all the puns about the book 'landing' or the occurrence of a reading 'flight of fancy', it was tough but I've managed to stay grounded through this one.
Now I'll add to the list of doubts, what interest do I have in the rise of American aviation?
Not a jot, but I do have an interest in a life well portrayed. Charles Lindbergh of whom I know the minimal amount to be able to converse superficially and mostly gleaned from the film Spirit of St Louis starring good old James Stewart.
Well I opened it and that's been me done for over the last three days, unputdownable reading, a gripping and ultimately tragic and very poignant account of Charles Lindbergh's life, and my thoughts on the book on here soon.
But I have even more astonishment to share because it's now been confirmed and I want you to be the first to know ...at about 5.20pm local time, on May 21st 1927 Charles Lindbergh, piloting the Spirit of St Louis, flew over our house.
Yes really, and I'm some excited about all this.
Look, this very bit of sky and I've done a helpful little artist's impression to give you an idea.


'Well to the foot of our stairs I will go,' I exclaimed, 'He flew across Cornwall towards Plymouth, he must have flown over our house.'

Bookhound, by this time so beleaguered with 24/7 Lindberghia, knew exactly what I was talking about.

'Well, you'd need his charts to prove that.'

'They're in the book...I've got them here.'

Out came the magnifying glass followed by an agonisingly long perusing pause.

and here's the very delicately annotated version in case you want to verify.


'Weeeeell, I think that's quite possible, he'd certainly have followed the Tamar down to Plymouth, so he flew quite near.'

'Over...'

'Well at least past...'

'Over...'

'Oh alright then, Charles Lindbergh flew over our house.'

So, as I said, all confirmed and we might have a plaque made and put ourselves on the Lindbergh Trail
Meanwhile this aviation lark had me digging out a few more books that had been hovering (sorry).
With recent coverage of the anniversary of the Battle of Britain, The Last Enemy by Richard Hillary tells the author's story of his experiences as a fighter pilot, shot down in the Second World War and undergoing months of treatment for burns at Archibald McIndoe's pioneering plastic surgery unit at East Grinstead, hailed as one of the classic texts of World War Two, we'll see.
I'm inclined to weave in The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupery because I have never read it and I really should have done, and can I find a copy anywhere on the shelves here? No, but there's a new Collector's Library edition out very soon, lovely little editions and I assume unabridged.
Alongside that I'm dipping into a book I've been staring at as it awaits its slot, (sorry it couldn't last) Aloft by William Langewiesche, a reflection on the first century of flight and how flying has altered not only how we move about the earth but also our perception of the world and our place in it. Aloft as a title perhaps slightly misleading, this being more about planes that have failed to stay aloft, but it's equally riveting in this brave new aeronautical world I find myself in.
If I'm really feeling up to pursuing this vapour trail further I may add in Alain de Botton's A Week in the Airport, an account of his week as writer in residence at Heathrow, for which he moved into the Sofitel Hotel, the Terminal 5 outpost and to the sweet background rumble of a plane landing every minute.
He probably deserves a medal, as do all of you for reading through this very over-excitable mess of a blog post.
Chocks away and any more aviation reading to suggest?

dovegreyreading...

Some interesting new arrivals and real reading pleasure this week so I thought I'd share a few with you all in case anyone's short on ideas for a good book to read at the moment...as if.
I'm convinced I read differently in summer to winter and it's the arrival of some new Irene Nemirovskys that have made me realise that for reasons undefined, I store her up for the autumn.
Time to ring the changes in that case so I have two novels, The Dogs and the Wolves and Jezebel  and the short stories Dimanche lined up, along with the recently translated biography The Life of Irene Nemirovsky by Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt.

 

You may recall I was slow to warm to Suite Francaise, but once I'd bypassed the hype and found my own way in, and all about a year after the rest of the world, I became a fan of Irene Nemirovsky  for life.

I'm trying hard to keep my 'reading in progress' as varied as I can at the moment and that takes a bit of discipline. Before I knew it recently I found myself reading six books, all fiction, all by men and all tangling with each other for plot lines and characters...is it me or are men starting to write more about the domestic sphere?
Usually the women stand accused of that but I've picked up several books recently where the men seem to be getting their hands dirty with the 21st century domestic detail and all with a great deal of intensity.

Sometimes I feel sated with that 'intensity' so if anyone feels likewise and is searching for a heart-warming, beautifully written and slightly unusual book, then look no further than Mr Rosenblum's List by Natasha Solomons. I can't tell you how much pleasure this gentle yet subtle book has given me this week, quite perfect for sunny day garden reading.
Jack and Sadie Rosenblum arrive in England as refugees in 1939 and attempt to assimilate according to the Helpful Information pamphlet they are given on arrival. What follows is both funny but with serious undertones as Natasha Solomons cleverly exposes the follies of the British class system through the very confused eyes of Mr Rosenblum. Poor Jack takes everything very literally and at face value and of course it's not quite a simple as that.


Making sure I keep the non-fiction flame flickering in the reading pile, I love a good story about a house, its history and its residents; lived-in social history, the class system and its mores in action, such a good structure around which to drape the memoir of a family, and I was immediately drawn to Hancox, A House and a Family by Charlotte Moore.
The house is in deepest Sussex, not far from Bodiam, and still lived in by the author who has benefited, as does Port Eliot, from Hancox being large enough for everything to have been kept, nothing need be thrown away when you've got somewhere to put it...or as in our case, even when you haven't.
Bundles of letters turn up in long-forgotten drawers, or a photo suddenly examined closely reveals names and dates, and thus a story is fleshed out. I guess not every family has the potential to be interesting no matter how many letters turn up in drawers, but a family tree with Florence Nightingale and Barbara Leigh Bodichon gracing its branches, and Darwin and Kipling as friends, has potential, and Hancox is more than fulfilling that.
In fact I actually feel as if I'm prowling around Charlotte Moore's house and rummaging around in those drawers myself, I almost keep looking over my shoulder to see if anyone's caught me.
This one is proving perfect for those long sunny evenings we're having here in Devon at the moment, sitting out until dusk and really appreciating this run up to the Longest Day, the warmest in years. It's a happy moment when we remember at 11pm that the washing is still on the line and decide to leave it there until the morning, they probably did that at Hancox too.
So that's my reading week, how about yours...and all suggestions of gentle, subtle, undisturbing reads most welcome too.

 

dovegreyreading...

I haven't given you a glimpse of books arriving for a while but there have been some corkers through the door and across the counter too in recent weeks.
Firstly, better fess up to this little 'senior moment' and get it out of the way.
In London on Wednesday and a fine day with a little browse at the London Review Bookshop squeezed in and how can I possibly go all that way and not buy a book?
I know it's the current fashion around the book blogs to declare that you won't buy any books for a whole year, or you'll only buy a few, which is indeed virtuous but I haven't yet persuaded any of the abstainers to declare how many freebies are coming through the post which may help make that book-buying unnecessary. No such admirable restraint ever likely to happen here, and I see no point, when to pass money over a counter and be handed a book chosen by myself as a treat happily tops up the joy levels to the brim.
I think I'm worth it and no I can't afford them either if I'm honest, and I actually need one more book like I need another ball of wool really, but that's never stopped me in the past and nor does the arrival of free books stop me now.
I had to dig deep to remember the author's name but it came to me eventually and there it was, a copy of Stoner by John Williams in the coveted NYRB edition alongside Butcher's Crossing.
Both would have been nice but at £11.50 one would have to do because I'd already gone into meltdown at the V&A shop, so I left Butcher's Crossing behind for another day.
When we got home past midnight, and having left very early in the morning, there was the day's post waiting. Now I don't know about you but I often order a book from Amazon on a bit of a whim and forget I've ordered it so I was thrilled to see a little Amazon package in amongst the pile.
I know... it was the new book on Ted Hughes that I'd ordered, great.
No it wasn't actually...it was the copy of Stoner by John Williams in the Vintage edition that I'd ordered last week when KevinfromCanada mentioned it here in comments in the same breath as William Maxwell.

Now if just one other person could tell me they've done this too I'd feel a whole lot better very quickly. It's too much bother to send it back so someone somewhere will be getting a copy of Stoner for their birthday/Christmas or as a meeting gift (I always pass over a book when I meet any of you) one day soon.
Other books that have really caught my eye this week...
Always the Children - A Nurse's Story of Home and War by Devon-based author Anne Watts and it was an odds-on certainty that I'd be head first into this one, not least because of a connection I mentioned back in 2007 here. Anne worked as a nurse for the Save The Children Fund during the Vietnam war and subsequently among the victims of Pol Pot's regime in Cambodia, in Lebanon during the Israeli occupation and in Saudi Arabia during Operation Desert Storm. I've started it and I'll finish it, I'm gripped and having discovered that Anne lives just a few miles up the road from us I'm really hoping to be able to meet her eventually...and does that look like a vintage London Hospital nurse's uniform on the cover?

Next a book that feels so sensible I wonder a publisher somewhere hasn't thought of it before, or perhaps they have and I've missed it, Stories to Get You Through the Night published by Vintage. An eclectic mix of short stories from a wide and varied range of authors under headings various... stories to make you glad to be alive...to send a shiver down your spine...to help you rejoice in the beauty of nature...to read when it's all going wrong...to celebrate the joys of getting old. Authors include Kate Chopin, Haruki Murakami, Somerset Maugham, Elizabeth Gaskell, Helen Simpson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Alice Munro and many others and I really like the look and the sentiment of this book.
I know that many people who read this blog are unwilling night owls for one reason or another, and I suspect that this might be a handy book to keep on the bedside table for those darkest and often most difficult hours, when the ebb of the mood can sink to its lowest as the rest of the world seems to be fast asleep and you are not.
Now just how long have I been meaning to read a book by Iain Pears?
An Instance of the Fingerpost has been on the shelf since forever but the arrival of Stone's Fall in paperback tempts me with the allure of a death in mysterious circumstances, an unusual bequest and story that moves backwards in time from London in 1909 to Vienna in 1867 via Paris in 1890.

Finally, the Kohinoor diamond in this week's glistening reading crown, a beautiful finished copy of Theodora, Stella Duffy's new novel now graces my book table. I started a proof copy and new I'd love this but set it aside to read nearer to publication date which is any day now and I really can't wait a minute longer.
That's me with some good reads lined up, how about you ?

dovegreyreading...

I felt your pain...I really did...all those books jostling for your attention on here and no time to read them, so I'm hoping that this scaled back approach doesn't feel quite so demanding of your immediate attention and it gives longer to natter about the books in between too.
It's certainly working this end because I am hoping to dip back into academia this autumn and needed some time to gather my thoughts and explore routes to getting that coveted MA in English Literature in the bag before the next big 0 birthday.
Open University works well for me so it might just win and I'm getting the old buzz back, self-inflicted directed study plus their new Literature MA looks right up my alley, lots of variety and new trails and of course I'm hoping you'll all give me the answers when I need them and I'll just sit here with my feet up and let you write the assignments... will that be alright?
I'll credit you in the footnotes and you can all come to the graduation.
I did six years of study with the OU whilst working full time and raising teenagers so if I can't manage it now that I work part time from home and with Bookhound doing the shopping, well I need sorting.
So the pile of books I was supposed to be reading seemed to be self-multiplying and I was like a moth to a flame, dipping into everything that arrived and wanting to carry on with it immediately and in the end I had to give myself a very stern talking to.
The situation actually so serious that the bedside table looked like a pile 'em high shop display with no room for Bookhound to carefully place my breakfast tray, which is a serious matter so something had to give.
I've been a bit ruthless, quite a few half-reads that seemed likely to stay that way, books that started so well and fizzled, others that I want to slow-read, others that I've been reading for months now and they were beginning to feel like millstones making temporary abandonment the only route.
Plus plenty more William Maxwell and now Wallace Stegner, because Wallace is in the house and is mostly to blame for this along with all those of you who dropped his name into comments on a regular basis until I relented....bless you all.
The first few chapters of Angle of Repose tell me that I will love it but I've settled on a slow read of Stegner's Crossing to Safety now that I've completed my four week dawdle through William Maxwell's Time Will Darken It more of which soon.


I have more all jostling for attention on the ' American Boys' shelf on my desk too.
Who'd have thought it, suddenly it's the American chaps who are grabbing my attention and usually that's a group that frightens me silly...Philip Roth, Saul Bellow et al, except how daft to lump them all together. It's like suggesting that Sebastian Barry and Martin Amis rub writing shoulders...actually they might be best friends, I don't know, but I do know I read everything written by one and am scared stupid at the mere thought of the other.
With that in mind I turned to Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote, last read in 2001 for a book group and to think, Holly Golightly might have been called Connie Gustafson... good call Truman.
I haven't seen the film in ages but I have to own up Moon River just does for me every time so I'll be watching again any day because I've loved the book all over again.
 
Having just about recovered from 600 pages of Orley Farm, which was the Mystery Trollope I was reading over Christmas and which got 3* from me (that's highly recommended according to The Reader star rating), The Reader had very kindly sent The Thirty Nine Steps by John Buchan for the next Reader's Connect slot, a very welcome 90 pages...I could have kissed it and what a revelation of a read that's been.
Do you note I'm past tensing this reading?
I'm completing and finishing.
I suppose for many this might have felt like the reading doldrums, the 'blues' rather than Holly Golightly's 'mean reds', becalmed with books everywhere, but I have no problem sweeping aside those I'm not enjoying...even after a hundred pages or more, drawing a line and starting over.

That's me sorted for this week how about you?

Stop all the reading clocks...The Cuckoo Boy is here.

Sometimes a very unassuming looking book slips in through all the eye-watering dazzle and the glister and the crazy titles and the Booker hopefuls, and chimes in perfect pitch with that funny old thing called this reading life.
It's May Bank Holiday in the UK today and I spent much of yesterday welded to the first hundred pages of The Cuckoo Boy, the exciting (well I'm very excited) debut from Grant Gillespie and the first novel to be published by the To Hell With First Novels imprint.
You may recall I sardined into the To Hell With shop in London recently for the David Vann reading and nearly died of fulminating hyperthermia. The national grid took a rest that night and just plugged me in instead.
I'm quite likely to have sat up half the night reading The Cuckoo Boy  and doubtless praying I haven't gone out on a limb without checking the strength of the branch because I'll go doolalley (not pretty) if this book goes turkey-shaped, but once I've been to work this morning, I shall be doing a great deal more of the same today.
It's strangely funny but disturbing too and I can't quite decide whether to laugh (I have been) refer Family Gardener in to Social Services and call a Case Conference (it's my job, I probably should) or be very afraid (I'm very nervous) about what I think is about to happen. A fabulous concoction of emotions and observations, lots of nature versus nurture ponderings and a razor-sharp narrative voice to die for, which all adds up to my first truly un-put-downable new novel of the year to date.
I was actually beginning to give up hope.
Any other un-put-downables of the year to report?

All at sea...

We've had several relaxed and contented phone calls from the Tinker on board ship as he traverses the Atlantic and all seems to be going full steam ahead as he sails south into warmer climes, Having been to Madeira the next port of call is Antigua and the trip on the submarine. Mostly he seems to be watching the ocean go by from the confines of the sauna, followed by the pool and the jacuzzi, a bite to eat, a bit of shut-eye on deck, another bite to eat, a few pages of Wolf Hall on his balcony, more of the sauna, the jacuzzi and so on and forth.
This is the life well-deserved at 85 I say.
Meanwhile my reading week has been sporadically invaded as always by that thing called Life.

Lovely friends, lunches and evenings out plus racking up the performance standard at choir practice as the Vocal Harem Annual Gala Concert approaches.
 
If I had to choose the songs I have always wanted to sing in a big choir, America from West Side Story and Rhythm of Life from Sweet Charity would be two of them and...well who knows, we might.
And just take a look at our rather special guest soloist.
Bookishly, I'm revving up for this Sunday's NTTVBG choice to be hosted here, The Boys in the Trees by Mary Swan, so not another word about that until then.
Now I hope Rev Cheryl won't mind me mentioning that we had a delightfully cheery and very long phone conversation this week that proved dangerous all round.
Ostensibly it was about the possibility of giving a new home to a typewriter for Bookhound after the Norwegian Blue Imperial episode, which he was thrilled about, but I take no responsibility for the fact that Cheryl was online as we spoke and thus in a ready-steady-go position to buy almost the entire William Maxwell oeuvre as I was enthusing.
It works both ways though because I was frantically scribbling down Cheryl's recommends and dashed off to purchase the minute I'd put the phone down, in particular Writing in an Age of Silence by Sara Paretsky, which has since arrived.

Whilst I seem to be reading the US chaps at the moment, I'm also finding books on reading, writers and writing hold great allure and a book tracing a writer's journey from 'silence to speech' was going to be a winner. Rev Cheryl has also been impressing upon me for some time that there is a huge gap called "Sara Paretsky" in my reading life, so I aim to fill.
I also gather Richard Mabey may be another omission to be remedied.
I  read news last weekend of the latest Sylvia Plath recording to be made available by The British Library and ordered the CD immediately.
I find there is something beguiling about listening to Sylvia Plath reading her own poetry. An indefinable accent and ever the performance artist, structuring her presentation with precision and modulating the timbre of her voice with great care, Sylvia Plath left nothing to chance as she read, and as my collection of Plath readings are on old cassettes the CD seemed in order.
It goes without saying that I wasn't in the least bit interested in the recording of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes in conversation, the only known recording of them speaking together about their work, their marriage, their lives, and the impact of the arrival of baby Frieda, plus Sylvia's growing interest in bee-keeping and bee imagery ...no of course I wouldn't buy the CD just for that...
Other reading has seen me finally finishing Time Will Darken It by WillIam Maxwell, after a four week-long very slow and deliberate read.
Also that re-read of The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald.
Two beautiful books I want to think about carefully before I rush my thoughts out on here.
And on the subject of William Maxwell, my heartfelt thanks to Kamala, a U.S. reader who very kindly offered me a copy of The Element of Lavishness Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and William Maxwell and then so generously included I'll Stand By You The Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland in the package, thus diverting the books from their fate at her local library sale.

With apologies to potential purchasers in New Jersey they really do belong in Devon and Devon will treasure them. Do you know that feeling when a book parcel arrives and you almost want to cry with happiness...it can't just be me, and whoever said in comments that neither William nor Sylvia ever wrote a bad sentence was spot on.
Cornflower and I have postponed our Persephone Tea this coming week but will be back at the end of May with The Children Who Lived in a Barn by Eleanor Graham, but exciting news which I knew of some time ago and now officially announced, Persephone Books will be launching their own online forum on June 1st. Anyone is most welcome to join in a regular discussion of the books there starting with Number One, William - An Englishman by Cicely Hamilton.
So that's my week, how about yours?

dovegreyreading...

I'm in a leisurely reading mood at the moment.
As well as Jean Baggott's The Girl on the Wall, I'm still meandering very slowly through The New House by Lettice Cooper for the next dovegreyreader  & Cornflower Persephone tea and still have the new David Mitchell The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet chugging alongside The Concert Ticket by Olga Grushin...same as last week. I may set aside David Mitchell for a while, it's brilliant, fast-moving and dazzling but I am just not in the mood to be dazzled right now.
I've also been reading Kimbofo's choice for this Sunday's NTTVBG The Illusionist by Jennifer Johnston, so not a word about that before Sunday.
I've added in a work-related memoir, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken, about the loss of her baby at birth, which is matched up with Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking in the cover blurb. All too sad and challenging for many I know, but as I sit and 'listen' to real parents' experiences of a baby born sleeping, in amongst all the other sadness of life, four mornings a week now it can really help to find books like this and gain some new perspectives.
Of this book Alice Sebold says

' By the end of this memoir you will have held a beautiful child in your hands and you will have acknowledged him. This book is an extraordinary gift to us all.'

A few new arrivals have caught my eye as usual and perhaps it's going to be A Dangerous Year for Boys on this year's Booker longlist?
New novels from Martin Amis, David Mitchell, Peter Carey (this one looks good) a new one from Robert Edric, Salvage, which I plan to read carefully because I know I did his writing a huge disservice last time round in my brash young blog days of the first Bookerthon.
And now the latest Ian McEwan, Solar.

I'll own up that I don't greet them with the same degree of enthusiasm reserved for a new Byatt, Waters or Mantel but I'll be giving them all a go and I do have high hopes for some of them.
Solar, before I even get near the content, has a very interesting touchy-feely cover.
If you see it in a bookshop, just discreetly go and stroke that cover and see what you think.
Most odd but apparently we're in for womanising Nobel Prize-winning physicists so who knows what's in store.
There's a new book from Joanne Harris too, blueyeyedboy, and the title seems to be written like that, lowercasenospaces.
Right, I'll now confess that I haven't read Chocolat or even seen the film, so I'll just step back from the explosion of 'You musts' whilst adding that I tried Blackberry Wine and couldn't get on with it at all.
Please advise.


I'm also very taken with a book that would seem to follow on nicely from Helen Rappaport's Beautiful For Ever and fits my current preference for some non-fiction, Wild Romance The True Story of a Victorian Scandal by Chloe Schama, also indexed and referenced, which I always like.
Recounting the flirtation, secret affair and subsequent marriage of nineteen-year old Theresa Longworth and William Yelverton (later the Viscount of Avonmore) and the trials that ensued providing juicy scandal and yet more fodder for the novels of Wilkie Collins.
But there really is nothing to beat one of Adele Geras's 'Best Book Ever' emails, I love them and always follow them up because Adele is never wrong. So this message arrived at about 11pm one evening and by 11.03pm I had ordered the book and it's here,

Good to a Fault by Marina Endicott, Canadian, Giller listed, won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book and then slipped right off my radar, so my thanks to Adele.
Well that's me, how's your bookish week been?

dovegreyreading...

I have been disciplining myself to stop messing about and get out for a walk in all this glorious spring sunshine we've been having this week.
Grab a dog and go for a bimble along the lane, light on the back of the eyes...good.

It's been deceptively cold which was a good thing as I accidentally dropped the door key in the granite trough outside the front door as I was faffling around with my camera (better that way round)  and there it sat nicely on the ice ....

Did anyone else have a Troll all those years ago when they were the craze, and very expensive?
Then I've been out, not once, not twice but three evenings on the trot, including a planning meeting for this year's Village Show as I have been invited to join the organising committee, (think Vicar of Dibley and you won't be far wrong) so reading time has been at a premium. When that happens I want to be sure to be reading good books or I get crochety at fifty wasted pages of life and a book I am not enjoying and eventually have to give up on.
No time wasted this week though.
I finished Beautiful For Ever by Helen Rappaport, my thoughts on that on Monday and I'm delighted that Helen has agreed to hover around in comments during the day if anyone wants to chat with her, I certainly have my list of questions.
I hear the book bags are going from Long Barn like...well like hot bags, at the £6.99 buy one get one free offer, plus a whisper of 'dovegreyreader' also helps, and Helen's book currently also available there at the pre-publication special offer price of £10 inc. p&p.
One of the many joys of writing a blog is the unexpected arrival of a book you've been desperate to get your hands on, so when a signed proof copy of David Mitchell's new novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet arrived I just had to have a little look which turned into a big look.

1799 and Japan is visited by the representatives of the Dutch East India Company and I have been spellbound by it all, the setting, the dialogue, the repartee, it really is an 'extraordinary novel' and I think one of those I won't want to end.
I was in the 'I love Cloud Atlas' camp and the 'I'm not sure about Black Swan Green' camp so it's never a certainty that I'm going to love every thing David Mitchell writes, but so far so Booker, I feel sure this will be another for my longlist cometh July.
Talking of longlists, the Orange Prize for Fiction longlist will be revealed next Wednesday... so what's going to be there?
Any suggestions?
Back to my reading week and spoiled for choice I settled on So Long See You Tomorrow from the lovely box of William Maxwell books that arrived from Ellen in NY, and not realising that it's a sequel to They Came Like Swallows that's been an unexpected reading joy.

Talking of swallows and evicted wrens as I was on that post, I have exciting news to report...

...droppings on the wren nesting box, I'll bet that's made your day:-)
We think they may have taken up residence which is great news, it's heartbreaking to watch the swallows arrive, bully the wrens out of their winter squat and then find the tiny wren's eggs smashed outside the front door.
I also picked up The Concert Ticket by Olga Grushin 'just to see' , and seventy pages later I realised I was very late for everything else I was supposed to be doing.
A famous exiled composer is returning to Cold War Russia for one night only to conduct his final symphony and it becomes an obsession at the heart of Anna's family to get hold of a ticket. It's beautiful writing, every moment of leaden bleakness balanced with a joyful leap of the imagination interwoven with splashes of light and colour. I'm really loving this one.
So that's my booky-walky week, how about yours

dovegreyreading...

I was thrilled with the arrival of this one, but firstly I have to declare in interest in any book that emanates from Long Barn Books because, occupying a seat on the editorial board as I do, there's a chance I may have had a small say in the book's genesis.
So I did read the proposal for Helen Rappaport's latest book, Beautiful For Ever - Madame Rachel of Bond Street -Cosmetician, Con- Artist and Blackmailer and I added my hearty approval to the decision-making process, which all seems light years ago now.
Lured by the promise of beauty, the gullible rich came in their droves to Madame Rachel's Bond Street shop in the 1860s, face 'enamelling' at twenty guineas (£1500 today) a go a speciality, and it was all bound to end in tears, more about this one next week and I hear it has very narrowly missed out as Radio 4's Book of the Week.

The gorgeous cover designed by Emma Barnes of Snowbooks is a perfect fit for the book's themes and my copy actually nestled in this book bag...

... available to purchase from the Long Barn Books website should you covet one, and if you whisper 'dovegreyreader' in with the order there will be some discounted special offer arrangement.
As if this wasn't enough, the most exciting box of William Maxwell books arrived from Ellen in New York. 

"Beside myself " doesn't quite capture the dancing around delirium of the moment and my effusive thanks to Ellen were sent off in a trice, much more about William Maxwell soon.
Plenty more has caught my eye in this week's post too.
I've already read the first three chapters of Stella Duffy's forthcoming book Theodora for publication in June and it's a corker. I've had to drag myself away because I don't want to be premature with my thoughts on here and then find you can't get hold of it for months, so will read it nearer to its due date and be part of the big buzz that I feel sure this book will generate. The story of Theodora of Constantinople, the most powerful woman in the history of Byzantine Rome, forced into slavery as a child but determinedly in charge of her own fate and future. One for the wish list or to reserve at a library near you so then they'll have to buy it.
Another one I've been looking forward to so I was really grateful for a review copy of Dimanche and Other Stories by Irene Nemirovsky to be published by Persephone Books in April.
Then a deceptively diminutive little book with a big theme, Angels A History by David Albert Jones, published by Oxford University Press. Examining the powerful presence of angels in high art and popular culture and religion and spirituality, this one will be winging its way to a good home when I've read it. I have a very good HV colleague who, likewise fed up with clinical writing, pursued a degree in Art History, completing her MA dissertation on the representation of angels in Renaissance art. Let me tell you that used to be a welcome distraction at team meetings.
More angels but of the Barbara Pym variety, Less Than Angels in the new Virago edition and with a forward by Salley Vickers, what could be more perfect...

'Catherine Oliphant is a writer and lives with handsome Tom Mallow. Their relationship runs into trouble when he begins a romance with student Deirdre Swann, so Catherine turns her attention to the reclusive anthropologist Alaric Lydgate who has a fondness for wearing African masks...'

That sounds most un-Pym-like, I can't wait, but nor can I wait to open the latest novel from Jude Morgan, A Little Folly for which Jude Morgan has cast his eye over Regency London.
And whilst we're on the subject, I hear the paperback version of The Taste of Sorrow is now out and though I haven't seen it yet, I hear there's a comment from here in there somewhere.
So how about you, good booky week?

dovegreyreading...

Since I seem to be unwittingly wearing my unshockability, non-stick, teflon reading cloak this week, whereupon no angst or readerly desolation doth adhere or pierce, I've powered on with some of the more edgy books that on an ordinary day might have just cut to the quick and left me in bits.
Isn't this whole reading life so strangely unpredictable because I have picked up another of my prizes for Choosing the Booker Winner generously offered by KevinfromCanada on last year's Booker forum and it's a prime example of exactly how unpredictable.
When Porcupines and China Dolls by Robert Arthur Alexie arrived a few months ago, I opened it, quickly closed it and put it on the shelf. It's a novel which takes Canada's Native residential school history as its foundation, so I knew it would be brutal and honest and I haven't been spared, but in the week that Gordon Brown has issued an apology to the Australian migrant children, and film footage on TV that I could hardly bear to watch, how strange yet appropriate to be reading this book this week. I'm finding some very clever narrative devices which feel as innovative as Jon McGregor's in Even the Dogs, different and original methods of expressing difficult subject matter and new ways of saying the unsayable and I'm really impressed.


I am perhaps slightly less impressed with Paul Auster's latest novel Invisible though it's quite unputdownable, but my reservations might be down to a combination of subject matter and the fact that, in the context of other reading, my sympathies are incapable of stretching as far as moneyed, middle class suffering this week. However, though I've only read one other book by Paul Auster, (Oracle Night 2005, excellent as I recall) I do know that he is capable of the most incredible twists and turns in his writing so, with eighty pages to go, I'm reserving judgment and sticking it out to the end neath my teflon cloak.
I'm still reading Lives Like Loaded Guns very slowly and thrilled to discover from the pre-festival newsletter that Lyndall Gordon will be at the du Maurier Festival in Fowey this year, so have no fear I shall take you all along as well. But as a treat, and with Vanessa and Virginia by Susan Sellers coming up on the next episode of NTTVBG (over at Other Stories on Sunday March 7th,) I have allowed myself a Woolfian wallow alongside the delights of Emily Dickinson.
The biography Virginia Woolf by Anthony Curtis and published by Haus Books has me mesmerised as if coming to Virginia Woolf's life and times anew and if you are a Woolf novice, this would be a perfect book for filling in that background on her life and writing. The sepia-toned pictures are an object lesson in how to assimilate pictures into a book to create the most enticing of reading atmospheres, and though this picture isn't in there it's of the ilk and a real favourite that constantly speaks more to my reading mood than any other I can think of.
A wet winter evening and a book lover browsing outside a shop in Sicilian Avenue in Bloomsbury.

Over the years everyone but everyone has warned me off The Waves, citing it as Virginia Woolf's most challenging book..sharp intakes of breath followed by frightening admonitions of 'Don't go there'.
Well hang it all, I have dived right in and what's all the fuss about?
Perhaps this  reading is so much better because of the Ulysses experience?
Or did you all advise me so well when I was reading To the Lighthouse last year and floundering?
If so a belated thank you because whatever it is I am completely hooked on about ten pages a day of The Waves, look forward to picking it up, coping with form over plot and have completely engaged with the complexities of  writing style, and it's beautiful.
Now this is tricky, I wonder can you guess and in no particular order, I'm reading The Waves in one of these editions and I love the cover, I would be equally happy to read it in another though I don't have it but would now sell a cat for a copy of the third...

So how about you?
Good, brilliant, unusual or disappointing reading week?