dovegreyreader scribbles

A Midsummer Night's...

Well it's supposed to be Dream, obviously but I fear it may be Deluge given that the UK weather systems have apparently all slipped southwards and the jetstream is doing funny things, and with all this has come the interminable and torrential rain. Perhaps someone can explain all this to me as a sort of Idiot's Guide because I found this website last evening, while the rain was hammering down, and started to read, and watched the animation, but eventually decided life was too short for me to grasp the rudiments of weather-forecasting, so I went for a bath instead.

But I wonder, for today, would you all be so kind, regardless of creed or non-creed, to just send up an invocation or do a quick novena to Saint Scholastica who I have chosen from a seemingly wide selection of available anti-rain saints. She seemed to be the only one who didn't serve a dual role (ie anti-drought) plus when Saint Benedict of Nursia (that seems apt) was in his cell he had a vision of Saint Scholastica (who was his twin sister) on the night she died, heading towards heaven as a dove.

This seemed like a favourable portent too.

The thing is, this evening... and this seemed like a really good idea back in blazing, heat-wave-ridden March,  the Endsleigh Salon is off to watch a plein-air performance of A Midsummer Night's Deluge Dream to be performed in the terraced rose garden at Hotel Endsleigh.

'Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,
As in revenge, have suck'd up from the sea
Contagious fogs; which falling in the land,
Have every pelting river made so proud,
That they have overborne their continents...
The fold stands empty in the drowned field...' 

Goodness yes....just look how open and exposed to the wind and rain whistling up the Tamar Valley that lovely garden is...

Thus far I have lined up Bookhound's fishing chair, my fleece-lined trousers, several jumpers, boots, a fleece poncho and a plastic poncho to go over the top, my knitted Orkney ear flap hat and gloves and I may yet pack a tarpaulin or three. Oh yes, and sandwiches for the obligatory picnic and probably a thermos of soup, ready to hear Titania pronounce on climate change...

'Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,
Pale in her anger, washes all the air,
That rheumatic diseases do abound:
...as in mockery, set: the spring, the summer,
The chiding autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which...'

I have also been reading and loving Angela Carter's Wise Children, the most perfect accompaniment for the total lash-up that is Melchior Hazard's disastrous Hollywood production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and I have been in hysterics.

Which I will probably will be this evening too, but I've paid for my ticket and I will be there come rain or shine ...OK... if you could start sending up those pleas to Saint Scholastica now.

 

Lord of the Flies ~ William Golding

Hardly a seasonal theme but it's all in the luck of the draw, and at the Endsleigh Salon Christmas gathering last month we all pitched up ready to talk about our chosen Banned Book.

Some really great choices amongst the salonistas...
Catcher in the Rye by J.D.Salinger,
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck,
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H.Lawrence,
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou,
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury,
The Well of Loneliness by Radcliffe Hall,
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The Country Girls by Edna O'Brien

We blessed the American nation for extended the range of our choice so wonderfully. Typing 'banned books' into Google and the list was endless, books banned by American schools in different states gave us plenty of scope, Plus those banned in this country too...hats off to Rebecca for tackling Lady C and talking us through it all. And the bonus of themed evenings because what interesting conclusions we came too when presented with the wide range of reading that we had tackled between us, how several of the books were about imaginary and dystopian futures, as if the potential was all too much to bear. Plus of course the context of the era, many of the old literary taboos challenged and broken, and much debate about what might constitute a ban these days.

Angela and I had both chosen (this happens sometimes) Lord of the Flies by William Golding, and both of us had read the Folio Society edition, though I had written and underlined my paperback edition (even I can't write in a Folio copy and I feel sure Angela wouldn't do such a dreadful thing either). The novel banned in places various including Canada and in Florida for profanity, lurid passages about sex, statements defamatory to minorities, God, women and the disabled, an indictment against the Christian church and for its depiction of religion as an uncivilising factor... much of which had us a little mystified when we tried to pin it down.

But we had a great discussion about a book most of us had read as teenagers at school as a set book, and how fascinating this re-read has been for me over forty years on, and with sons of my own. I also love the timing of the publishing arc behind Lord of the Flies, or Strangers From Within as it was originally titled, first submitted to publishers in January 1953 and, after doing the rounds of them all, finally read with interest and guarded enthusiasm at Faber in late September 1953, when I was born.

Both of us on a nine month journey.

When the book was eventually published a year later and after a great many rewrites and much editing (I meanwhile was still being edited and not ready for publication) sales were modest at 4662, but the reviews were stellar, not a single dissenting voice. There was huge interest in the film rights though the censors were insistent on an X certificate, and when the film finally arrived in 1963 it was low-budget and privately financed. My thanks to Professor John Carey's excellent biography William Golding - The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies which provided some fascinating background material to my reading

For anyone who may not have read Lord of the Flies the story centres around a disparate group of schoolboys who have crash-landed on a desert island during a nuclear war. Left to their own devices the boys create rules, and a society and a hierarchy of their own, eerily based on what the adults in their 'other' world have taught them by poor example perhaps... or is it all a reversion to basic instincts, and that seems to be the focus of any study of this book.

My centenary edition has a great introduction by Stephen King who suggests..

'...a successful novel should erase the boundary between writer and reader so they can unite...should interrupt the reader's life, make him or her miss appointments, skip meals, forget to walk the dog. In the best novels the writer's imagination becomes the reader's reality. It glows incandescent and furious...'

Yes, yes and thrice yea, Mr King.

Some of our debate ranged around whether there was an ideal age to read Lord of The Flies, and is the book done a huge disservice by being thrust on as teenagers. What if anything do we take from it at that age, because for sure, we were given it to read as adolescents for a reason, but I would urge anyone to make room for a second read as an adult.

Angela and I both felt a little mortified for sharing the same 'most upsetting moment' in the book.. not the brutal death of some of the boys but the killing of the sow as she fed her piglets. I wonder why I had failed to be moved by that slaughter as a teenager whilst I had remember experiencing fully the impact of the other deaths. Yet despite knowing the ending I could feel my panic rising along with Ralph's as he, once leader, becomes the hunted. I was never so relieved to see that... well I won't spoil it for those who may not have read. And we wondered too how the story might have differed had it been a plane load of girls...

We also pondered how much scope there was a for a sequel and wondered why there hadn't been one. Having seen what the boys had endured there was much debate about the adults they may have become. Just what did they take from that childhood experience into adulthood with them, but given there has been a nuclear war who can know if there was a future waiting. Incidentally Faber are currently running a competition for 13-16 year olds to design a new cover for Lord of the Flies, the closing date is January 20th and there are some stunning designs in the offing one of which will apppear on the cover of the book later in 2012.

So a great evening as always, some in-depth discussion, plenty of laughter given the proliferation of festive earrings and antlers and a fascinating re-read for me... but would you tell us about Lord of the Flies and you ??

Never read??

Read at school??

Read again??

Memorable impact or forgotten??

.

 

Endsleigh Salon ~ Fashion

Sartorial elegance should have been our dress code for the night but it was March and we doth not cast clouts so foolishly early in the year for the Endsleigh Salon, so as I recall we all turned up in our usual comfortable array of woolly jumpers and woollier boots, because I for one can never be quite sure whether I will boil of fry in this beautiful early nineteenth century setting. Thus attired we set to with our evening's theme of Fashion but in fact we quickly peeled layers because our lovely friends at the hotel had given us the gorgeously stylish sitting room complete with log fire, so we were mildly blissed out by our surroundings...they really are very good to us and for that we thank them.

There's always a brief silence when we call to order after a quick catch up over the teapots...who's been on holiday... who's going in for surgery...who's fallen over on the ice and fractured their arm... and then someone asks 'Right, who's going first?' and there's complete silence until eventually somone pipes up and off we go.

Linda launched us on our way with The Way We Wore A Life in Threads by Robert Elms, a local library cast off and after a bit of a dodgy start the book came good as Robert Elms recounted his love affair with clothes, and those up-to-the-minute fashions that signalled membership of certain social groups which most of us could remember quite clearly. The tonic mohair suit, the Levis, the Ben Sherman shirt and the Cherry Reds all had us nodding at mention of skinheads and mods.

Jane (you will see there are a lot of other Js to come) took us into Linda Grant's world of The Thoughtful Dresser, a third time read for her before confessing that she worked in a clothes shop in town that the majority of us had never had the courage to go in because nothing in the window was priced (= expensive.) Only the rich can afford cheap shoes apparently and at all cost we must avoid the decline into beige as we age, but a fascinating account of how Linda's Jewish immigrant family dressed to assimilate.

Rebecca had read Elegance by Kathleen Tessaro and had been sufficiently impressed with the book to order the book on which the novel is based and uses extracts from as a means of taking the heroine's life whilst advancing the plot alphabetically through a lifetime of fashion...A Guide to Elegance for Every Woman Who Wants to be Well and Properly Dressed On All Occasions by Genevieve Antoine Dariaux, who with a name like that has to be the epitome of grooming I feel sure.

Then it was me and I had taken along Coco Chanel by Justine Picardie and probably gave a rather garbled account of an excellent book because it is a while since I had read it, but hopefully the gist was there.

Judith had read Cleopatra A Life by Stacy Schiff citing the idea of the fashionable woman of her time and was very impressed with the book, meticulously researched and a great read... we did of course stray into some debate about all those myths about Cleopatra and blamed Shakespeare for a great deal including the whole asp thing. No asp.

Jeannie had chosen The Clothes in the Wardrobe by Alice Thomas Ellis before discovering that the book wasn't really about clothes as much as the central theme of a wedding and a mis-matched couple. However the book was so good she carried on knowing there were bound to be some references to dresses which, with group latitude allowing for interpretation of themes, was fine with us. Interestingly several of us had read Alice Thomas Ellis voraciously back in the 1980s and wondered quite how she seemed to have gone out of fashion now (forgive the pun.)

Jane had endured sterling toil on our behalf, having done a last minute dash to the library and grabbed the only book she could see on fashion which happened to be Through Thick and Thin My Autobiography by TV fashion celeb Gok Wan. Jane then proceeded to soldier on through the life of a man who she couldn't help feeling quite sorry for but truthfully didn't really warm to. Perhaps it all epitomises the cult of celebrity, that craving of approval, the hatred of criticism and a man who only really revealed what he wanted in the book (autobiography so his perogative we all agreed) including the fact that originally weighing in at eighteen stone severe anorexia followed; a diet of honey and fifty laxative pills a day leading to the loss of  ten stone in a year. Much discussion followed about Gok's TV series and how so much of what he does is about self-esteem and making women feel good about themselves when much of the time he seems quite fragile himself... all fascinating.

Chris had opted for the fashion of architecture (clever eh, and why we love our themed reading approach) and had read and loved The Glass Room by Simon Mawer and as quite a few of us had read it we had some interesting discussion about the way that the book had left us all feeling we wanted to see the house, and had then all dashed off to google it.

Karen had acquired her book after an unfortunate incident in a charity shop wherein her son had toppled a great pile of books and she thus felt obliged to at least buy one to make amends. In fact it was 99p well spent because Things My Mother Should Have Told Me proved to be hilarious. One of those 1920s and 30s handbooks full of little epithets of the moment about sweeping your house daily and dressing nicely to go to the shops, so much hilarity ensued.

Almost as desperate for something to fit the theme, and also drawing a blank at the library, Jean had discovered In Vogue - Six Decades of Fashion by Georgina Howell on her shelves and took us on a wonderful tour of fashions we have known. Much debate about the present-day value of what we may all have thrown away in our time, and how years ago many of us would happily trek off to buy the Butterick pattern (do you remember the fuss the shop assistant used to make about stamping "Cannot Be Exchanged " on the envelope?) and a few yards of fabric to make our own clothes. Jean very versatile in this respect though her son still hasn't forgiven her for the crochet fig leaves that she knocked up so that he could enter a Pontin's Holiday Camp fancy dress competition.

And lastly but never leastly (if there can be such a word) Angela having just returned from a two week pre-earthquake holiday in Japan had taken along The Hare With Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal as her reading for its netsuke connections (yes, we all said netski) and having reached the end, turned right back to the beginning and read the book again. Advancing the suggestion that this book is about a fashionable lifestyle, we were all entranced, and of course it is about fashion and much more besides. I'm reading this one very very slowly at the moment, rationing myself to a chapter a day and then indulging the thinking and other bookish trails that it opens and I'm thinking I will hardly be able to leave the company of the Ephrussi family when it ends.

April's theme is The 1950s... all suggestions welcome. So much choice I don't quite know where to start.

 

 

Downton Abbey redux... Searching for Grace ~ Carol Henderson & Heather Tovey

It's Endsleigh Salon this evening with the delicious theme of 'Guilt' and I have decided that I will make this book fit the theme because I think it's clear for all to see that several people may... just may, have felt enormous guilt about their part in the story I am about to recount.

We'll be sipping tea ourselves down at Hotel Endsleigh and you might also need a pot of your own for this one, and you'll have to concentrate for this first bit because I need to explain quite how this book arrived in Devon because I was asked if I would like a copy of the memoir Searching for Grace by one of the authors, Carol Henderson. Carol is a friend of the daughter of a retired GP fisher-friend (whose family are mentioned very briefly in the book) of Bookhound's...are you with me? Carol e mailed me about the book from her home in Wellington, New Zealand and then very kindly sent a copy which duly arrived in that huge sack of post we eventually had to drive through snow to collect for ourselves on Christmas Eve, and I was delighted that it did because here was more lovely Christmas reading.

Searching for Grace a book I'm about to explore in more detail than usual here because it is currently not readily available in the UK, (though if you're in New Zealand you're in luck)  but one that definitely should be for the light it shines on a period of time that's much in our national consciousness right now, with Downton Abbey conversation everywhere and a second series to come. Reading it proved to be the perfect adjunct to all that Christmas watching, because it's not only contemporaneous with the era, thus offering further fascinating insights into the lives of the privileged, but it's an extremely well written memoir and I couldn't put it down.

Have you ever wondered about the fate of those children born out of wedlock to the Edwardian aristocracy who were then silently whisked away into obscurity so that the season could continue, the presentations at court needn't be interrupted, the lovers could still be bedded and the summers could still be spent languishing on the Riviera? I'll admit I hadn't given it much thought at all until Carol's book arrived and I settled down to read the poignant story of her mother Heather Tovey's life.

The family memoir predominantly written by Heather (nee Campbell) who was born in London on... well when was Heather born? She thought it was March 3rd 1911 but had no birth certificate to prove it, and nor could Heather apply for one from Somerset House because they held no record of her birth. When Heather came to apply for a new passport in New Zealand in 1975, the country where she had lived for nigh on forty years, that lack became the focal point of her story as she proceeded to trace her life back to those earliest memories of growing up in Edwardian London in the care of three sisters, one of whom she knew as 'Mummy' and who had indeed been loving, but in a strangely remote way.

Slowly the mystery unfolds as Heather travels to England at the age of sixty-four to search for her roots and her past. What became apparent as I read was just how important known parentage and identity can be and how unsettled and rootless it is possible to feel without those constants in your life. Heather had grown up with secrets, a child's awareness that all is not quite right, the brick wall when the questions are asked and this coupled with the knowledge that Heather unearths, that she was indeed a child of the aristocracy, all had me deeply engrossed in this very readable book.

Heather had long suspected that she may be an illegitimate child of a daughter of the Maple family, the owners of that great furniture empire, in which case she had unwittingly met her mother Lady Grace Weigall in her Hill Street home in Mayfair on many occasions. The GP and family friend who seemed to have acted as her guardian and provider, Dr Leonard Boys, had more than a passing interest in her welfare too though he was not her father. Grace had been three months pregnant with Heather by an unknown man when she married Sir Archibald Weigall in 1910, and indeed there are pictures in the book of Grace, heavily pregnant with Heather, as she accompanies her new husband on the campaign trail that will see him elected as an MP.

Dr Boys had been present at Heather's birth and had then immediately taken her in the hushed hours of night, wrapped in a shawl and still unwashed and unfed from the delivery room, to the waiting family of spinster sisters with whom the care arrangement had been made. Most heartbreakingly Heather had also unwittingly played with and wrapped her dolls in that black shawl for many years without knowing of its greater significance.

Quite who takes responsibility for the non-registration of the birth is a debatable point, I have always thought it was the parent's responsibility but Dr Boy's collusion with the circumstances and his professional accountability is much-debated in this book, as is his role as the go-between. Forgive the pun but the saving grace is that Heather and her carers are well provided for and it is Dr Boys who keeps the supply of money flowing from an unknown source and maintains a watchful eye over proceedings in a sort of god-fatherly way, whilst taking his vow of secrecy concerning Heather's parentage to the grave. It is his widow who finally tells Heather the truth about her birth mother and as for Heather's father, his identity remains uncertain, though there was much speculation and plenty of titled men in Grace's life to choose from.The potential scandal can only begin to be imagined had it got out, and quite what everyone who knew her thought Grace had done with the baby born six months after her marriage remains open to speculation.

The book is full of deeply poignant reading as Heather imagines and describes some of these key moments in her young life and who can know how painful that may have been for her to recount.Then there are the ongoing uncertainties and insecurities that Heather has taken into her adult life, lying about her age and secretly marrying the New Zealand artist Gordon Tovey before emigrating to Plimmerton, north of Wellington in New Zealand, to start a new life with him at the age of eighteen. Except Heather has more baggage than she can have possibly imagined, and through her life the leaden weight of that starts to increase until it becomes an almost intolerable burden. The letters to Heather in New Zealand from Mummy urge her to put it all behind her but, as the written words traversing thousands of miles become the vehicles of confession and admission of so many of the secrets surrounding Heather's origins, she is most certainly unable to do that.

The veneer covering Heather's insecurities is often painfully thin and easily scratched to reveal the rawness of what lies beneath, as when she gives birth to her own daughter Carol, the co-author of this book who inherits her mother's cause and researches it further after her death. Or when Gordon sinks into alcoholism and takes a mistress to which Heather displays a limitless degree of tolerance and capacity in coping with his infidelity, perhaps deeply rooted in the infidelities of those who have treated her so badly in her own past. Whilst it's easy to read a book like this and impose your own emotional coping strategies, Heather clearly had her own methods too and used them to shore herself up and protect herself from further hurt.

Knowing and finding her family becomes an obsession that will haunt Heather for the rest of her life, and when she does find a sister, Priscilla once married to Viscount Curzon, and is initially welcomed but subsequently rejected, the pain makes for very sad reading. Priscilla's assertion that if only she'd known of Heather's existence she could have given her a great deal of money when it was distributed from the estate, to make up for the little that Heather had received, somehow misses the point entirely... this was about something no amount of money could buy, it was about belonging.

In fact Heather taps into a seam of sadness, despair, depression and instability within that extended family that perhaps has its deep roots in the fickle nature of those moneyed ancestors. Lady Grace Weigall,
Heather's mother, a wealthy serial adulteress with a string of country seats (now luxury hotels Petwood in Woodhall Spa in Lincolnshire, Engelmere in Ascot) and plenty of lovers to meet there, reminded me slightly of Idina Sackville of The Bolter fame. When I read that at eighteen months Heather had almost been whisked back into the aristocratic fold but for Mummy's protestations at the damage it would do, I could only but think what a fortunate escape that had been for her. Whether Heather was ever able to see it in that light seems uncertain, and indeed it is Carol who takes up the burden of the past after Heather's death and finally achieves that search for a different kind of grace, along with some sense of closure for the family and in honour of her mother's memory.

So forget all the fictional accounts, here is a true story, wonderfully written and a brave and honest indictment of  a time when class was everything, when reputations and social standing for those classes in society took precedence over all else, when an unwanted child's life could be spirited away out of sight, when money could buy silence and secrecy and when lives could be cruelly manipulated beyond the grave. A powerful and really excellent read about Heather Tovey (nee Campbell) a woman of indomitable spirit, and my sincere thanks to her daughter Carol for sending me a copy.

The Endsleigh Salon Christmas Extravaganza.

It's tonight and I am more excited than is good for me, the Endsleigh Salon Christmas gathering of the book group with a difference and we have been looking forward to this almost since the last one, the highlight of our year and for 2010 we are pushing the boat out very big time.

First up, the Secret Santa limit is as usual set at £1.50 for the Christmasiest giftette you can find. Then same room, same place, same time and having always threatened to have ourselves a theatrical evening and read through a play, tonight's the night. Thespians the lot of us thanks to Faber who came up with the perfect production for us when I asked if they could suggest something funny and suitable for about fifteen people. A stroke of brilliance from the drama department and their suggestion of The Madness of George III by Alan Bennett went down a storm with the salonistas.

So we will be performing to an audience of no one but ourselves from scratch, no rehearsals, nothing and it all promises to be hilarious.

Look, even Alan Bennett is looking forward to a complete massacre of one of his many masterpieces...

What could be better and more perfectly contemporaneous with our surroundings?

Imagine Georgiana's early 19th century weekend houseparties at Endsleigh Cottage, her holiday retreat deep in the Tamar Valley. Someone from the village has spent three days plumping up all the feather mattresses (yes really) the Bedford's staff have all arrived in convoy followed by the guests travelling down from London with all the latest gossip about events at Court. Surely they would have talked about George's rather embarrassing ailments, and doubtless in the very room we sit in and to the background of the very same listed wallpaper, whilst looking out of the same windows onto the same gardens...

'My dear...you should have seen him...yes...in his nightshirt they say... and the water... well we're told aubergine is the new purple... darling, I'm thinking of having the drawing room painted in that new colour from Farrow & Ball...King's Kidney.'

Anyway we have embraced the thespian challenge with much enthusiasm. A theatre company's costume department has been raided for a few wigs and frocks, the ubiquitous nightshirt will doubtless be much in evidence and we're all bringing along 'a prop' each ...watch out for a dozen chamber pots. To avoid tantrums we are drawing lots for the parts as we arrive tonight, and will probably have to play several each but we'll get around that...

Curtain up and pictures to follow of course.

Hotel Endsleigh Dinner

I am so far behind with Endsleigh Salon updates it hurts but it's that Tuesday again, this evening's theme The Deep South and my money's on at least one reading of Gone With the Wind... well I hope so because I haven't read it since I was sixteen and I'd love to mull it all over again without all the teenage angst getting in the way.
Except, it's all a bit of a clash tonight because not only do we have choir practice, but great excitement because the Tour of Britain cycle race is passing through Tavistock overnight, so the roads are closed and we all have free tickets for the concert in the Square. Local lad done good, Seth Lakeman will be playing and as I am a huge fan and have been playing the latest CD Hearts & Minds ad nauseum we have decided us aging rockers could be tempted to go to a gig.
A few weeks ago Bookhound and I were invited to another gig, a dinner at the hotel with guest speaker, Rachel Trethewey author of the Mistress of the Arts, the book about Georgina, the sixth Duchess of Bedford. Rachel's book the reason we all know locally that years ago it took someone from the village three days to plump up all the feather mattresses when the Bedfords were planning a local sojourn in their holiday cottage. It's a wonderful book and one that we've all read and enjoyed.
Fascinating then to hear the background to the writing of the book, the countless phone calls around the museums to check the existence of letters from Georgina which unearthed some really unexpected gems, including the love poetry of one ardent admirer of the Duchess (one of many it seems).
Lord Holland fired with the sort of imagination you'd want an admirer to possess when he manages to capitalise on the shortage of words to rhyme with Duchess, and so settles frequently on 'crutches'.
The research proved an invaluable insight into Regency life with marriage for dynastic reasons, for life and for the heir and the spare, but infidelity rife and accepted practice.
Incidentally, for our Christmas gathering this year the Endsleigh Salon plan a reading of a play.
We've been threatening to do it since we started, so when I was visiting Faber (& Faber) on a recent London trip I asked if they could suggest one that would have plenty of parts and plenty of laughs. Faber have done us proud because a few weeks later a dozen copies of The Madness of George III  by Alan Bennett arrived. Completely contemporaneous to the venue and who knows, probably the subject of much discussion amongst Georgina's houseparty guests as they sat in that same salon room that we do. Anyway our imaginations are fired and running away with us, the evening likely to be hilarious, especially as we will doubtless be dressing accordingly and taking along one prop each (not much room for a complete set)
In the end, after fruitless trips to Ireland and the archives of the Abercorn family, into which Georgina's daughter had married, it was the Devon Records Office that produced the research jewels for Rachel Trethewey, an archive of every bill and receipt for monies paid out by the Bedfords in the construction of Endsleigh (incidentally 200 years last Sunday since the laying of the foundation stone) In total £120,000, the equivalent of £4 million today.
Within those records fascinating details...
Georgina joined the Tavistock Subscription Library
Her favourite scent was Esprit de Rose
She regularly bathed in asses milk
But all was not lost on the research trip to Baron's Court in Ireland, the seat of the Abercorn family. Here were revealed the sketches by Edwin Landseer, almost certainly Georgina's lover (yes, another one) and whilst poetry may not have been Edwin's bag, art was and the sketches revealed an intimate, tender and sensuous evocation of their love, much like a photo album. The drawings seemed as fresh as the day they had been drawn and in the words of Rachel Trethewy, the 'distance between the past and the present evaporated'.
Georgina, exiled from Endsleigh by the family after the death of the 6th Duke, died in Nice in 1853, sadly a trip to Nice could not locate her grave.
So a fine time was had by about sixty diners, plenty of interesting questions and it was good to chat to Rachel again after meeting up at Dartington earlier this year too, and I finally managed to get my copy of the book signed.
Then time for home...but we had parked in the rather more distant and uphill, woodland car park...in daylight.
By now pitch dark the hotel came to our rescue with a small lantern which helped a little once Bookhound realised he was holding it back to front and illuminating the path behind us.
But still velvet darkness and a deathly hush as we inched our way  up the path, trying to remember if there had been a fifty foot drop to one side or not, and felt our way around the carriages until we thought we'd found ours, which we did eventually.
Not hard to imagine ourselves back 200 years at all.

Endsleigh Salon ....Plague & Pestilence

With grand designs on turning up at last month's Salon as the acknowledged expert on plague, buboes and rats, I was thwarted by tempus fugit and failing to carpe the diem in my attempt to fully digest Benedict Gummer's The Scourging Angel The Black Death in the British Isles, but in the event my failure hardly mattered.
It was with huge sadness that we learnt that one of our members, who had joined about a year ago after reading about us here, was now seriously ill in hospital and battling cancer. None of us had the first inkling... V always radiant and animated, a picture of health, but we reflected for a moment on some of the far-reaching discussions we have had over the last year, and how much courage it must have taken for her not to reveal that fight, or how it may have impacted on us a group and the freedom of our debates if we had known.
We all signed a card, but sadly V died peacefully the next afternoon.
So at our meeting this evening, (with the prior permission of V's husband and the hotel management,) we will be inscribing and quietly placing two of V's favourite books on the library shelves at Endsleigh, in memory of her love of books and reading, and her vibrant and enthusiastic contribution to our Salon evenings... those two books, chosen by V's husband, The Little Friend by Donna Tartt and The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer.
It took us a while to get going after that news and of course still unaware quite how near the end was for V so talking hopefully of sending her books to read, but we headed on into Plague and Pestilence and with perhaps one of the biggest plagues of our times at the forefront of our minds.
In a state of shock I kicked off to rather a lame and halting start with Always the Children by Anne Watts attempting, but possibly not succeeding instantly, to highlight the ravages of war and disease that permeate Anne's book. Thus I wasted my slot and kept piping up all evening '...'oh yes, well that's apparent in this book too.'
Rebecca added to the disease register with The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson, delineating the history of cholera and its spread from the Broad Street pump which finally gave the clues to the origins of the disease.
Next up The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald for its portrayal of a young girl with TB and much debate about the scourge that was TB, and the scourge that it could yet become again as disease mutation and resistance to all and sundry seems to be a risk these days. The book had much impressed the reader and so we had a little eulogise about Penelope Fitzgerald while we could.
Jeannie then stepped in brandishing Angel of Death by Professor Gareth Williams, a history of smallpox... I'll bet you're wishing you'd been there now aren't you, things were getting scarier by the minute, because of course who knows who keeps a bit of the supposedly eradicated smallpox on the side for some illicit germ warfare. There was a flurried rolling-up of sleeves amongst the more senior members to reveal vaccination scars, all apparently now useless should there be an outbreak, which led to some disappointment amongst those of us marked for life at a tender age. Jeannie brought much-needed mirth to the proceedings by bravely revealing that as a four year old in the 1950s, she had played the starring role in a government sponsored public health film on the dangers of smallpox.
We were all incredibly impressed to be in the company of a Shirley Temple starlet, though Jeannie quickly disabused us of any notions of grandeur because sadly it was never shown to the public, and seeing it for the first time recently Jeannie was able to deduce why. As the fatally ill child actress is carried in the arms of her distraught mother and clutching the offending and germ-laden toy rabbit brought back as a gift from overseas, the prostrate, pox-laden floppy child lifts her pox-laden head and flashes a beaming smile of complete happiness at the camera....CUT.
This quite diverted us from too much in-depth debate about bio-terrorism as we really did all want a good night's sleep.
Next up The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner and I didn't write much because I was too engrossed in the Sylvia discussions, but something ravaged through that convent for sure. It's a book I only have in an edition with very dodgy tiny print and I have been searching for a better one ever since. I got as far as the tower falling down and gave up last time I tried to read it.
Then for our delectation The Ninth Life of Louis Drax by Liz Jensen, which, set in a hospital coma clinic, felt plaguey and pestilentialy enough to make the cut and came well  recommended as was Blackwater Rising by Attica Locke...I think... Rebecca will help me out here...
The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis was a winning Sci-Fi combination of bubonic plague and a mutant flu virus with some time travel thrown in that involved Oxford in 2056 and Medieval England, and you probably still had parking trouble in the middle of the city. Our resident speech therapist wanted to know ' Did she have to learn medieval English to communicate?'  I think it was an affirmative.
Poor Karen, fancy telling someone the topic is Plague & Pestilence and they say 'Oh I've got the perfect book for that' and lending you a copy of The Plague by Albert Camus...
Oh b%&*$%...her word not mine, but surprise surprise, readable, good story, beautifully written, not bleak and highly recommended, who'd have thought...
Last but not least Angela brings back The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer for the second time and reads us the Health chapter...something about flaying a fat cat and drawing out the guts, mixing in some bits of bear and then stuffing and roasting said cat and anointing ill people with the dripping... I might have got that slightly mixed up with something I saw on Hugh Fearnley Eatitall Whittingstall, but it was hilarious as usual and just what we needed, though we're all agreed, Angela's in trouble at any attempt at a hat trick to make that book fit three separate themes, tonight Immigration & Emigration.

Endsleigh Salon update...London

I think I'm a few Salons short of a full house having sacrificed  May (theme ~ Road)  to the final pre-concert choir practice, and realising I still hadn't brought you news of April and the theme of London, and look it's June already which means Plague and Pestilence this evening.
Going back even further, here's a soothing picture of the recently restored Endsleigh rose walk taken last year, and don't miss the little bit of film over here >>>>under 'Seeing' if you missed it. The gardens have slowly been restored in accordance with Humphry Repton's original and very detailed early eighteenth century plans, a place of breathtaking beauty with surprises around every corner.

I do make a wild assumption that everyone knows what the Endsleigh Salon is... a monthly book group with a difference which meets at our local inn, the difference being that we read around a theme rather than a single book and it's a magic formula that works. It means you can read a book of your choice rather than have to slog through one chosen for you that may not be to your preference, and the discussion can lead off all over the shop and that's fine too.
So off to London and Linda kicked off with her choice Balthazar Jones & the Tower of London Zoo by Julia Stuart and gave it a real thumbs up. It's fiction, Balthazar, married to Hebe, is a beefeater at the Tower and keeper of the Queen's menagerie, it is the sudden death of their son Milo that forms the backdrop to the story and with it all the twists and turns of human relationships with some unusual animals thrown in. I'm feeling a bit vague all this time on but I'm sure a Lost Property Office features somewhere, but don't take my word for it, take Linda's, she really enjoyed it.
Next choice, City of the Mind by Penelope Lively also given a very enthusiastic resume. London as a character, through layers of history and time as the stories rise up through...you'll have to forgive this sparsity of detail, I was listening but I also had the chair facing the window and kept glancing out onto the parterre garden it was a glorious evening. Anyway, highly recommended.
Samuel Pepys -The Unequaled Self by Clare Tomalin also a fascinating read, the diary set in it's sociological context and much emphasis on the impromptu, spur of the moment life of the man as a focal point of interest for this reader. Highly recommended.
I think I'd taken along a Muriel Spark but I didn't write down which one and it's so long ago I can't remember which one...perhaps Memento Mori, someone will confirm or correct.
Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd was proving a bit of a struggle for the chooser, but with pledges to finish it seemed all was not lost.

Oh dear, Saturday by Ian McEwan...a book I feel I've heard so much about I really don't need to read it and have never really wanted to either. Champagne socialism apparently featuring a 'smug b*&$%&*d of a neurosurgeon and the reader, not one to mince words, wanted him dead. Round-robin bragging letters featured in this discussion somehow, I have a feeling the neurosurgeon's family sickeningly won Olympic gold at everything.
We wondered how we felt about Ian McEwan on that recent TV programme where a clearly adulatory interviewer fluttered her eyelashes at him, declared him our 'national novelist' and asked how he felt about that.
We felt we'd like to have been consulted first.
Hmm again and thrice hmm and a lot of tutting over Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger. Highgate Cemetery, surreal plot and it got a thumbs down but did have us discussing better books with a twin-ish theme like Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson....which if you haven't read, my saying that has just ruined it for you, forget I said and read it anyway.
Rebecca loved London Belongs to Me by Norman Collins, good story and characters, very enjoyable read.
Angela had us mesmerised by The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer who she and Linda had heard speaking locally but it had all been a bit rushed, he'd got lost and was late they had a table booked for lunch.
London we asked?
Oh yes, big chapter on London we were assured...
40,000 inhabitants.
Rat infested ditches.
Pig population out of control.
Forbidden to lob excrement into the ditch around Fleet Prison because all the prisoners were dying.
No stigma attached to brothels.
Lots of executions.
Oh plus ca change we all agreed, give us Devon any day.

Endsleigh Salon update...'School' continued

 
I must bring you news of the other 'School' themed reads from our last Endsleigh Salon evening, because I'd hate you to think we'd just languished around wishing we'd been at Malory Towers, or were thankful we'd missed out on the Abbey School and the Morris dancing.
 
The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury, very 1970's bohemian with every kind of 'ism' going on which as I recall, having lived through it, must have been at least feminism and pacifism and I'm sure you can think of a few more. The book seemed to be 75% dialogue, a series of impressions and from where I was sitting the print looked tiny, but Rebecca had read it and enjoyed as I recall, though wasn't quite head over heels about it.
Tom Brown's Schooldays by Thomas Hughes and published in 1857 proved very disappointing and perhaps offered a good example of a novel whose imagery is more often gathered from the watching of the film rather than the reading of the book.
Who can forget that little chap being roasted by nasty Flashman.
The Secret History by Donna Tartt might have been that old favourite, a room divider...
'Oh I loved that book.
'Oh God, the worst book I've ever read.'
But if there was any doubt about that one dividing the room you should have seen the ranks take up arms over Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.
'Hated it'
'Loved it'
'Adored it'

We do actually say far more than that and there was a great debate about why we'd hated it, loved it and all those other things about both books. Linda and I were sadly united in our dislike, for style, some irritating narrative devices and characters in Never Let Me Go, whilst the village contingent (there are so many of them they could do with a bus now) were unanimous in their admiration.
It's clearly a geographical thing but I have a reread scheduled just in case my current Kazuo Ishiguro revisit can shed new light, because I had read it in the midst of a Bookerthon, often not the most propitious way for a book to endear itself to me. It may sadly however be curtains for Linda with Kazuo though I was more than persuasive about A Pale View of Hills and said nice things about The Remains of the Day too, with tempting snippets about Dartmoor and Tavistock and Creber's all getting a mention therin.
Looking to Chillaton for some moral support...no, they hadn't been as impressed with The Remains of the Day.
Sorry Kazuo, I tried but you win some you lose some.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark was on the other hand unanimously received with praise on all sides of the salon.
The Dead School by Patrick McCabe had its reader very exercised in the describing of; bleak but very funny, sort of Father Ted meets Quentin Tarantino and set against a backdrop of the early 1970s, the troubles in N.Ireland and two parallel lives which cross.The final verdict was a great read.
The Piano Teacher by Janice YK Lee proved to be nothing to do with schools at all but had been a good read however Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi was added in by its reader as the most fantastic read. All added to by her visits to Tehran and the university in the past and how it really felt to wear a burkah and, as we never stop a discussion trail leading wherever it wants to, interesting debate followed about the life and the restrictions then and the current political climate.
Thinks by David Lodge sadly had its reader surrendering at page seventy something and moving swiftly on we all agreed that Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones, which was the fall back option, was a truly beautiful and clever book that could happily have lost its ending and were it possible, been even better.
Lastly The Finishing School by Muriel Spark... and we all thought oh great, what better way to end, that'll be two brilliant Muriels in one evening then, but sadly it was not to be. The Finishing School felt like a very insubstantial read to its reader, riven as it was with themes of jealousy, satire and middle-class values.
Next theme Back to the Land...

Endsleigh Salon update

I know book groups run on all manner of successful formats and much depends on the needs of everyone there, but I have to say, for anyone thinking about starting a reading group or even just getting a group of bookish friends together, you can't go wrong with themes as your central organising method.
No having to read a book you don't quite fancy, no running out of things to say about it after thirty minutes, and descent (or in our case ascent)  into off -track nattering is perfectly permissible because with themes anything goes, you can talk about whatever you want.
So where would this month's theme of Scandal take us?
October was also our third birthday so we raised a cup of tea and a chocolate biscuit to ourselves and the evening we all look forward to so much. I had pondered the dusk as I drove in realising that we are now heading into winter mode with no gorgeous views to set the scene, somehow we'll just have to cope with log fires and Georgiana's Birds of Paradise wallpaper as we tuck up into our cosy salon room.

So onto Scandal and we threw the chairing task at A.
It's just that you need someone who walks in looking full of beans and wide awake to keep things ticking along and A always looks wide awake and up to the task because she's usually spent the weekend before running a marathon through the Lakeland Fells in pouring rain or something, while I'm exhausted after a weekend in the armchair.
I had done a quick dictionary check for a definition of the word scandal and that proved quite useful because our choices ranged across the centuries and led to much debate about what would be considered scandal then but might be quite acceptable now, and where have our tolerances taken us and how and why might that be.
Madresfield - The Real Brideshead by Jane Mulvagh got us off to a fantastic flying start, I woke up very fast.
This is purported to be the real-life story behind Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. Waugh was a regular visitor to the ancestral seat of the Lygon family which had been in the family from 1196 to the present day.
Earl Beecham the patriarch was a pillar of the community, a friend of King George V until revelations about his private life and homosexuality were exposed for reasons various by the Duke of Westminster whose sister was married to Earl Beecham.
The fifty-nine year old Earl fled to the continent in 1931 and the family's fortunes predictably took something of a turn for the worse. Beaverbrook connections kept everything out of the press but the family and particularly the Earl's children were shunned and rejected by their peers and forever paid the price. Golden futures replete with opportunities melted into dust overnight.
Well we went to town on this one and to my chagrin I was the only person in the room who hadn't read Brideshead Revisited so I must schedule an appointment with it very soon, but nevertheless, the tea trays had arrived and we were off to a great start.
Next Lady Worsley's Whim An Eighteenth Century Tale of Sex, Scandal and Divorce by Hallie Rubenhold. The presenter of this book had gone into the local bookshop and asked what they'd got on scandal to which the owner had replied
'Are you from THAT book group?'
So our reputation grows apace.
Lady Worsley's whim was actually Captain George Bissett even though she was married to Richard Worsley, things went from bad to worse for Lady W with a child, an elopement and no friend in the Beaverbrook family to control the media, so salacious treatment in the press. Having brought her fortune to the marriage Lady W lost the lot and the children too and presumably the very nice Appuldurcombe House on the Isle of Wight.

We went to town on that one too.
I threw in a play which I had been really looking forward to reading but which hadn't quite met my expectations, Gethsemane by David Hare first performed in November 2008.
A critique of New Labour though David Hare denies the remotest connection, family scandal promising to throw it all into chaos, but to be honest I think we're getting harder to impress these days, perhaps we're becoming immune to it all?
It hardly felt like scandal, more like every day news of ministerial duplicity so at times like this it's always good to look to the Westend Whingers for a definitive theatre-goers assessment. I was interested  to see they thought likewise after seeing the play at the National Theatre, being more impressed with the standard of the roasted peanuts and the space for your bag behind the seats in Row T than the play itself.
Mixed in with the real life scandal, plenty of made up scandal too,  though the scandal itself often seemed more in the eye of the beholder than the sole purpose of the novels.
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert and great debate about just how scandalous can it be to race around full speed in a carriage with the blinds drawn, actually just how uncomfortable was it in there and how often is the scandal all in the mind of the reader.
The L Shaped Room by Lynn Reid Banks
And a signed first edition copy was flourished. Loved in the 1960s but which now made for slightly uncomfortable reading, times and attitudes have changed and the book reflected that.
Lolita by Nabakov...oh dear.
Loathed and then loathed some more by the reader, turgid writing, dodgy themes and even debating the social mores of the time didn't really help us figure out just why this one is a classic.
It did all made us think carefully about what we now class as scandal and thoughts progressed through each book debate about what we now see as depravity and how those definitions might have changed across the centuries.
Anthing Goes by Lucy Moore had been read specifically following a recent Sunday magazine article about Harry and Caresse Crosbie, the couple who made the 20s roar and we proceeded to find out how. Harry would go out minus a hat on for starters which was enough of a scandal, but all made much worse when he took the married-with-two-children Polly Peabody as his lover. Changing her name to Caresse seemed a minor detail in the end.
Peyton Place by Grace Metalious was last and in the new Virago edition. I have a copy and have been looking at and wondering when to start.
Well now I will because apparently it's a remarkable read.
Written in 1956 and evoking a benign conformist world but with much ugliness beneath the surface, Grace Metalious was villified for telling it like it was. Most of us could remember our mums watching the TV series but not a lot else.
So what a brilliant evening we had, next month Adventure which I will miss which all gives me time to gear up for South America in December.
Incidentally we often sit in our room and wonder at that wallpaper's survival.
It's listed now so can't be touched but how often in the past might someone have thought it looked a bit grubby and stood in front of it with brush and emulsion poised?
Now that would have been a real scandal.

The World That Was Ours by Hilda Bernstein

When the 'Africa' theme came around for September's  Endsleigh Salon gathering I was really spoiled for choice.
I had dipped into several general books on the continent itself but none seemed to fulfill that need to know something specific and different that would make a good book-sharing experience.
Richard Dowden's  Africa Altered States, Ordinary Miracles really is excellent and a book I will turn to country by country as I want to know more but it wasn't going to make a good cover to cover read for me. I couldn't find my copy of Out of Africa anywhere, completely forgot about Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm and its Vera Brittain connection...wasn't it the book Roland gave to Vera? So wandering around the shelves my eye settled on The World That Was Ours by Hilda Bernstein, ten pages in and that was me sorted.

I thought I knew it all.
I had read Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom years ago, of course I knew. I'd read it in the press, watched the news, seen the violence, remembered the sjamboks, the necklacing...thought I understood
But I didn't really, not until I'd read this book and my eyes were opened even before I had started, with this epigraph from The Burning of the Leaves by Laurence Binyon, author of the more famous poem For the Fallen

Now is the time for stripping the spirit bare,
Time for the burning of days ended and done,
Idle solace of things that have gone before,
Rootless hope and fruitless desire are there:
Let them go to the fire with never a look behind.
That world that was ours is a world that is ours no more. 

Dedicated to the nine men of Rivonia, famous names like Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki and of course Lionel 'Rusty' Bernstein husband of Hilda, who wrote this account of their life together as white activists in apartheid-riven South Africa and the Rivonia arrests and trial which led to the eventual imprisonment of Nelson Mandela.
This is South Africa in the early 1960s and sensing and then railing against the deeply inhuman policy of apartheid, the Bernsteins apply themselves actively to the campaign for its abolition. The dangers are rife and manifold and I could only marvel at the courage of a couple who loved each other deeply, could hardly bear to be separated yet were distinct individuals and were prepared to risk it all to stick to their principles whilst so many of their colleagues left the country, rightly concerned for the safety of their families.
It must have been the toughest of calls and the ever-present danger to the Bernstein children too made it even more so, yet Rusty and Hilda principled perhaps many might argue to the exclusion of all common sense, stayed and stayed and eventually had no choice but to stay even longer once Rusty was arrested whilst meeting secretly with other members of the ANC at Rivonia.
It quickly becomes apparent that absolutely nothing was secret in this ailing country and the depths of depravity to which the security forces would sink really defies belief, except this was in my lifetime and I had watched it all on the news for years and yet somehow it was all allowed to happen and I still haven't quite figured out quite how or why that was.
Simplistic and naive my thinking may be, but quite straightforward surely, hadn't the Hitler experience revealed the terrible never-to-be-repeated lessons of facism?
For much of the book I felt I was reading a thriller of a  page-turner because the moments of tension are frequent as are the moments when Hilda's fear and frustration just seep off the page and create that sense of sympathetic anxiety in the reader. I had to start doing some deep breathing as Hilda rushed to get the washing in the machine before dashing out to evade arrest, or the day she risks all to be home to kiss her son before he sets off for school. Feel that sickness as she and Rusty, head for the border once they decide that escape is their only option. Rusty had eventually been acquitted but his and Hilda's rearrest on rapidly invented technicalities, at which the South African government of the day excelled, seem only a matter of time.
Hilda's daily trials as she attempts to visit Rusty in prison aroused those same feelings of cruel despair that I always sense in Anna Akhmatova's poem Requiem, as she stands outside the prison in Stalin's Russia waiting to see her husband and her son.
There was a small yet defining moment for me in The World That Was Ours that somehow epitomised hope and everything that everyone was fighting for.
The accused men are led into the dock for the first time...

'Nelson Mandela comes first, almost unrecognisable. He has lost about forty pounds in weight. His splendid figure seems to have shrivelled, his skin has a greenish-grey prison pallor; he is dressed in a khaki shirt and shorts, wearing sandals on his bare feet, and this what eighteen months in jail, sitting in a cell for twenty-three hours out of twenty-four, being kept apart from other prisoners, has done to the man who was a political leader and distinguished lawyer. Have they so easily reduced this proud and sophisticated man to the dress and status of the African tolerable to whites - to a 'boy'? As he files into his place at the right of the dock, Nelson turns to the public gallery where there are relatives and friends, and flashed that magnificent smile as of old, splendidly confident, full of brilliance and power; this is the Nelson we knew.'

And somehow, though I had the gift of hindsight unavailable to Hilda in 1963, I hope that perhaps deep in the recesses of her heart she knew what we now know; that this battle would be won eventually just as Laurence Binyon knew it too, in 1942, as he wrote  The Burning of the Leaves

They will come again, the leaf and the flower, to arise
From squalor of rottenness into the old splendor,
And magical scents to a wondering memory bring;
The same glory, to shine upon different eyes.
Earth cares for her own ruins, naught for ours.
Nothing is certain, only the certain spring. 

Picture of Hilda and Rusty Bernstein

© www.rustybernstein.com

Endsleigh Salon - July and we have a Guest Author to visit

I’m so far behind with my reportage of recent Salon events it'll be Christmas soon, so I must catch up before we gather this evening for our theme of 'Wish You Were Here / Glad You're Not Here'. It seemed quite apt and catchy for the holiday season and wide open to multifarious bookish interpretations, so I can't wait to see the salonistas' selections.
Mine's a secret because some of the salonistas read this and it completely kills my flourish and display moment...oh yes, we saw that on your blog.
So, July saw a gathering with a difference because we had a Guest Author visiting.
Except first we had to do a quick whizz round with our books, because to go to the Endsleigh Salon without a book is a sin, so we each took along a Great Read and had sixty seconds to sell it, thus achieving in half an hour or so what usually takes us three or more.
Here's the list and I didn't write my own choice down, so now I can't for the life of me remember what my highly memorable Great Read was, might have been The Fall by Simon Mawer, if not it should have been.
As you can see I have some catching up to do, some great new reading for me here.

When Will There Be Good News - Kate Atkinson
The Behaviour of Moths - Poppy Adams
The Long Winded Lady - Maeve Brennan
The Reluctant Fundamentalist - Mohsin Hamid
An Expert in Murder - Nicola Upson
I Capture the Castle - Dodie Smith
Have the Men Had Enough - Margaret Forster
Into Danger - Kate Adie
The Uncommon Reader - Alan Bennet
The Reader - Bernard Schlink
Sophie's Secret - Suzanna Kearsley
Diary of a Provincial Lady - E.M.Delafield
Easy Silence - Angela Huth
The Rapture - Liz Jensen
The Tortoise and The Hare - Elizabeth Jenkins

So to our first ever Guest Author and what a wonderful evening we had with Amanda Craig, author and children's literature reviewer for The Times, who also contributed those last two book suggestions.
We talked in depth about Hearts and Minds with Amanda, about life in London versus life in Devon about the characters, the plotting and the actual writing of the book and we learnt a huge amount about the sheer grit and determination that went into completing this novel.
Then we moved onto the literary world at large, the review pages and the state of literary criticism and reviewing today, what we look for and expect to find in book reviews, how long does a review take to write, what might make us want to read the book, how exactly are the reviews commissioned and written,  why we read them, whose opinions can we trust, what we'd like to see more of, what disappoints us, even more to the point who disappoints us as readers and book buyers and consumers.
At this point I'm sorry to disappoint but I can report no more, not a word because we all took the pledge of secrecy and confidentiality, no names, no pack drill but we know a whole lot more about it all...oh yes all of it, everything and our thanks to Amanda for being so honest with us.
Assuming the grown-up responsibility for the bouquet of flowers for the Guest Author, I had decided that this was Tuesday and they'd likely be wilting by Thursday, so had taken a unilateral decision to blue-sky think the gift to its limits of originality and we sent Amanda home with a pair of Tamar Valley apple trees from the neighbouring Endsleigh Gardens Nursery instead.
Now I hadn't really thought beyond what an original idea it was, so the logistics, sensible things like getting them in a little saloon car, had by-passed me in my enthusiasm for the task. We'd delivered them to the hotel earlier in the day in the back of the Land Rover and truly the warning signs were there as they hung off the back and out of the sides, but that night, in a howling gale (the one that did for the Gaze-Bo) pouring rain and pitch darkness, it was indeed confirmed that they would not be fitting in the back of my Fiesta in a hurry either.
Thankfully the night porter at the hotel baby sat them until we sorted it all out the next day and I gather they are now planted in Amanda's beautiful Devon garden as a permanent reminder of an evening in the Salon. We hope as she crunches into those succulent apples in years to come she will forever recall what a pleasant and very pleasurable book-loving evening we all spent together.
So tonight's theme, Wish You Were Here / Glad You're Not Here, coming up - September - Africa, October - Scandal and more great evenings next year. I'm really looking forward to Plague & Pestilence and Back to the Land plus of course I'm already making headway with October 2010 The Book You Should Read Before You Die (how goes it Team Ulysses, Base Camp Two this Sunday, I'm bivouacked and just settling in)
But what on earth would you all take along for any of those themes?

Endsleigh Salon update - The Impossible Book

It's hard to imagine you could spend a really good evening discussing your 'Impossible Book' having forced yourself to face your own nemesis and pick up a book you have struggled with for years, but as always The Endsleigh salonistas came good and had all flogged through and even, in some cases succeeded in conquering their betes noire...bete noires?...betes noires?...a book that is particularly disliked or that is to be avoided.
What a surprising selection too, some books which many had loved in the past but others had loathed.
Thankfully success first off for the reader of Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie which got us off to a good start because the book had plenty of support from devotees in the room.
Failure for The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot, and interestingly at the defining page sixty nine, too much early despair at poor Maggie's lot, discouraged ...might try again but will probably start half way through the book.
Success thanks to a degree of reader perseverance for Philip Pullman's The Subtle Knife and much debate about how many of us had whizzed through Northern Lights and then come unstuck with the differing pace of the second in the trilogy. Yes, slower, repetitive and less continuity but vital to the trilogy was the verdict of the successful trilogians in the room (don't shoot me, Pullmanites out there, I am but the messenger).
Quite a conquest next because our resident 'Loather of All Things Henry' had actually almost finished (and assured us she would) The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James and much helpful advice about How to Read Henry ensued. Little and often seems to be the verdict and eventually you really don't notice that the 'little and often' piece you've just read had no full stop in sight.
Hats off to our newest member who is now not our newest member because we had another newer one, who had tackled The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Green in an effort to become a Quantum Physicist in the space of four weeks. By this time I'm really impressed  with all this gritted teeth and dogged determination flying round the room. It's another few pages at a time book that has been surprisingly understandable and revealing. We expect her to have split the atom by next month, she was about halfway there.
Next, well we were holding our breath, would The Time Traveller's Wife's most vehement critic have succeeded ?
To her and our utter amazement and I think cheers and a little round of applause, the answer was 'Yes!'
In fact to her chagrin she had struggled to find fault with it, tried hard to be hyper-critical and trash it, but just couldn't.
Pride was swallowed in great big gulps...'there there' we said 'more tea?'
The key apparently is to dive in and just go with the flow. Like my failure with The Secret History by Donna Tartt on an excruciatingly hot holiday in Barcelona (left it behind in a hotel on Las Ramblas) about seven years before I finally bought another copy, read it and loved it, The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger had also been a swelteringly hot holiday reading failure much better suited to a wet and windy Sunday afternoon in Devon.
The Kite Runner was next and Khaled Hosseini got a very great bit thumbs down from its reader, so big I don't have space to recount the vexed criticism and puckered brow, there seemed to be little support for the book in the room either. I too was a Kite Runner failure many years ago so could sympathise with yet another well-placed 'there there' and 'more tea?'
The reader of Tulip Fever by Deborah Moggach reported success of a sort, having passed the point of surrender first time round, the book hooked and kept her reading from about a third through, much debate about what you should eat with fried tulip.
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon from our newest new member and there was a definite ambivalence surrounding the book despite its best seller list fame. We wondered whether the next book from Zafon, due out soon, will generate the same interest and my copy has just arrived so we'll see...it would of course help if I'd read the first one if I want to compare and contrast wouldn't it?
My own offering was Fugitive Pieces by Ann Michaels and I will write more fully about it soon.
I had called a halt about twenty pages from the end...well actually I'd sat down to finish it that afternoon and fallen asleep instead, which I suspect was my own way of avoiding any further harrowing detail at a time when I seemed to have enough real-life stuff to deal with.
I had failed with this book on numerous occasions and I think this time I may have succeeded. For me it was in no way a book to read cover to cover like a novel, I read it as the  'Pieces' dictated and over a period of several weeks and it worked, so much to reflect on and I'm not sure I gave a good account of exactly what those reflections are because it still hasn't really sunk in fully, so I will go back to it and then come back here with my thoughts when they finally surface.
Next month it is with some relief and a sense of uplifting joy after this month that we are doing 'Letters' and really looking forward to it.

Endsleigh Salon update

April and our first glorious daylight salon of the year, nearly wrote my car off following Rebecca down the drive. While she slowed to avoid pheasant roadkill I was a bit too busy admiring the fabulous sky-high rhododendrons. But a chance to sit and admire the par-terre garden which was a beautifully segmented palette of pansies, as we gathered to share our book choices on the subject of Intrepid Travellers.
I do it every time, boldly proclaim my choice on here and get to the afternoon of the day with the book largely unread. Sadly On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers by Kate Marsden no exception, it just wasn't doing it for me and the book I'm enjoying now on Laura's recommendation, Journey into the Mind's Eye by Lesley Blanch had only arrived that morning. Kate Marsden an intrinsic part of the young Lesley's Siberian Shelf but it was all a bit more than I could stomach.
Turning to the shelves for inspiration I gathered together a stack of W.G.Sebald and curled up for an afternoon siesta read and found that Rings of Saturn fitted what I wanted to say perfectly.
Not only a book about an actual journey but a book that made something of an intrepid traveller on that reading journey out of me.
Discovering Max Sebald quite a pivotal point in my reading life with that sense of history, archiving and the whole process of memory linking all those deposits and traces of the past and the Sebald narrator who is so often a wanderer. The reverberations all there for the reader to hear and for years I just wasn't listening in the right way when I attempted to read Sebald, because you have to use your eyes too. The pictures which take their meaning from the text by implication and suggestion, so once my senses were tuned to the pitch of Max Sebald's writing there was no looking back. Rings of Saturn a book that it is almost impossible to hold in the memory and summarise sufficiently when others ask you what it's about. That melancholic meditation which Geoff Dyer suggests is 'teetering on the edge of boredom' yet it absorbs the attention so completely. In Max Sebald's own words,

'By all means be experimental but let the reader be part of the experiment'

and so each time I raise my head from reading Rings of Saturn I very appropriately wonder quite which planet I've been on.
Some great Intrepid Traveller reads from fellow salonistas.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy was suitably lauded by those who'd read it.
Unsuitable for Ladies an anthology of the experiences of women travellers less so for its rather messy editing.
The Discovery of France by Graham Robb fared little better though came with glowing approval ratings from the giver of the book as a gift so we made generous allowances on the basis of never look a gift-book in the mouth.
Lost Cosmonaut by Daniel Kalder ...are you there Rebecca, I was so enthralled I didn't write anything down, Kalder visiting the off the beaten track Russia and I think you sort of enjoyed it but not quite hugely.
The Horse Boy by Rupert Isaacson generated lots of debate about autism and the author's journey with his son in search of healing and acceptance. We wondered if the time might come when autism is no longer viewed as a problem but accepted as a different and valid view of the same world, and actually who's to say whose view is the right one?
Adventures on the High Teas by Stuart Maconie took a bit of a drubbing truth be told, its reader was not impressed and there was some serious dissection of the whole genre of Bill Bryson-esque writing.
We came to the conclusion that only Bill can be Bill.
The Places Inbetween by Rory Stewart almost won Book of the Evening for his long walk across Afghanistan which took the reader into new territory and brought her out the other side a complete expert on the country and its history and with a solid understanding of the people and the problems.
But all offerings were eclipsed by a book written by cat, Mrs Chippy's Last Expedition edited by Caroline Alexander, Mrs Chippy being the tom cat that accompanied his owner on Shackleton's last fateful journey on the Endurance. I can't bring myself to tell you what happened to Mrs Chippy but at least we don't think they casseroled him. We were all distraught verging on inconsolable and thankful of another offering from the bearer of Mrs Chippy, The Female Shipwright which cheered us up no end. This the book about Mary Lacey who joined the navy in the 1750s as a man which was never discovered until long afterwards when she applied for a pension and got it.
Another great night of bookish talk, our new member came back which is a good sign and next month is a tricky theme if ever there was one.
The Impossible Book.
We all have to read that bete noir, the book we may have struggled with for years. We groaned and wondered quite why we'd chosen this one, but undeterred and determined we strode forth to gather again in May, and yes I'm going to say it "someone" is dragging themselves kicking and screaming to open The Time Traveller's Wife and it's not me.

Endsleigh Salon update

Second Tuesday in March now a distant memory, a quarter of the year gone already but safe in the knowledge that the next time the Endsleigh Salon gathers we have put the clocks forward, and for the next six months or so we will drive along Georgie's carriage drive in daylight taking in the fabulous views and the gardens which are always spellbinding.
So this was the evening of the 1920s reading theme and you may or may not recall that I had grandiose plans to contrast and compare Edith Wharton's Twilight Sleep with The Beautiful and the Damned by F.Scot Fitzgerald. Usual story, ambitious with the dawn, back to basics by dusk, so when it chimed 5pm on the day and I had just two and a half hours to read nigh on seven hundred pages it was clear my plans would come to nought and I would be going empty-handed.
Except we never go empty-handed so as I gazed around the shelves for inspiration it came to me in a blinding flash, Elizabeth von Arnim. More specifically I took along Vera by Elizabeth von Arnim because at this juncture I sensed vague similarities with The Lost Child / Myerson family situation. I hadn't read The Lost Child at this point, nor had I given more than a cursory glance to the mess that was simmering in the press and of course when I eventually did those similarities became differences, beyond the fact that there's no publicity like bad publicity.
Mary Annette Beauchamp aka Elizabeth von Arnim, cousin to Katherine Mansfield, who following her first marriage to Count Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin and subsequent widow-hood, had the dire misfortune to marry John Francis, 2nd Earl Russell.
Easier to spell but not so easy to live with.
Russell was violently, possessively and overbearingly in love with Elizabeth according to Karen Usborne's excellent biography, Elizabeth, the Author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden and the marriage ended disastrously with Elizabeth doing a runner to the U.S. to escape his clutches. Revenge perhaps often a dish best served up in fiction and many including John himself recognised just who Elizabeth had used as her model for the tyrannical husband Wemyss in Vera. Russell was incensed and you can only be thankful the man wasn't in possession of an iPhone because he was very imaginative with his harassment, having already sent Elizabeth a copy of the Bible with every reference to faithless women underlined. There was talk of litigation, publishers Macmillan rubbed their hands with glee and the book fair flew off the shelves as the whiff of scandal started to seep out in 1921.
I've sent my Virago copy off around the group (this is my first edition copy inherited from my mum who was also called Vera) for a considered opinion on my pet theory that this could have been one of the books that inspired Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, there are a few similarities so I'm looking forward to the verdict at April's meeting.
We had a full house plus a brave new soul (the test is whether a newbie returns for more) and the other 1920s books offered for discussion covered a wide and varied range and included The Great Gatsby, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, all by F.Scott Fitzgerald so I was probably wise to change my tack at the last minute. We had a fine nostalging moment when Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables took centre stage and good debates around The New House by Lettice Cooper, The Bolter by Frances Osborne, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon, Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh and a great biography of Colette by Judith Thurman. The pro-Woolf faction tried to persuade the anti-Woolf faction that Mrs Dalloway  was a great book if you read it Woolfishly but I don't think we succeeded.
As you can imagine by the time we'd covered that lot and done our usual amount of tea-sipping, laughing and sidetracking there wasn't a lot of oxygen left in the room and the hotel definitely knew we were in residence. I drive the five minutes home, I know I should walk by the stars and do book-thinking but it's really very dark and look it's all the way down here and a lot more, and badgers run out on you and you tread on hedgehogs and things.
I know there is no point in going to bed for hours because I can never get my mind to shut down after an Endsleigh Salon evening's brilliant and inspiring bookish talk.
The next theme is Intrepid Travellers and I have just the very book lined up.

Happy World Book Day & The Endsleigh Salon

Happy World Book Day, and that can only mean one thing, well two actually.
Firstly we can all read all day to our heart's content and feel no guilt. When it's World Kitchen Floor Washing Day, fine, we'll all do that all day but today it's books all the way.
Secondly, there is a title to be defended, a crown at stake, book group pride to uphold as the Endsleigh Salon head off this evening for the annual World Book Day Quiz against all the other book groups in the area at the local library.
We limped stormed to victory last year by about one point thanks to some genius thinking (not mine) on that fiendish sheet of picture questions that is sitting on the table to be completed inbetween rounds for fun.
Fun?
Who said anything about fun?
Good grief no, this was deadly serious, we meant business and, though I can't remember the question, the answer was The Art of War by Sun Tzu.
February's salon a few weeks ago was on the theme of Childhood (but not a children's book) and we had a great and wide-ranging selection of books and some fine discussion as each person extolled the virtues of their choice and quite how it had spoken of childhood to them.
The Changeling - Robin Jenkins (mine)
Spies by Michael Frayn
The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank
No Talking After Lights by Angela Lambert
Oranges are Not the Only Fruit - Jeanette Winterson
The Country Child - Alison Uttley
The Children's Hours - Richard Zimmler (ed)
Lolly Willowes - Sylvia Townsend Warner
Daphne du Maurier - Margaret Forster

I think you'll agree we had plenty to talk about with this lot plus two people had chosen to re-read Spies by Michael Frayn and with differing views it all reminded me that this was a book I had long been meaning to read.
Next month's theme is the 1920s (a book either written in or about) and I'm completely spoilt for choice but have narrowed down to two,
Twilight Sleep by Edith Wharton
The Beautiful & the Damned by F.Scott Fitzgerald.
In the end and if I have time I might just read both (except now I see it's for next Tuesday, I'll have to get a wriggle on especially as it's Inner Child this weekend too) because what an interesting comparison the two would make. Edith Wharton clearly ar her most acerbic and disparaging on the louch New York rich-kids' lifestyle and Fitzgerald struggling with his own demons whilst portraying the same era, a male and female perspective on turbulent times.
That said, I'm finding the plethora of radio and TV programmes being pushed out on the subject of the Wall St Crash of 1929 all quite unnerving at the moment, heavy comparisons to the current economic situation which presumably means we must expect a Grapes of Wrath dustbowl next, it's all too terrifying to dwell on.
Meanwhile do excuse me while I head into the zone and Trimble-ize in readiness for tonight's fingers on the buzzers, your starter for ten, let's hope we're the team that get to sit upstairs, talking of which, what a debacle that all turned into.

Endsleigh Salon - Food & Drink, and a prize draw.

I just have to ask, have you ever tried to drive a car wearing a set of Angel Gabriel wings?
It's not easy and I can see exactly why he flew everywhere. There was some debate before I left home as to whether I was wearing these the right way up and I'm still undecided and must also apologise to Endsleigh for the unexpected moult on the...er...plush velvet seating.
No wonder Fred got annoyed with Ginger.

No Santa hats left anywhere in town, musical antlers also a feature, a special little woolly guest, lovely little Secret Santa gifts and some great Food & Drink reading suggestions against that fine backdrop of Georgina's original nineteenth century, hand-blocked, Birds of Paradise wallpaper.
Eventually I did shed my wings in the name of comfort, the Angel Gabriel can't have sat down in an armchair much either.

Nigel Slater got a look in twice with Toast and Eating for England and was loved for both, plus apparently his recipe for chocolate brownies is unsurpassed. Also much loved and with a food connection, Where Did it All Go Right by Andrew Collins whch linked in with Cupboard Love quite neatly and we all had a mad reminisce about Vesta Chicken Supreme and Butterscotch Angel Delight.
H.G.Wells with The History of Mr Polly and all the food eaten therein and Guernsey Potato Peel Pies etc were well received, Schott's Food Miscellany absolutely fascinating.
Blackberry Wine by Joanna Harris and Raw Spirit by Iain Banks both got a bit of a nul points from their respective presenters, but Joanna made up ground with her much-lauded, The French Kitchen and much sage nodding of heads and a general  Chocolat adoration ensued (except from me who still hasn't read it or seen the film). Finally a cookery book that had us all coveting mercilessly, Falling Cloudberries by Tessa Kiros.
 

And just because we can't do anything without having a prize draw now, thanks to Faber for four copies of the fabulous play that I took along to the Salon last month, The Pitmen Painters by Lee Hall. I am going to see it, and in the company of some esteemed theatre critics too.
Names in comments but only if you can assure us all that you really are sitting there wearing a set of musical antlers, a Santa hat or a set of Angel Gabriel wings.

Cupboard Love - A Food Romance by Laura Lockington and a prize draw.

The Endsleigh Salon reading theme becomes more of a challenge as the second Tuesday evening in the month draws near. Sometimes I can tie it into a book I'm already reading, sometimes I have to search out a specific book.
This month's Christmas theme was Food and alarmingly no food of note was jumping out of any book I was reading, so  I turned to my shelves and picked up Cupboard Love A Food Romance sent along by author Laura Lockington a while ago.
All hope rested therein or I would have to take along Delia's Christmas and pretend it was my favourite book.
I had already taken a long hard look at the cover when Laura's book arrived because I'm quite convinced that if that is her childhood picture  then it's quite obvious she was a precocious talent.
With that starring role in The Sound of Music as the littlest von Trapp her course was set fair. Can you see it?
Bound to include a wiener schnitzel recipe in that case.
Uncertain what to expect in a book designated a 'Food Romance' I made a start and things looked promising after the first paragraph,but perhaps not in a Sound of Music way,

' I don't care what anyone says. Losing your virginity does not make you an adult. Nor does getting your first credit card. Or buying your first house. Or making a will. Cooking your first Christmas lunch: that's about as grown up as it gets.'

Each chapter of Laura's life, because this is a memoir written around memorable food, begins with a recipe for something which will feature somewhere in the ensuing events, from funeral baked-meats to school dinners, picnics to pasties and I was whisked back to an age that so many of us knew so well.
The days when the bed-bound granny lived in the sitting room with ne'er a thought for being placed in a nursing home. Grace Helen's bed, and her grand mother's company and her humour, plus assorted extended family members (and a few hangers-on)  form the centre of Laura's childhood and the source of some of her most useful lessons in life.
The cooking with her mum had me back there with the pinny, the chair and the grey pastry item slipped in the oven alongside the obligatory pie, to be cooked and eaten as if a gourmet dish by my dad. These were indeed the days prior to the reign of Elizabeth David and Edwardian cooking tradition along with pies and suet still ruled in the kitchen.
Laura's mum used Cookeen, mine used Trex, both standard baking ingredient fare in the 1950s and I still have my mum's Trex cookery book to show for all that saturated fat on which we were raised. Doubtless our arteries were done for by the age of ten yet none of us were overweight.
I particularly coveted the Bibby bookmark but it had to remain in the cookery book where it belonged.
The meals unlock the memories for Laura and with them the most wry and hilarious look at her life which had me laughing all the way through, even at the funerals which were a family speciality, they all loved a good wake to cook for.
Laura was the school rebel and now I look back I think I'd like to have been the school rebel too.
There  were several at my Girl's Grammar school and I can still remember their names but had better not divulge, they are probably University Chancellors or Government Ministers now. I think my worst misdemeanour was something like trying to jump across the pond in the quad, (probably unsuccessfully)  while our school rebels were busy trading Mandrax (pronounced Mandrakes apparently) in the toilets.
The whole school was shamefully rather vicariously thrilled when the drug-bust and the pupil suspensions (my year no less) made the front page of The Daily Telegraph, and the head mistress intoned with gravitas, in a special emergency assembly, of the disgrace these 'rotten apples' had brought on the reputation of the school. I expect we then had to sing the school hymn which was Jerusalem.
I waited in vain for Laura's Sound of Music Wiener Schnitzel recipe which never came but even so I wasn't disappointed. Her writing voice is marvellously engaging so if you sat for a whole afternoon looking at and refusing to eat a plateful of revolting school dinner, sloshed on the Aqua Manda perfume and listened to Mott the Hoople as a teenager, ate Vesta Chow Mein and perhaps even like Laura skived off and went to the Isle of Wight Festival to hear Jimi Hendrix (or wished you'd had the nerve to) then this is the book for you.
If this was before your time (or after it) read it anyway and find out what you missed.
Even better along the way you will find out how to make the very best homemade lemonade ever, the best way ever to cook gammon and the best bread sauce ever invented plus a whole lot more best ever recipes.
I loved it start to finish and Laura has very kindly offered a signed Christmas stocking copy of Cupboard Love for one lucky reader anywhere in the world, so names in comments and Rocky will oblige.
Pictures of the evening, (I did wear 'them') and another prize draw later today.

An Endsleigh Salon update and stocking filler prize draw

It seems fitting that as today is the Second Tuesday in the month and this evening sees the Christmas gathering of The Endsleigh Salon, that I choose an appropriate book for today's prize draw.
As you will all be sick to death of hearing, Hotel Endsleigh very kindly welcome us through their very grand yet homely doors once a month for a book group with a difference. Look, I've even done what we used to do on holiday postcards to show you 'our' salon room.
This is where the sore afflicted of rural West Devon can discreetly go, safe in the knowledge they are not alone in their book addiction, this is Bookaholic's Anon where we can all just talk on and on and on about books we've loved. To keep a vague state of order we choose a theme and all take along a book somehow connected, no matter how vaguely (remember Sheep?) , wax lyrical about it for a few minutes, someone attempts to chair the evening, great debate ensues, the hotel staff generously bring us a huge tray of tea and coffee and we all come away with a list of even more interesting books, so the addiction is nicely self-perpetuating.
Tonight's theme is Food but I'm not revealing my choice until tomorrow when there will even be a prize draw for a signed copy of my chosen book from the author. We are also tasked with a Secret Santa gift costing not a penny more than £2.50 and we have to wear an item of Christmas cheer. I've actually got the most gorgeous set of...no, I think I'll keep quiet about those too but I will look a complete idiot if that suggestion was a joke...and I walk into one of the nation's smartest hotels, past all the famous guests having drinks before dinner wearing...perhaps I'll think of something else.
So to the book, what is it?
Well it's a copy of The English House by Clive Aslet courtesy of Bloomsbury who will post direct worldwide and there's a whole chapter on Endsleigh, Georgina, Duchess of Bedford's little cottage orne holiday retreat here in the Tamar Valley,

'...the dwelling of someone who liked... to pretend that her tastes were simple and rustic when they might, in fact, be very sophisticated indeed.'

This is where Georgie ( as us locals call her) entertained her young lover Edwin Landseer and someone will often interrupt the bookish talk to speculate on how often Georgie and Ed might have sat looking at the view that we do from the Upper and Lower Georgie's, terraces designed by Repton to give the most acceptable view of the valley.
Or perhaps we ponder the thirteen little Bedford's sailing their model boats on the trickling rill that surrounds the edge of the beautifully planted par-terre garden.
Or the intimate weekend house parties that the Duchess would have given, and for which the chosen few from London society would have de-camped to Devon...then someone says something like,
'Wonder if they all threw their room keys into a bowl on the table.' and the spell is broken.
I digress but be assured tonight we will be pondering what Christmas at Endsleigh may have entailed, the hotel will be magnificently but very tastefully decorated and I may well have ruined the whole kudos of the place by walking in wearing...oh well never mind. I'll take photos anyway.
Other houses do get a mention, Buckland Abbey just up the road, The Clergy House, Alfriston, East Barsham Manor, Pagnell Manor House and plenty more, but I'll wager a guinea that none of them resound with quite so much bookish adoration and laughter as Endsleigh on the second Tuesday in the month.
Names in comments for a copy of The English House.

Endsleigh Salon - Very Important Theme

An Endsleigh Salon update seems propitious given that our most recent evening found us deep in discussion over one of our most erudite themes to date; so erudite in fact that we were 'at home' to the Bookgroup Babes who had asked if they could come along and discuss great literature with us in our very own opulent surroundings.
Of course, we said, come and see our lovely home, do admire our wallpaper, yes Georgiana chose it herself , more tea?
You may or may not recall the Bookgroup Babes are the group I went to talk to in Plymouth and then organised for a group read of Ekaterinburg and to meet the author Helen Rappaport at Dartington this summer.
It was such a good evening as seventeen of us squeezed into Georgiana Duchess of Bedford's little salon room and the hotel staff piled in with huge trays of tea and coffee and the discussion began.
The topic?
Ah yes well, blame Rebecca.
Rebecca was on holiday when we selected our next run of themes and so we slotted in "Sheep" as a bit of a joke. Rebecca loves sheep and anything to do with them. Protesting her embarrassment at our choice she begged us to expand it to "Animals" but we said no, just think creatively.
So after all those amazing evenings of debate about Australia, Sport, History for the Stupid, Spies and Spooks, First Novels, Science Fiction, The Far East, The Test of Time, topics that would have impressed the world and its mother, here we are with learned and esteemed guests to impress and we're talking about er...sheep.
Right...good.
But this is us and books and we have now proved conclusively that we can talk about any book on any topic and make it interesting (well, except for Politics last month which was a bit of a damp squib and could have used John Sergeant doing a tango) and the consensus by the end of the evening was 'Let's choose more whacky themes'.
The range of books was vast and the connection to sheep occasionally tenuous, not much beyond a title perhaps as in Lamb by Bernard MacLaverty or my intended choice which didn't actually come to fruition, Knitting With Dog Hair, Better a Sweater From a Dog You Know and Love Than From a Sheep You'll Never Meet by Kendal Crolius, thank goodness I stopped myself.
Then there were sheep by association as in I Bought a Mountain by Thomas Firbank ( we think no relation to Douglas) Resistance by Owen Sheers (location sheep-laden, extra points for author's surname) The Hills is Lonely by Lilian Beckwith, The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies, On the Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin and God's Own Country by Ross Raisin (me), Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx (lots of sheep in the film but great disappointment when our film guru declared they were computer-generated). A little mention of sheep in A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini let that one into the fold too.
Then there were all the practicalities of sheep husbandry and some more fascinating books, The Wisest Dogs in the World, a book about sheepdog trials in the days when it really was rural competition and not televised, and The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono about a shepherd (apologies, lapse of concentration at this point, the room was getting very hot , or was it me?) and Station Life in New Zealand by Lady Barker.
Then we hit 'off the wall' sheep and  into some great discussion as Karen eulogised over A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami and Norma waved Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip Dick and both convinced all of us to read their choices and now I'd better watch Bladerunner. Chris meanwhile felt our comedy lives would be incomplete without reading The Sheep That Changed the World by Neil Astley and I sort of agree because she couldn't stop laughing as she talked about the book.
Finally, and really this one can only have been found by Angela.
Angela can always be trusted to come up with the definitive book that pulls our whole theme together, Sheep The Remarkable Story of the Humble Animal That Built the Modern World by Alan Butler.
Now listen carefully, it can be argued that sheep are responsible for just about every historical event, cataclysmic or otherwise, that has ever happened.
Yes really, Alan believes so as did Angela (almost) by the time she'd read this book.
Think Reformation, think sheep, think British Empire, think sheep and it went on and on and in the end I think we were all convinced and started adding in our own suggestions.Then a bit of a fierce debate about just which animal had contributed the most to civilisation, the cow faction locked horns with the horse faction while us sheep people just hunkered down with gratitude and our knitting needles.
God bless the sheep.

Endsleigh Salon - Catching up

I haven't taken you along to Endsleigh Salon in recent months, but rest assured we've been having our usual second Tuesday evening of the month good time in the Salon, with 'Australia' and then a 'First Novel' evening.
The Australia discussion kept going round in my head for days afterwards. The choice of books was varied as always, amongst them
Gilgamesh - Joan London
Eucalyptus - Murray Bail (me)
My Life as a Fake - Peter Carey
The Widow and the Hero - Thomas Keneally
The Fatal Shore - Robert Hughes
and it was this last book, that finally gave us the perspective on our reading that we had been struggling to define. Then the debate really took off.
First Novel last month equally enlightening with
What Was Lost - Catherine O'Flynn (loved it)
Maggie's Tree - Julie Walters (surprised the reader)
This Side of Paradise - F.Scott Fitzgerald ( good but what follows is better)
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers (rave review)
Hide and Seek - Clare Sambrook (the reader had been at school with the author and was very intrigued to read the book)
The Outlander - Gil Adamson (me again and you know my thoughts on this one already)
Tonight's theme is Sport and too late to be of any help to me, an article in The Guardian 'Sport in Fiction', because I had scoured my fiction shelves to little avail for anything remotely sport linked, letters and diaries  yielded nought and a dearth in biography too.
Eventually I found a battered old 1968 3s/6d Pan copy of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner by Alan Sillitoe. I had quite forgotten this was a short story and then decided that chess would have to be considered a sport and I'd include The Royal Game by Stefan Zweig too.
Reading The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner so many years on is to return to the literary age of the Angry Young Men and to be reminded how we all grew up in the fifties with that word Borstal. The young inmate considers his life as an Out-law bloke training up for sports day,

'when all the pigfaced, snotty-nosed dukes and ladies...come and make speeches to us about sport being just the thing to get us leading an honest life and keep our itching finger-ends off them shop locks and safe handles and hair-grips to open gas meters.'

For us as children Borstal was considered the most awful thing that could possibly happen to you. It hung in the air like a threat (more for boys than girls) but it was absolutely beyond the ends of the earth where punishment was concerned. If you ended up there you were dead meat and everyone else would be terrified of you when you came out, that's the memory I have of the word itself.
To read the story again has strangely reconfigured those crystallised word-associated memories, and suddenly I can recall conversations with friends as we sat on the kerb swapping comics in Queen Anne's Gardens, Mitcham, discussing someone who we thought (and hoped) would end up in Borstal and give us a bit of peace. He was called Danny and would appear out of nowhere, his best weapon was a simple 4" long rusty nail, kept in his pocket which he always threatened to stab us with.
We believed him and were terrified.
To return to one of my favourite Stefan Zweig stories,The Royal Game, has been a calming treat after all that recollection of childhood fear, even given that it's about a man who, imprisoned by the Gestapo, induces a form of schizophrenia in order to play chess against himself in his mind and survive. The skill surfaces whilst he is on a cruise ship some years later and finds himself being challenged to a game by the world champion.
It's a masterclass in psychological realism as humanism is pitted against Nazi barbarity on the chess board, and it won't be long before I'm back and reading more Stefan Zweig with the arrival of the latest from Pushkin Press, Burning Secret.
Lest their be any doubt and for my own purposes to make the book fit the theme, and knowing that someone has valiantly read The History of Cricket, I now declare chess a sport.
Anyway, the Australians do say that the Poms are only any good at sports where you can sit down.

Endsleigh Salon - The Test of Time

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

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

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

Bookopoly.

Endsleigh Salon earlier this week and after a year or more of meeting at the hotel and bookish talk we opted for a bit of a change.The hotel was closed for decorating so we invaded someone's home for the evening and the theme was What I Got for Christmas, meaning books, not foodmixers or new slippers.
Well of course I got Bookopoly for Christmas and took that along as a semi-valid contribution and we had soon settled ourselves around the table and the game began.
Let is be said you never really know people until you sit them around a competitive game.Add in a cat called Malcolm as well and the evening was the best and possibly the rowdiest we've had. Even noisier than that Ian McEwan/ Chesil Beach debate evening.
The game is American and bookish but Monopoly just the same.You throw dice, land on books and buy them much as you would properties and charge rent accordingly, build bookshops if you get a run of three books and then a library if you manage to build four bookshops. You had to go and watch TV rather than go to jail and the utilities are replaced by genres.So the first few circuits were the usual flurry and saw heavy expenditure not unlike any of us in a real bookshop.
The Catcher in the Rye! Yes I'll buy that.
Frankenstein, oh alright then, why not.
So it went on and gradually book portfolios were accumulated.
Mine was paltry.
A few duff throws of the dice and several of us were following in the wake of the big spenders who were ripping around the board doing a bookshop trolley dash.Charlotte's Web and Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry were hardly going to win me the game and indeed they didn't.
Meanwhile the evening was constantly interspersed with a regular chant from my right of "Moby Dick, that's me $26 please" because for some reason that whale was unavoidable, a nice little earner. To my left a canny gathering of titles, ruthlessly managed and all of which I seemed to land on with great regularity.
The eventual winner managed it with a single book purchase followed by several fortuitous, nay fluke turns of good fortune.
A throw of the dice which won them the jackpot of money from the middle of the board. 
Dodgy income we cried, earned from all our fines as we successively landed on "Paper Mite Extermination Pay $200". A draw of the card "You're holding a creative writing workshop, all players pay you $35 to attend."
We was robbed.
In the end it was all quite fitting because what was that single winning book?
The Great Gatsby by F.Scott Fitzgerald.

Endsleigh Salon preview

Here we are again, second Tuesday in the month and thanks to the generosity of Oxford University Press, this evening the Endsleigh Reading Salon is about to embark on a long-term and very exciting reading project.
As many who visit here will know this is a very egalitarian, non-elitist, everyone welcome reading group with a difference I set up for local readers.Faced with a love of books and no funding, I had the choice of only two possible venues, the ancient cold and draughty, corrugated iron village hall or the local 5* hotel, a listed building tastefully furnished, log fires crackling in the grate through the winter months, a library fit for the Dukes of Bedford and set in extensive grounds with far-reaching views across the Tamar Valley.
On the off-chance I opted for the cap-in-hand beg for charity approach at the hotel first before collecting the keys to the village hall and figuring out how those calor gas heaters worked.
Alex Polizzi at Hotel Endsleigh jumped at the idea and they have accommodated us with the warmest of welcomes and in great comfort for over a year now, all at no charge and keeping us regularly supplied with tea and coffee served in Wedgewood cups and saucers.The group has settled down to about ten regular members, the bookish chat is second to none and we laugh like drains along the way too.
We have been pondering the logistics of fitting in some reading of the Classics whilst maintaining our rather laissez faire "all read a different book" approach which works like a dream on our regular themed evenings. We hit on the idea of choosing one author, all setting off and choosing a book of our choice by said author and then perhaps devoting the final half an hour or so to discussing what we'd read.
OUP very kindly offered to supply us with the books from the Oxford World's Classics range and we plan to critique the introductions too.
So we came up with four authors we'd like to nail.
The choice wavered and havered, someone begged us not to choose Henry James and we heeded their plea because it was heartfelt, and we quickly ruled out Austen, Bronte, Dickens and Eliot in this round as 'already read quite a few of '.
Eventually we hit on a selection that either few of us had read, or who we'd read but felt we'd like to do justice to in some group discussion. All quite different, Alexandre Dumas, Edith Wharton, Thomas Hardy and Anne Radcliffe.
A huge box of books has arrived ready for this evening and I thought I'd give the Endsleigh-ites who stop by here, and all of you, a little flavour of what's to come.
I'll be reporting back here every so often on how the project is going but I've peeked in the box, pulled rank and craned out a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, all 1000 pages of it.
At this point let me say, I think it was noble of me not to grab the shortest Dumas, The Black Tulip while I had the chance.Few if any of the group had read any Dumas and I only recall The Count of Monte Cristo from that great BBC Sunday night TV series back in 1964 starring Alan Badel when I would have been eleven.
The thinking was that I'd open the book reeeeeally carefully, not bend the spine, read a bit and if I didn't like it I could surreptitiously crane it back into the box and pick another one (don't tell them will you?).
Except I've rapidly thrown my lot in with Edmond Dantes and he's quite the moody teenager.
Typical 19 year old, can't get him out of bed in the mornings and his room is filthy.
"Edmond" I said "this might be the Chateau D'If  but there is absolutely no need for all that green slime on the walls"
"No I absolutely don't want to know what it is, just get this place bottomed this minute."
I might have to hang around because I think he's going to do something stupid, a bit of tombstoning would be just like him.
Tsk, these youngsters.
So there can be no turning back now, which is a pity because I've got my eye on The Three Musketeers as well and then there's The Man in the Iron Mask.

The Endsleigh Booker

It's here at last and how appropriate that the Endsleigh Salon reading group chose The Booker as their theme for last Tuesday evening.
The remit was vast, any book that has been nominated, long-listed or short-listed since the beginning.
So in the beginning there was The Booker and we had a good selection of books to talk around.
I took along Animal's People by Indra Sinha because in between dashing in from work, eating a roast dinner which Bookhound had lovingly prepared and dashing out again I opened my e mails.There was an invite to the Simon & Schuster Booker Prize party for Indra Sinha to be held at The Groucho Club this very evening.I suddenly felt exceedingly well disposed towards this book.
Please note that I am flogging myself to death at the front today so I am not dressed to the nines and en route to the Groucho for a knees up, but I do wish Indra Sinha and his publishers the very best of luck this evening.
There was good honest debate about Possession by A.S.Byatt and I could only talk to the first 100 pages of that because I had a complete Possession failure back along (as we says in Devon).Interestingly it had been read by several and with apologies to ASB it got the thumbs down from all of them.
Kazuo Ishiguro had a good airing, in particular When We Were Orphans and Kazuo got a general stamp of all-round good-egg approval as we debated several of his books and all promised to read more.We all as of one recalled that our town (Tavistock) and our famous shop ( Creber's) both get a mention in The Remains of the Day.
Life of Pi by Yann Martel received a mixed welcome, love or loath, dreamy eyed or narrow slits but it certainly drew plenty of debate...not from me beyond the recall of plagiarism allegations because I haven't read it and by this time I was beginning to think some Rennies might be handy because I really had bolted that dinner.
The Orchard on Fire by Sheena McKay had been read and enjoyed recently by one of our number and several of us remembered reading this one when it first came out, but yet again I wasn't much use because I couldn't conjure up a single thing about it, but it was 1997 and the first year of my OU degree so I claim exemption.
Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah caught several of us on the hop but not the other several who had studied it for a degree course. I had never heard of it but it was highly praised as a good and unusual read by the several.
Lastly I must apologize to anyone who was staying at Hotel Endsleigh last Tuesday night because we got completely carried away with our discussions of On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan and were probably all talking a bit loudly over each other about topics we perhaps don't usually discuss quite so animatedly in public.If we receive an eviction notice then I will hold Ian McEwan personally responsible and he will have to come down and sort things out and explain that we were discussing the subject matter and certain events in his book and it was nothing more suggestive than that.
It was only when a member of staff put their head round the door and asked pointedly if there was anything we needed that we suddenly realised which phrases may have perhaps isolated themselves from the main conversation and floated off into the lounge where the guests were quietly sipping their drinks.
Oh dear, and those who had read it didn't think On Chesil Beach was a Booker winner either.
And where's my virtual money for the Booker Prize 2007? Well I'll let you know later.

Endsleigh Salon update

Endsleigh Salon book evening this week and, having missed the last two, it was lovely to head back to heaven on earth and talk around this month's theme of books and America.
The themes are working supremely well and we all agreed at the end of the evening that we'd had a fantastic discussion about a great range of books when so often the debate about one and the same book read by all can often dry up worryingly fast. Then book groups can go way off topic and end up discussing who has got planning permission for that plot of land down the road and have the old folks had their sit-in protest about the demolition of their town centre Over 60's Rest Room yet?
Does every town have one of these? Entry forbidden unless you are over 60 and the Tinker says as he's over 80 that rules him out. It is the standard dare when anyone hits the big 6-0, they just have to go and sit in there because they can.Well ours is to be demolished to make way for flats/ houses/ skyscrapers/shops, who knows and the old folk are not happy.
Hell really hath no fury like the elderly of a traditional rural market town when rankled.We rely on them to protest about everything, neon signs, scaffolding outside shops, smelly drains, rogue trading stalls in The Square, they are invaluable.The eyes and ears for the rest of us who are too busy keeping the place working to notice.
Taking away their Rest Room is not a smart move, though quite how a sit-in has helped the cause I'm not sure because surely that's what they do in there anyway? I think a Zimmer March would have had more impact.
Anyway we had a sit-in of our own at Hotel Endsleigh, the salon room with the listed wallpaper (in case you'd forgotten that detail, we love it) pots of tea and coffee brought in and we settled down to American books and found we had covered a good range of authors between us. Anne Tyler, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest J.Gaines, Mark Twain, Alison Lurie, J.D.Salinger and everything else inbetween.
The discussion ranged all over the place, UK versus US culture, how do we see them, how do they see us, how are the books in any way different from UK reads and now we need to know just how acceptable is Huckleberry Finn as a text for children in the US now?
Our reader had found it surprising and wondered whether it might be slightly frowned upon now so perhaps some US visitors here could enlighten us.Is Mark Twain your Charles Dickens? We thought possibly so if it's not treachery to suggest such a thing to all Dickensites.
Anne Tyler got a great thumbs up as did F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Catcher in the Rye we had down as the US equivalent of our Lord of the Flies, the didactic classroom text that is supposed to convey a message and make teenagers better people.
Were we right?
Next month, back by popular demand, our favourite topic, History for the Stupid.

Endsleigh Salon update

I've held off posting about last week's reading group at Hotel Endsleigh just long enough for the SAS to clear out of the woods and for our airpsace to go quiet because anyone who reads the Daily Mail will know that Hotel Endsleigh was the venue chosen by Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall as base camp for their three day visit last week.
We sort of had an inkling because suddenly our quiet lanes seemed to be riven with slow-moving vehicles crawling along in convoys, and if one more helicopter had swooped low over the house giving us the once over we might well have gone mad.It's not so much the airborne divisions but our four dogs who know their valley and feel they must defend it against all-comers.They definitely sniffed the legions of sniffer dogs in the air and kept up a fairly constant and very defensive 72 hour Tamar-wide barking rota which no amount of explaining to them seemed to halt.
Should we perchance have been blind to those rather overt clues there was back-up, every delivery person kept the entire valley nicely informed.
So we all discreetly went about our business and it was book group as usual a few days before the visit and the onset of impenetrable security cordons.
Departing from our themed read we had all read the same book this time, Mistress of the Arts by Rachel Trethewey.I've mentioned it here before I know but it tells the very relevant local account of the life of Georgina, Duchess of Bedford. Endsleigh was her baby (she had twelve others) and much of what is there today is a direct result of the 1810 collaboration between the architect Jeffry Wyatt and landscape gardener Humphry Repton with plenty of Georgina's vivacious personality shining through.
As I steered my carriage (Ford Fiesta) down the long twisting driveway it was easy to envisage Georgy and the Duke doing the same journey 200 years previously.The rhododendrons were in full flower, glorious shades of neon technicolour, the arboretum fantastic and suddenly through the trees you get a tantalizing glimpse of the Tamar far below.
Georgina was another of the 'it' girls of the day and no wonder I had been confused in the past, there were Georginas vying for the post of Duchess of Bedford around every corner.
Once I'd unravelled my Georginas it was time to get in a tangle about the Dukes because having fallen head over heels for Francis, the filthy rich 5th Duke of Bedford, Lady Georgina Gordon had to rapidly switch allegiance to the newly installed 6th Duke, John, when the 5th Duke succumbed to a fulminating bout of peritonitis. Add in Georgina the deceased wife of the 6th Duke...I do hope you're keeping up... it's no wonder confusion reigned.
Later in the book enter the dashingly good catch Edwin Landseer the artist, in this portrait cleverly keeping his painting hand warm.Georgina astutely kept him out of the marriage market by bewitching him with her charms.There seems little doubt that her last child was Landseer's.
This led to much speculation about what exactly may have occurred 200 years ago in the exact room we were sitting in.Landseer was a frequent visitor to Endsleigh and the Duke seems to have settled happily for a menage a trois.
Following the 6th Duke's death various members of the family had their revenge and Georgy was forbidden ever to visit Endsleigh again, having to make do with lesser quarters in Scotland.Her native country welcomed her back with open arms which I felt a bit relieved about, anyone who provides a ducal family with that many heirs deserves better care than the family gave her.
All in all a book that we all felt we had enjoyed for the local colour and relevance but perhaps for this occasion we could have managed without the complex political information. It's a difficult balance this combination of personal and public spheres and in this instance we all wanted much more of the personal, 1800's Hello magazine stuff. In the end we invented a whole load of completely outrageous but very entertaining copy for ourselves.

Just one more thing...

Just a bit more feedback on the Endsleigh Whodunnit reader’s evening and I should probably issue an apology to any hotel guests who may have wondered what all the hysterical laughter issuing forth from the salon room was all about.

Look at the wallpaper in there by the way, hand blocked original 1800’s and listed so we were careful not to wreck the place.

The laughter was all down to Three Bags Full A Sheep Detective story by Leonie Swann and many thanks to R who unintentionally had us all weeping at the greatest round of sheep crime puns ever invented by man.It started with “I bet that was a good yarn” and things went rapidly downhill from there.

There was a wide selection of reading around the crime theme, Robert Goddard, Reginald Hill, Val McDermid, Jed Rubenfeld, C.J.Sansom and Lyndsey Davies but one crime writer stood head and shoulders above all other choices and at least 5 people had read a Henning Mankell.A great debate then ensued about all things Kurt and Swedish.

We note just about everything and so we started to read out all the one liners on the front covers (I think these are called puffs?) and have decided that The Guardian has a monopoly, no book worth its salt unless The Guardian likes it. Hilary Mantel coming a close second in my own reading of late, Helen Dunmore scraping home in third place.

 

These I must share

It would be churlish of me not to share a few pictures of the scene that greeted us for our first daylight evening at our local monthly reader's evening at Hotel Endsleigh. We've had six winter months toiling up the long drive in thunder, lightening and torrential rain and dashing in to tuck ourselves up around the log fire and talk books.
Suddenly the sun shines and we can see the gorgeous views and the stunning Humphrey Repton gardens.
Next month we read Mistress of the Arts, Rachel Trethewey's fascinating book about Georgina, Sixth Duchess of Bedford and how she came to build her little holiday cottage in Devon.Then we will have a wander around the house and the grounds and follow in the irrepressible Georgie's footsteps.

Endsleigh Whodunnit

Life is just flying by like a real page-turner. No sooner one great Endsleigh Salon book evening enjoyed than it's time for the next one and tonight's theme is Crime & Whodunnit.
While I think of it check out great crime fiction blogs It's a Crime here and Euro Crime here.
I wanted something completely new and preferably a series that would create one of those nice gorge-like addictions where you really get under the skin and sense the personality of the investigator and feel the atmosphere of a setting that perhaps you don't know very well. That way you get a bit of armchair travel thrown in for free.
I was spoilt for choice when I checked the shelves.
Should I catch up with Adam Dalgliesh? I had a massive P.D.James binge back in the 1980's and then lost track.
Should I finally make a start on Rebus? I have been long promising myself that I should at least read the first one which is why I haven't made any progress because the only one I have is the fifteenth one in the series, Fleshmarket Close and I only bought this because I was in Edinburgh and had just walked up there.
Same with Veronica Stallwood, goings on at the Bodleian and I'd just been to Oxford.
What about finding out what all the fuss is about and investigating Dr Kay Scarpetta? Never read a Patricia Cornwell, was I in the mood for New York?
Perhaps a trip back in time and catch up on all those Sherlock Holmes stories I haven't read? The Tinker is a real Holmes buff after we bought him the complete stories on CD for his 80th birthday but I'm nicely behind in all things Sherlock having not read any seriously since my teens.
There again should it be Brunetti, Venice and Donna Leon? Enough of these to keep me going for months and Random Jottings won't let me off the hook much longer after I made her read The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency.
But no, perhaps this is finally a chance to try and crack Jasper Fforde? I have had a complete and frequent failure with The Eyre Affair but I keep feeling I should try harder, I've bought, sold on Amazon and bought again, more copies of this book than I care to admit to. I think I'm missing the point with these but what am I missing? Could someone explain?
There was however an eventual winner and I'm delighted to have finally made the acquaintance of Andrea Camilleri's wonderful creation Inspector Montalbano and to have taken a trip to Sicily in the process.There's a very informative article by Paul Bailey here and his comment that characters generally win over plot in Camilleri's police procedurals is spot on but that was exactly what I was looking for.
I've done quite a lot of serious reading lately so I've been weaving in some humour here and there.Excursion to Tindari was a perfect combination of serious crime investigation coupled with sardonic but very funny humour matched with a priceless main character who you can't fail to warm to.
Stephen Sartarelli's translation is perfect, capturing the nuances of the language in an unobtrusive but unique way that had me reading sentences out loud and actually sounding like any mafia godfather should.
I'll also enjoy any writer who is sufficiently self-effacing to write

"This entire book - names, surnames (especially surnames), situations - is invented out of whole cloth. Any coincidence whatsoever is due to the fact that my imagination is limited"

Lastly perhaps I should also declare that the cover won me over instantly, you know me by now, every bookseller's dream customer.
You can diagnose a Jeff Fisher book cover at sixty paces now, ever since those early Captain Corelli's Mandolin days and they haven't lost one iota of their appeal for me, I love them.Seemingly random but chock full of detail and an artistic style that just urges me on to like the book.
So fickle in fact am I that another three Inspector Montalbano's are on their way because The Book People (shhh, don't tell) had a special offer, £4.99 for three.I tried to make the order up to £20 for free postage but TBP prices are so rock-bottom it almost works against itself. It would have meant about fifty books arriving, even I can't cope with that right now but I can cope with any amount of Inspector Montalbano.
But I would be negligent not to issue a health warning.
Beware these books are very high in calorific value, the food is so effectively tossed, drizzled and served throughout the book you really do have to go off and find a bowl of pasta with a nice sauce, dash of balsamic, few pine nuts, throw on some olives, grating of parmesan...quite often.

The Final Solution

So,my responsibility to decide this book's fate. Already hated by two readers, one more and it's into the Endsleigh Salon Room 101 Box.
Taking the task very seriously I gave the book my undivided attention and am pleased to declare, Michael you are safe with me because I couldn't possibly hate this book.
Yes, it's strange, haunting and perhaps completely odd but that made it an even better, far more memorable read.Always something that you can't quite touch, just out of reach.Writing that often stopped me in my tracks and made me re-read a sentence or two just to gather every last crumb.
Undercurrents, almost intangible, of trains deporting Jews to concentration camps and the added mystery of the numbers recited by Bruno, the African Grey parrot and friend of the mute Jewish child Linus Steinman.Linus now living in rural England having escaped from Nazi Germany.
Again, I was constantly reminded of the numbers tattooed onto the arms of the prisoners and I have no idea if I'm right or wrong in that interpretation and nor have I looked anything up about the meaning of this book.
It has left me with an impression of its own that will suffice.
When the parrot disappears it is the elderly local beekeeper,a retired policeman who decides to investigate the mystery. Lots of good beekeeping stuff which I always love as I am a failed apiarist (did the course, never got the hives) and there is the most heart-wrenching parrot's eye view of captivity at the end of the book that restored my faith in a bird which I don't like that much.
The Final Solution most certainly rescued and a book I will read again, as yet again it's one that has so much in it to miss first time round.
And why don't I like parrots? More of that later today.

Endsleigh Salon- February

Endsleigh Book Salon last week and another great bookish evening, all warmly hunkered down around a crackling log fire in the grand environs of  Georgiana, Duchess of Bedford's little holiday cottage.Someone's got to do it so we do.
We've come to the conclusion that we can now offer long range weather forecasting for the second Tuesday evening each month.Whatever the weather is doing it will be extreme, we've fought our way there through electrical storms, torrential rain every time and last week flooded highways and byways.
It was Spies and Spooks evening and as always the reading choices can be stretched to the limits of personal interpretation.
Two people had inadvertently read an early and a late Ian Fleming so we had some excellent James Bond debate and plenty of observations to be made about how his style had changed and of course the films, lots about the films.We had plenty to say about the Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt type of spy, then we debated why they all came from Cambridge? Didn't Oxford supply any?
Spy on the Roof of the World by Sydney Wignall had a great airing from a fine advocate who had pilfered it off her husband's shelves and surprised herself by enjoying it. We have quite a few Dartmoor Rescue Group connections in our midst who love a bit of a wander in the outdoors with the added excitement of a previously unclimbed mountain route to deal with.
I'd gone with a small collection of Edith Wharton's Ghost Stories and also taken along The Victorian Chaise- Longue by Marghanita Laski.I read it a while ago and actually it was all so eerie and spookily terrible that I couldn't bring myself to read it again.Poor Melanie and that malevolent bit of antique furniture, with its ominous brown stain on the berlin-wool tapestry cover as she becomes "locked in the time and body of a Victorian".
I think my unease may inadvertently just have put everyone else off reading it too.
Ghost Stories by M.R.James got the thumbs down from its reader, times have changed and we decided it takes a lot more to scare us these days, like Marghanita Laski.I do think Edith Wharton still has immense power to disturb and unsettle and I have a new little volume of her ghost stories from Peter Owen to check out soon,The Demanding Dead : More Stories of Terror and the Supernatural.
Someone else brought along The Road by Cormac McCarthy, two people had read it and reckon it's 21st century reading at its scariest.
The Final Solution by Michael Chabon was also not well received by its reader.Someone else had also disliked this parrots for cash story (apparently that's what it boils down to), well actually hated it, so we hit on a great new idea.
We will have our very own Room 101 box and if three people think likewise about a book, in it goes.
I am reader number three for The Final Solution so Michael Chabon's fate rests with me.
Next month we are all spoilt for choice as we have War as our theme.

P.G.Wodehouse

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

Endsleigh and Sargasso

I made it to the Endsleigh Salon evening last week despite my common cold and am pleased to report a great group is shaping up.Warm, welcoming, friendly with a great sense of humour and a real love of books and reading and probably now all sneezing...no, joking, it was "on the turn" I went back to work the next day.
The venue is more than perfect and if the hotel is quiet we can use the beautifully relaxing sitting room with log fire while all the guests go in for dinner.The hotel provide us with tea and coffee and we settle back in our comfy chairs for a couple of hours.
This session was Prequels and Sequels with about 8 of us tackling Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys because the recent TV adaptation of Jane Eyre had prompted us in that direction.
This was a first time read for me and a book that feels so profound I may need to read it several times before I start to appreciate all the significance.But I enjoyed it immensely so it will be no chore to revisit it.We had a great discussion and included some thoughts about the significance of the title, that alone could have kept us going all evening.It has more and more meaning the deeper you look.
There was a wide selection of other books too, the whole point is to read what you want not what you think you should or what anyone else is reading if you don't fancy it.
Mrs DeWinter by Susan Hill had generous coverage, this a sequel to Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca, there was more muted enthusiasm for Rebecca's Tale by Sally Beauman.
One of our gentlemen had chosen Emma Brown by Clare Boylan and that one is now making its loan journey around the group.Clare Boylan took the first and only two chapters of an unfinished work by Charlotte Bronte and carved a novel out of it.Clare Boylan signed my copy so I don't like to open it, daft, I'll give it a go soon.
Also on offer Peter Pan in Scarlet, the recent sequel to J.M.Barrie's Peter Pan written by Geraldine McCaughrean and written about here recently.This received glowing praise but not only from me, I had lent my copy around and others agreed, it is a very cleverly written sequel.
There was much debate about our choice for "Humorous" in January.
What is likely to constitute "funny" for any one of us may not make the next person laugh. Plenty of suggestions and I have set the challenge for myself.I'm going to try out some P.G.Wodehouse as that's another club I haven't joined but I'm also going to scour the shelves in a high street book shop somewhere and choose a book from the blurb.
The blurb must say "hilarious", then we'll just wait and see.

Endsleigh Salon

I've had to get a wriggle on with my reading this past week as it's the third Endsleigh Salon evening next week and the theme is Prequels and Sequels.Plenty of interest in the recent TV serialisation of Jane Eyre, and with it a great deal of enthusiasm for reading Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys.
I read somewhere last week that Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is the book most people instantly say they've always been meaning to read but for me it's Wide Sargasso Sea and at last I've arrived. I can almost hear the gasps out there,"What! NEVER read Wide Sargasso Sea?"
I've just finished it and have a little biography of Jean Rhys on the go too, quite a remarkable writer so I'm pleased to have finally made it.More about that and the evening next week.
Hotel Endsleigh will be decked for Christmas,which I can't wait to see, and of course I'll take my little camera so you can all sneak a look too.
Back in November we did Favourite Children's Books and with a pleasingly wide age range in attendance we covered a vast range of reading between us and all came away with plenty more ideas.The book chat was intense and non-stop for two hours and feed back suggests a great time was had by all.
Gradually the evening is taking shape and new faces being welcomed.None of us wants it to be exclusive,elitist or cliquey so any sort ot reading is discussed with interest.If that's what you read and enjoy then that's fine by the rest of us, no judgements or discrimination.Everyone talks to everyone too,there would seem to be no shortage of people who, like me,specialise in Chatting About Books to Anyone.
We've chosen our themes which have all been written on slips of paper and gone in The Box of Themes.We decided to draw out at random and several months ahead so we have Laughter for January, Spooks for February, War for March and Whodunnit for April.The idea is that you read absolutely whatever you want around the theme from fiction to biography to historical to anything else remotely connected and the interpretation is entirely your own.You get five minutes or so to talk about your read if you want to at the Gather Round bit of the evening and that's notebooks at the ready time and this bit will be chaired by willing volunteers.
We've agreed,no newsletters,no reading lists, nothing to detract from the the idea of a complete free-for-all of bookish talk.Brilliant.

Endsleigh Salon, the books and the thank yous

Shameless begging letters from me had publishers being generous to a fault and just about every book was snapped up, browsed, talked about and taken away to be read and reported on over the next few months, then to be brought back and handed on around.
There were enough copies of The Extra Large Medium by Helen Slavin for everyone to take away a copy (thank you Long Barn) so I expect lots of chat about that to come, there was great interest and enthusiasm for it. It goes without saying that the other books from the well-known author at Long Barn went in a flash too and there was also a great exchange about The Various Haunts of Men. I had been recommending this to all and sundry and, as it was all and sundry who had gathered, plenty had read it. Everyone wanted to talk about the end without giving anything away.Of course I couldn't resist slipping in my "of course I've met..." piece but they all knew that anyway, everyone who knows me knows THAT.
The Pushkin Press books vanished in minutes, thanks Jonny and likewise the Snowbooks, thanks Em.I don't quite know how I let them out of my grasp but I did.It was a classic example of Em's ideas on the snowblog a while back, it's the covers and the feel of these books that matters before you even get to the contents.
Transita had also sent a boxful and there was much interest in this concept.Several people in very demanding jobs (Social Services, say no more) who just don't want to read anything heavy, homed in on these very quickly and were delighted.
Canongate had sent some pre-publication proofs and there was a great deal of interest in the chance to read a book before everyone else which isn't an opportunity offered much beyond the confines of the literary review world.It should be, what better people than readers to ask for an opinion?
A great selection of magazines for readers too,so thanks to PenPusher, The Literary Review, Slightly Foxed and The Reader who all sent copies down.
There was frantic scribbling as book suggestions flew around the room, we hope to draw in some more bookaholics, shouldn't be difficult.A piece went into the local paper and the phone hasn't stopped ringing since.

The Endsleigh Salon

I realise I've hardly raved enough about what a great first night launch Alex Polizzi and I had for the monthly Endsleigh Literary Salon so I must rave some more and say some public thank yous.So I've mentioned a few book-ish things but I haven't told you about the decor and the ambience and I must.
What do you mean you didn't know anything about any of this, where have you been?
I've bored you rigid with the history of the place but when you walk in the door of Hotel Endsleigh on a dark evening nothing but nothing prepares you for the atmosphere created by hundreds of candles burning in deep amber coloured glasses all around the hotel.Beautifully arranged on tables, high up on mantlepieces, illuminating corners or particular pictures.It truly does take your breath away as a first impression and suddenly the image of Georgina,Duchess of Bedford walking into her much-loved home flits into your mind.
Obligatory log fires crackle away quietly and the room we used, which is just off the library, is as near perfect to a salon-type room as you could wish for. Original hand-blocked 19th century Birds of Paradise wallpaper now architecturally listed and large mirrors on the walls, another log fire to roast by and more candles.Comfortable sofas and armchairs and we were in heaven.
Add in our own waiter who kept our glasses expertly topped up and the fifteen bookaholic people who I'd invited to help get us launched, and we all just settled in comfortably for the evening.In fact a week would have been nice.
As the evening progressed, one of the fiercest electrical storms we have had in ages raged spectacularly across the valley and we had the perfect view.The rain was tipping it down stair-rod style and here was the best bit, as we left we were each escorted to our cars by the porter holding an enormous umbrella, not a drop touched me.
We are hoping to tempt some writer's down this way to visit, they won't be disappointed.
More later about the books and my thank yous,mustn't forget those.