dovegreyreader scribbles

Sunday Confessions...

I know it's Tuesday but I haven't done Sunday Confessions for ages... that owning up to all the books that were arriving, because in the end it just seemed like bragging about the number of books that had come through the door. However some of this week's are too luscious-looking not to mention, so please forgive more indulgence and actually I have paid for a few of these too... no chance of a year of not buying books for me.

I have to shout from the rooftops because some of those 'reasons to be cheerful about publishing' have arrived. A parcel from Faber included a proof copy of On Canaan's Side by Sebastian Barry, not published until August, but all bets are off that I won't have picked it up before the end of January. An epic spanning seven decades as Lilly Bere mourns the loss of her grandson...memory, war, family-ties and love. I came across this quote in an interview with Sebastian Barry as he talked about A Long, Long Way and I knew exactly what he meant,

'Any half-decent book has a secret that the reader recognizes and, like the writer, can never completely say what it is—which I think constitutes the pleasure of a book. It is saying something, but the thing left hanging in the air, the thing unsaid, is what the reader takes away.'

Likewise I am eager to read Irma Voth the new novel from Miriam Toews and a return to  the fundamentalist religious community that she portrays so well. As a film crew move in recently married and deserted Irma starts to question the secluded life she has led.

In the same parcel, Philip Larkin, Letters to Monica edited by Anthony Thwaite...

'My holiday was rather as I expected - my poor father grew steadily worse & died on Good Friday. Since then mother and I have been rather hopelessly looking at the stock in the house - this morning I shifted 100lbs of jam - 1945, 1946, 1947 years - and about 25 Kilner jars of bottled fruit. Seventeen dozen boxes of matches, a shoe box of chocolate - all this from one small cupboard. I don't what will happen to it all - I don't like sweet things  you remember.'

I'm going to add this to my pile of letters to dip in and out of, The Letters of T.S.Eliot arrived a while back too, so much to enjoy.

Not forgetting either Saints and Sinners by Edna O'Brien, also from Faber and this the first collection of her stories for some years, I haven't read anything by Edna O'Brien at all so this will be my starter for ten.

My three purchased Philip Roths have arrived along with another good spot on Amazon, a collection of three books by Tarjei Vessas, Spring Night, The Birds and The Boat in the Evening published by Peter Owen and which I snapped up in the Marketplace. It is a while since I read The Ice Palace but memories of that book etched into my memory so I am looking forward to more by this Norwegian author.

I was also delighted to receive a copy of Old Man Goriot by Balzac from Penguin, in a new translation. Perhaps better known as Pere Goriot to me but mention of Balzac when I was writing about Penelope Fitzgerald this week had prompted me to plan a sidetrack in his direction after that single blaze of glory I experienced with Eugenie Grandet, so a fortuitous arrival.

Just as timely, a copy of Daisy Goodwin's My Last Duchess which has been getting great reviews. I missed it in hardback so my thanks to Headline for a paperback edition because I think this will segue nicely into my reading of Searching for Grace by Carol Henderson. I'm really hoping the allusion to Browning's wonderful poem quoted is setting me on the right track with this one. A Level English, rainy day huddled over books in a classroom and I knew that I would love his poetry for ever when I read this poem, and slowly its haunting meaning dawned...

That's my last duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf's hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands
Will't please you sit and look at her?...

It will please me to sit and read this book for sure.

 

 

dovegreyreading...

This week I have been mostly reading The Girl With Glass Feet by Ali Shaw in readiness for NTTVBG round at Simon's this Sunday and not another word about that until I'm comfortably esconced on the Savidge Reads virtual sofa. For those of you following the books there has been a date swap (all my fault) Skin Lane will now be on Sunday April 11th over at Savidge Reads and The Boys in the Trees will be here on Sunday April 25th.

Alongside that I've picked up and made a start on yet another book about Virginia Woolf, sensibly titled Virginia Woolf by Anthony Curtis.
I had an agreement with myself a few years ago that I would read no more about Virginia's life until I had actually focused on her writing having become so wrapped up in the extraneous detail that I'd missed the most important bit. Since then I've read The Voyage Out, Night & Day, To The Lighthouse, Jacob's Room and most recently Flush plus a great deal of the non-fiction writing so I think I'm allowed another book about Virginia before we reach the third book in the NTTVBG series, Vanessa and Virginia by Susan Sellers round at Other Stories on March 7th.

I'm really enjoying the conversational, reader-friendly tone to this book, which for all that readable appeal doesn't mess with the facts or the detail but somehow adds something extra, perhaps that human quality. The range of photos is also excellent, some that even I, having in my possession just about every book written on the subject, hadn't seen before.
Much other postal temptation to resist this week but it won't be long before I give in.
I read Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star with some degree of mystification but a great deal of enjoyment a few years ago and have had Why This World - A Biography of Clarice Lispector by Benjamin Moser biding its time here. I had really wanted to read a bit more of Clarice Lispector's fiction before I read about her life for fear of falling into that old Virginia Woolf trap, except there seems to be very little in translation, so I was delighted when The Apple in the Dark arrived.
 

"Martin is convinced that he has murdered his wife. In a delirium of guilt and grief, he wanders through a forest until he comes across an isolated farm run by Vitória an indomitable spinster who is afraid to live , and her flighty, obsessive cousin Ermelinda, who is terrified of death. As Martin works on Vitória's land he is both haunted and comforted by memories of his wife and son. In the intense heat of the Brazilian summer, drought threatens both the farm and its inhabitants, and these three very different but equally domineering characters provoke each other into a realisation of their individual psychological isolation."

This year it seems that I will also mostly be reading books by men called Jonathan.
Firstly Jonathan Buckley's Contact, currently Jon Macgregor's Even the Dogs about which much more soon because it has impressed me enormously (I even have prize-list hopes for it) and now a proof copy of Jonathan Coe's new novel The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim has arrived. For publication in May and perhaps Jonathan Coe's moment has arrived here with this book because I read the first thirty pages and had to drag myself away and I'll now confess I haven't read any of the others and everyone else seems to have done...The Rotter's Club...What a Carve Up!
I'm sure you're all going to tell me I must now.
 
 
From Jonathans galore to the one and only Joan Bakewell who seems to be the 'it' girl of the moment with an autobiography that everyone who reads it loves, and so I'm intrigued by the arrival of her novel All the Nice Girls, it's been out a year, soon coming in paperback,

'"The school is going to adopt a ship."
The announcement prompts tremors of excitement...Girls whisper...Contact with serving sailors, men in uniform, who have seen the enemy...even been in battle...Letters. Meetings...'


Rose Tremain is certainly another writer I haven't done justice to, The Colour was going really well and then something went wrong and I lost interest, perhaps an interruption and when I went back I wasn't enthused. I've missed a great deal both before and since I know, so I'll have a go with her latest novel Trespass and see whether a backlist-backtrack is in order.
Finally something else to look forward to for anyone else who loved Catherine O'Flynn's What Was Lost, her second novel The News Where You Are to be published in July,

'a blisteringly sharp satire on Modern Britain, brilliantly funny, heartbreakingly sad'

well so sayeth the blurb and look, one of my Jonathans likes it too..."an awesomely talented writer."
So how about you, good reading week?
Have the abstainers abstained from buying?
Have the rest of you had books plopping through the letterbox or lugged a bagful home from the library as usual?
Confess and be absolved, we won't tell anyone.

Postal confessions...

It's another "pen and notebook to hand" day, but before I breath a word about postal arrivals, I have to say a huge thank you for all your wonderful comments this week and every week. I really  appreciate you taking the time to write them, and I do try to reply to everyone except sometimes I think I'm just being repetitive and anyway often you're all having a lovely conversation with each other too; but be assured I'm reading and laughing and crying with you all and frantically jotting down book suggestions at the same time because there are always plenty of those.
This week I learn that if I'm ever stuck on a train between London and Kettering things can be made bearable if I have Kate Atkinson's Human Croquet with me, I won't forget that.
If I need day surgery again (which I'd really prefer not) all will be well if I have The View From Castle Rock by Alice Munro secreted in my operating gown, and it would seem those of us who haven't embarked on William Maxwell have some great reads ahead of us.
If you missed Tuesday's post 'On habit and reading in public places' and are in need of some reading ideas, check out the fantastic comments and have that notebook to hand.
Ellen thank you for the very kind offer of a copy of So Long See You Tomorrow, you've heard from me already and my thanks also to Chris (though I don't know which one...but we think Nottingham?) who this week sent me a wonderful book In Cold Ink, written by her brother, David Robinson,
David Robinson is the Books Editor of The Scotsman, I have to confess a newspaper not stocked in the village shop because to be honest even Bristol's a foreign country to us here in Devon, and I doubt they get The Western Morning News up there either, but I frequently come across The Scotsman reviews (and sadly never the WMN) if I'm checking out a book online.
In Cold Ink - On the Writer's Tracks is a collection of essays and interviews based on David Robinson's newspaper articles, and a book like this has to be one of my most favourite genres, they feel like a really precious resource on the shelf.
A book to dip into and one that suggests new reading trails because the list of subjects here ranges far and wide... Truman Capote, Robin Jenkins, David Mitchell, JG Ballard, Tobias Wolff, Ian McEwan, AL Kennedy, Ali Smith, Kate Atkinson (of London to Kettering fame), Ali Smith, Jackie Kay and many more.
One essay has already challenged a long-held reading pre-conception here, so expect more about that next week.
Amongst the recent new arrivals I've picked out a few books that have jumped out and bitten me for reasons various.
As this sassenach has already strayed north of the border today I might as well stay there for a minute and mention the latest book from Susan Fletcher, Corrag published by Fourth Estate. Beautiful cover cloaking a fictional account of the Massacre of Glencoe and the plight of a woman named Corrag, condemned for her involvement and accused of witchcraft. I loved Eve Green for its child's eye view of grief and loss, themes now repeating themselves in this week's reading of They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell, but how have I missed Susan Fletcher's second novel Oystercatchers?
Corrag has climbed very high up on the tbr munro.

Eline Vere by Louis Couperus from Holland Park Press who publish Dutch literature in translation. This book first translated into English in 1892; women's lives set in the stifling society of The Hague. Louis Couperus much admired by Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, tricky chaps to please at the best of times, and by me too after my last read Inevitable, which I recall was much enjoyed here two years ago.
The Mystery of Lewis Carroll, Understanding the Author of Alice in Wonderland by Jenny Woolf and published by Haus Books is perhaps set to challenge more loosely acquired prejudices and 'the nonsense written about Carroll from the 1920s onwards' ...which I'm sorry to say I have bought into wholesale, having had him down as a serial Schedule One offender for some years. I'm keeping an open mind and will be prepared to shift my stance if Jenny Woolf's evidence and arguments are persuasive enough.
I'm intrigued.

Having been introduced to a fictional account of the life of the poet John Clare through Adam Foulds's The Quickening Maze via the Bookerthon last year, how can I resist the other side of the story?
The Poet's Wife by Judith Allnatt, published by Doubleday, a book about poor Mrs Clare and her husband's madness.
More intrigue, the tbr munro is reaching some altitude this week.
Talking of which, The Hidden Landscape A Journey Into the Geological Past by Richard Fortey and published by Bodley Head looks like it might be a book that makes trilobite fossils (Ogygiocarella debuchii...that would be a Scrabble winner) and carboniferous limestone pavements interesting, and in a way that Miss Cassell's triple geography on a Friday didn't.

'Britain was once divided into two parts separated by an ocean... Scottish malt whisky, Harris tweed, slate roofs and thatched cottages can be traced back to tumultuous events which took place many millions of years ago.'

An exploration of time and place which lets the rocks tell the story of the British Isles which we can happily add to the current TV preoccupation with ensuring that we know this story from every conceivable angle.
Programmes which I could watch all day actually.
Coast with that nice Scot's chap with the long hair jumping on and off boats and I'm sure it's been on so long we've been twice round already. Then there's Andrew Marr bounding through The History of Modern Britain like an irrepressible puppy.
Did you see the last one, Paradise Lost, as the 60s dream turned sour ?
I'd quite forgotten how violent it all was, and bless Andrew for steering us around it all in his old Cortina...or was it a Zephyr Zodiac?
Then David Dimbleby, the measured and serious senior statesman-like approach to The Seven Ages of Britain with a lot of quiet reverent gazing at ceilings, which actually I like to gaze at too, so I'm enjoying that.
But shouldn't he have been wearing gloves when he leafed through that foot thick bible in Florence?
I was worried about the foxing, especially if he'd been eating a bag of crisps beforehand.
But how about you, have you bagged any books for the tbr munro this week?

Postal confessions...

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Postal confessions...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'll do a few more next week.

Sunday Confessions on a Sunday

It was obvious I couldn't go near a steady succession of bookshops and not buy at least one book, so by the time I reached Topping & Co in Ely in the company of RevCheryl, who is a regular, almost part-of-the-furniture customer, I was really a lost cause.
In the run up to Ely we'd done a raid on Heffers, Oxfam and The Haunted Bookshop in Cambridge where I was delighted to finally lay hands on a copy of a book I had been on the lookout for, more on that another day because it needs space of its own.
Heffers yielded a couple of books transferred to my possession by and about an author I have been meaning to investigate for some time and can't put off much longer, Elizabeth Bowen.
I love books of essays, they offer a real insight into a writer's thinking and everyone including A.S.Byatt seems to see Elizabeth Bowen's writing as quite a challenge; A.S.Byatt suggesting in her introduction to The House in Paris, that Bowen learned much from Henry James and Virginia Woolf, writing 'with a harshness that is unusual and pleasing ', making this 'a very elegant and a very melodramatic novel.' Paris is just where my reading is right now, currently very deeply embedded in the mire and slush of the 18th century streets in the run up to the Revolution, so I think this one will fit that Parisian reading trail nicely too. The joy of reading around a place is the ability to travel to and fro in time too, so I'm bound to add some more Emile Zola while I'm there and who knows what else.
RevCheryl also had a pile of books to pass onto me, urging me to read Siri Hustvedt
and also suggesting that my reading journey is incomplete without having at least tried Margery Allingham.
On to Topping & Co at Ely (and by now forgetting that I have to carry all these books home on the train) the bookshop with the stock to make you really really swoon and drool. I had quite thought bookshops just didn't even try to stock like this anymore in the face of internet competition, but that all seems to have passed Toppings by.
This bit of the shop might look empty but this was 10pm, after the event. In the afternoon it was fair buzzing with activity as everyone geared up for that evening's Year of the Flood extravaganza with Margaret Atwood and you could feel the tension and anticipation mounting, yet still customers were offered complimentary pots of Earl Grey tea (this IS my type of bookshop) and encouraged to sit and browse the books in a quiet corner, on window seats or scattered book-laden tables, and it wasn't in the least bit difficult to find three books I really couldn't live without a minute longer.
What better place than Ely to buy Roger Deakin's Waterlog - A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain.
To Siberia by Per Petterson caught my eye in the certain knowledge that having enjoyed Out Stealing Horses and In the Wake, I'd probably enjoy this one too.
Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose has been on my must-have list too, a book that takes you into literature and its masters for an in-depth look at just how that sleight of pen happens.
So then you hit that moment when you try to pack your bag for home and realise what you've done.

Sunday Confessions on a Tuesday

Don't you just hate the way these book buying sites control your clicking finger?
So there I was, Laura had talked me out of reading Kafka...what on earth was I thinking, men waking up as cockroaches...did I need that, perhaps not now...then Joan comes along and says I must read him and it's one of the many wonderful things about asking a question of all of you.
I shall be trying Kafka eventually because I want to be able to say Kafkaesque and I can't until I've read him according to Mike.
Mention of Arthur Ransome and Swallows and Amazons (Erika says no) had thrown up one recent but shabby paperback copy here and I knew it was the book to try for my next Inner Child read but I could only read it in hardback with 'that' cover.

Is everyone this fussy?
Finances permitting, does a book have to be just right?
Off to Amazon 'just to see' and luckily there is a hardback edition in print and available so that was easy.
Then your eye wanders over the screen, and drat and double drat, they've flashed up books relevant to your previous purchases.
They saw me coming a mile away when they pasted Stefan Zweig's autobiography right in my eyeline, I am a marketing tool's dream attachment, no messing, no fixing, no lining up the notches and turning clockwise, I just click immediately into place, or my clicking finger does.
'Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was a poet, novelist, and dramatist, but it was his biographies that expressed his full genius, recreating for his international audience the Elizabethan age, the French Revolution, the great days of voyages and discoveries. In this autobiography he holds the mirror up to his own age, telling the story of a generation that was loaded down with a burden of fate as was hardly any other in the course of history. Zweig attracted to himself the best minds and loftiest souls of his era: Freud, Yeats, Borgese, Pirandello, Gorky, Ravel, Joyce, Toscanini, Jane Addams, Anatole France, and Romain Rolland are but a few of the friends he writes about.'

How could I resist that?
In fact how could I have even waited this long to discover a book by a writer I admire so profoundly and when The World of Yesterday arrived I was dipping into it immediately, it's readable, seems to be wonderfully insightful and self-deprecating, in fact vintage Stefan Zweig, the man I feel  I have come to know through his writing and I'm intrigued to know if this will turn out to be the real man but I've had to force a put-down because...
Not purchased but here thanks to Bloomsbury and I'm already swimming around nicely in The Year of the Flood by my friend Peggy Margaret Atwood.
I think this might be the first novel to emerge since I finished that grand Atwood-athon three years ago, just before I started dovegreyreader, in fact it was Margaret Atwood who led me to Margaret Laurence amongst others who made me start writing all this, blame her. My head was so full of everything I'd read, it just had to spill out somewhere or I'd be in trouble.
Just how does Margaret Atwood do it, is a question I am asking myself over and again as I'm reading and if you enjoyed The Handmaid's Tale and more specifically Oryx and Crake, which I did, I suspect you'll love The Year of the Flood too. Oryx and Crake the book which turned me from an occasional Atwoodian into a devoted one and sent me back to tackle The Blind Assassin again after a failure or two. I hate to admit it but I may have reached that point where I am beyond any attempt at objective,  reasoning or criticism about Margaret Atwood's writing.
I just fall in and wallow around in the deep end loving it, sorry.
Only a six more sleeps until RevCheryl and I pitch up at The Year of the Flood event at Ely Cathedral, expect fulsome accounts and Marg09 is a blogger now too, check this out.

Hilary Mantel & Sunday Confessions...on a Thursday

Countless books arrive here each week as you know but I do still buy a few (oh alright, a lot) and I met a blog friend (who can identify herself in comments if she wishes...waving at Carol) at Port Eliot who said she really missed Sunday Confessions because it made her feel so much better about her own book buying habit, so perhaps I’ll start owning up again.
Last week, eager to get my hands on Me Cheeta I ordered a copy from Amazon and then needed to spend 6p more to get free postage. 6p, I ask you, but I perused my lists and came up with Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety.
This was on the assumption that if our ‘ilary could hand-hold me through the Tudors she was equally capable of guiding me through the French Revolution of which I think I know less than I did about Thomas Cromwell.
I love it when that parcel arrives and when this great big book clunked onto the table I was more than excited.
Does everyone else get the new-book excitement?
I pick it up and I don’t actually want to put it down.
I want to start it that very minute.
I want it with me everywhere I go and but for the fact this one is 870 pages I would have done just that.
I perhaps daren’t venture into 1780's Paris until I’ve conquered the Booker long list but I have a feeling I can see autumn reading trails opening before my very eyes.
I’d already lined up a return to some American women writers I haven’t really explored like Willa Cather and more Dawn Powell, but now I’m fancying a bit of French Revolution too because I have never managed to get further than page twenty of A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens either so might that be possible if I get my guillotine eye in?
I can hardly sit still for the thought of all the new and uncharted territory I’m about to discover and of course I can tricoteuse my way nicely through it all so all reading suggestions welcome.
Is there a record of what was being knitted alongside the guillotine?
Was it socks, stockings?
Perhaps I’ll knit some Revolution Socks to accompany.
Quite a few other new additions in recent weeks too.
From the second-hand book stall at Port Eliot, Sylvia Pankhurst, Artist and Crusader by Richard Pankhurst, revealing the much-forgotten side of the militant suffragette, that of the accomplished artist and all nicely illustrated and revealed by her only child.
Dashing off next to the annual Book Sale over at Launceston and a church hall stacked out with boxes and boxes of books all at 30p each. Rummaging began and I found a few to add to the shelves.
Babel Tower by A.S.Byatt, (30p for an ominously brand new hardback) The Careful Use of Compliments by Alexander McCall Smith, and a spare copy of Room for a Single Lady by Clare Boylan. This latter is one of my many favourite books so will be good to pass onto a friend or perhaps one of you if you are visiting down this way.
and then a book I’m afraid I couldn’t possibly leave behind,

‘She couldn’t even see the gazebo until she was halfway up the path. She couldn’t see it clearly then. It was just a shadow against the shadowy hedge...’

Bit like ours really.

Hair today song tomorrow.

That's a baaaad title, blame Bookhound because  when I said I need a post title for a book about hairy people and hairy singers that's what he came up with. So a couple more of the interesting books that have been arriving and how about this, The Marvelous Hairy Girls by Merry Wiesner-Hanks.
Now recognised as a case of hypertrichosis universalis, the hirsute Gonzalez sisters plus father and brother all suffered from this rare genetic condition which left them completely covered with hair. Far from being shunned as sixteenth-century oddities they were taken under the wing of the upper echelons of European society, cherished and educated as courtiers and playthings, fashionable curios and of course examined as medical aberrations. It's all bringing out the very greedy reader in me and this book described as 'speaking to our deep discomforts and compulsions towards the abnormal' and revealing much of ourselves in the process.
How true that is about reading and how astutely a book can force us to strip away all those surface and seemingly virtuous values because I'll admit it, I'm just agog to read this one.
Did I say no mens' lives arriving?
Well not quite, here come the Marvelous Hairy Men, Tenor, History of a Voice by John Potter.
This sorts the gender-balance of this week's postal arrivals nicely because there are hundreds of men in this book all finding their tessitura and giving it some Verdi.
Now if there's a bigger black hole of ignorance than my shameful Eleanor of Aquitaine one, it could well be my voluntary operatic one, you all know by now that opera offends my philistine sensibilities and my ears greatly. However I think this book may well be yet another about to try and debunk some of the elitism that lies at the heart of my doubtless misplaced prejudice, because it also seeks to precede the days of the highly cultured sound of the trained tenor voice we are familiar with today and searches for the antecedents.
Possibly those that sat behind me in the church choir forty years ago, who knows.
The tenor voice used to sound like speech apparently, clarity of text ruled over beauty of sound and whilst nowadays individuality is apparently sacrificed by modern training to produce that voice, meaning we may recognise the voice rather than the person, it was not ever thus.
When is a tenor not a tenor?
Well very careful albeit limited parallels can be drawn with the modern rock singer, text matters apparently and that can be a way of imagining the difference between pre and post-romantic singing.
See how much I've learned from the introducton already?
How much I've confused you all?
Don't worry, I'll sort it eventually I hope.
The book offers appraisal of not only the famous tenors of the establishment familiar to us now (well as familiar to me as Classic FM can manage before I leap up and retune)  but also examines the rise of the media-friendly tenor, those who purists may argue are not fit to let rip a cabaletta at the feet of the mighty and yet need to be considered in terms of their overwhelming public approval ratings. John Potter makes many a very valid point about their existence, their rise to fame and their popularity and also about accessibility; it's far cheaper for a greater number of people to hear these singers at a stadium than the 'vastly inflated prices to be paid for seats in an opera theatre.'
So quite a different book for me but the non-partisan writing style, one that offers both sides of the argument feels like a laudable achievement for a very knowledgeable writer who is also a tenor performer and recording artist. I've already dipped in and out of this far more than I might have expected to and I feel that John Potter is doing a grand job of breaking down the barriers with this book.
We were talking about this at Endsleigh last Tuesday evening. Sometimes it can be good to pick up and run with a book on a subject you know absolutely nothing about, think you don't really want to know much more and then end up being very pleasantly surprised. Our themed evenings often make this happen and none more so than next month,more on that soon.
On the subject of voice, I'm hoping to get back into some choir singing again later this year, and for this vocal reincarnation I'm opting for Ladies-Popular rather than Choral-Secular. I always think singing and sight-reading (poor to basic, we're talking up or down not pitch perfect) uses a bit of my brain that nothing else does and this is the longest non-choir stretch that I've had. Sadly plans to get to a 'Sing Carl Jenkins The Armed Man a Mass for Peace From Scratch' day in early May have been thwarted, but I'll let you know if I'm converted into a Pavarotti-lyte by the end of this book and of course I'll keep you posted with the repertoire when I rejoin the warbling ranks.

Womens' Lives

Womens' lives flying through the door daily at the moment, well books about them, and suddenly I wondered whether as many books are being written about men's lives and are they just passing me by, or is this the trend? Is there still so much about women's lives to be told?
So as I face down this big pile of big books and wonder when their moment will come, it's good to pause and sit and think about them before I dive in, share thoughts and pre-conceptions before I even turn the first page because the reading when it happens will often transform my attitudes, enlighten and inform my thinking, send me off on new reading trails. I'll often have changed my mind completely about something I thought I felt sure about and it's good to take you along on those travels, explore it with you all and hear your ideas and suggestions too. The Other Elizabeth Taylor just seemed to open a yawning chasm of unanswered questions for me, ideas about biography that I hadn't really settled down to consider before and thank you so much for all your considered responses.
Perhaps there will be some answers in this batch.
The stampede started with two lovely finds at the Book Fair a few weeks ago, The Wheel of Things a biography of Lucy Maud Montgomery by Mollie Gillen. I have most books by and about Lucy Maud but not this one. Lucy Maud possibly a biographer's dream subject because she appreciated in her lifetime that her personal history would become a public one and though she rewrote her journals in anticipation of publication they nevertheless always strike me as being riven with that searing warts-and-all honesty. However someone else's perspective on her life will be interesting too.
As if that wasn't enough there was a pristinely beautiful Virago super-sized edition, Ever Yours, Florence Nightingale Selected Letters, published in 1989, something endlessly fascinating and wonderfully contradictory about our Flo and I never pass up a book about her. Sorted out the Crimea and then returned home to a bed-ridden life but with no noted evidence of organic disease yet proceeding to live to the age of ninety.Doubtless Flo discovered that she had more clout and time to herself as an invalid and reading again Miriam Bailin's brilliant book The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction (in relation to my ongoing bout of Brontemania) confirms this.
Arriving in the post, The Blue Hour A Portrait of Jean Rhys by Lilian Pizzichini and so the life of a writer I know little about sits waiting. I do know vaguely that Jean was discovered in her later years living in straitened circumstances in the Devon village of Cheriton Fitzpaine, but I'm now that 'greedy reader' waiting to discover more. I've been picking up Jean Rhys's fiction whenever I see it, but my reading limited to Wide Sargasso Sea so I have much to explore here.
Anne Chisholm's  Frances Partridge The Biography looks equally tempting, all those years of reading the diaries lead me to think I know Frances Partridge as if she lived next door, but of course there will be much more. Anne Chisholm sets out a clear remit, she is not what Frances would term a 'Bloomsbury hound' sniffing around for any whiff of the old guard, this is about Frances's life and how she came to be recognised in her own right and not just as a minor player on the Bloomsbury stage. I'll own up, I can be a fiend for a bout of  Bloomsburyitis, I'll succumb along with the next person to the allure of it all but I feel sure this book is going to give me a new view through a different window and there are some fantastic pictures too. Frances was a real beauty right up to the end of her life at the age of 103 in 2004.
Right, next up Eleanor of Aquitaine by Ralph V. Turner.
There are many shamefully large and gaping black holes in the firmament of my history knowledge and there's a whopper called Eleanor of Aquitaine which this book should fill nicely. I could probably put Henry II in the same sentence and throw in something to do with France for good measure but beyond that nada. You see, I was right, it's pitiful, I don't know how I've got the nerve to admit it but it can't go on, who knows when I may need to know all this and for some strange reason it bothers me that I don't, I must repair and shore up forthwith.
Finally for today an unknown life which comes as something of a relief, The Magnificent Mrs Tennant by David Waller.
I don't feel quite so ignorant now, I couldn't have been expected to know anything about Gertrude Tennant surely?
An unsurpassed London hostess who established a celebrity salon enticing in the likes of Gladstone, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, Henry James, Robert Browning, fitting in a flirtation with Gustave Flaubert and becoming mother-in-law to Henry Morton Stanley of  'Dr Livingstone I presume' fame. The promise is of 'colourful detail' which will place Gertrude right slap-bang in the middle of a century's worth of European social, literary and intellectual life and she probably knew all about Eleanor of Aquitaine too.

Sunday Confessions

There's every chance if I've bought an unusual book that it's Mark Thwaite's fault entirely.
I nip over to Ready Steady Book or The Book Depository and there it is, a tempting little morsel on a writer I think I've heard of subliminally here and there but never properly.
I explore and the buttons are pressed in a flash. I envisage someone dashing off to pack up my book that very minute because they seem to arrive very fast.
In recent weeks the name has been Marguerite Duras,

'one of the leading intellectuals and novelists of post-war France.Throughout her life and to her dying breath, this astonishing woman never ceased to embrace national and international fame.Undoubtedly, she owed her success to her obstinacy to be and remain herself, come what may and be her own person.'

I'll quickly gloss over my ignorance, I'm sure I'd heard of her really.
Wartime Notebooks contains exactly that, the four notebooks that Marguerite Duras has kept in a blue closet in her country home in France, her writing from 1943 to 1949 including first drafts and the true stories behind several of her most famous works.
How exactly I've missed a 'major European writer' hardly matters now that I have this volume and one of her novels The Lover. This won the Prix Goncourt and is a story of an unconventional love affair between a young girl and and the son of a wealthy Chinese family.This slight little book gets mixed reader reviews from 'perverted' to 'exquisite' and when that happens the only course of action is to read and find out for myself.
How I heard about Clarice Lispector I have no idea, but I was checking out authors for my travels and had her lined up for Brazil. The greatest writer of the twentieth century for French feminist writer and literary critic Helene Cixous (how that name takes me back, Helene Sicksue  when we all struggled to understand her thinking) so I ordered The Hour of the Star published by Carcanet to make a start.
I didn't mean to go to Brazil just yet but then, in that blogendipitous way these things happen, I heard Clarice Lispector mentioned again this week over at The Complete Review and a link to this article.They've been meaning to read her too and this little book is more than intriguing so a minor diversion in progress.More self-reflexive authorial intrusion but of the highest quality as life is breathed into a character from nothing.
Finally I always listen to Terry Wogan as I drive to work and, one day back in early January, the interlude Pause for Thought was given by Father Brian D'arcy with a warm and heartfelt tribute to the Irish poet John O'Donohue who had died in his sleep at the age of 53. Father Brian also read out one of John's Gaelic blessings from his latest book Benedictus.
John O' Who?
I am always captivated by the idea of a poet who returns to Celtic spirituality, Kenneth Steven is another who has embraced this deeply quiet and gentle form in his anthologies Columba and Iona published by Saint Andrew Press, but I had never heard of John O'Donohue.Yet he had written a best-selling book Anam Cara and if Father Brian rates him then he's good, solid and sound.By all accounts an articulate philosopher with a razor-sharp intellect that he could use to convey his thoughts in a lyrical, accessible and informing way. I needed to discover more.
Somehow Celtic spirituality transcends boundaries and can appeal to even the most secular of thinkers like me. It seems to connect with the very basics of human existence and touching base occasionally is never time wasted according to John O'Donohue,

'...not a world of clear boundaries; persons and things were never placed in bleak isolation from each other. Everything was connected and there was a lovely sense of the fluent flow of presences in and out of each other...the homeland of the inspirational and the unexpected.'

On the other hand I'll switch off if it's too ethereal, mawkishly sentimental, wishy-washy or embarrassingly half-baked so was delighted to find John O'Donohue's book Eternal Echoes - Celtic Reflections for £3 in Totnes last week and again the chance to find out for myself what I may have missed.
I quite like this already,

' Each soul is a different shape.No one feels your life as you do; no one experiences things the way you do. Your life is a totally unique story and only you really know it from within. No one knows what your experience is like. The experience of each of us is opaque and inaccessible to outsiders.'

There's plenty more to qualify and enlarge on that statement but it's all robust and grounded enough to keep me interested and I have Anam Cara and Benedictus on the way. Then I feel a big Celtic phase coming on and with it that need I always have to link reading into crafts. Perhaps it's a good time to start thinking about making that little piece of Celtic applique patchwork with its eternal woven knots, interlocking  curves and curlicues, no beginning and no end.
Sunday Salon reading news later.

Sunday Confessions

A slight change, I'm going to keep Sunday Confessions chugging along as and when but stick mostly to books I've actually bought rather than the myriad piles that I'm sent.There may be just one or two exceptions along the way..like today.
Nothing will ever stop me from buying books and here are this week's offerings, not many but I think they may well all pack a punch.
Rosalind Belben has left an indelible mark with me, both her writing style and voice and her subject matter so Hound Music is next. 'Richly evocative of the countryside, plangent and mischievous...fox-hunting as it was in the years 1900-1902.'
Will this be steeped in controversy?
Read in the emotional context of 2008 probably yes, read in the context of its time, who can tell? It's a difficult subject made more so by legislation. Passions still run high over it in the countryside, I'm looking forward to this one.
To complete my Max Sebald oeuvre I've had to hunt high and low for On the Natural History of Destruction which would seem to be out of print and getting very expensive.More probing into the silence from Sebald and his thoughts on the scope of the devastation inflicted on Germany during the war and I'm heartened to see the following quote on the back from The NY Times,

'Most writers, even good ones, write of what can be written...The very greatest write of what cannot be written...I think of Akhmatova and Primo Levi, for example, and of W.G.Sebald.'

Good, I'm heartened because one of the most involving and demanding pieces I have ever written was an exploration of Anna Akhmatova and Primo Levi saying the unsayable, and for it I used Requiem and The Juggler respectively. I learnt a huge amount from that process and I am ready and willing to add Max Sebald to the list.
This is turning into quite a sober confession because up next The Singer on the Shore by Gabriel Josipovici published by Carcanet. A collection of lectures, essays and introductions by a writer who is starting to flit across my radar with increasing regularity.The book itself a fine statement of understatement, beautiful presentation, simple, unostentatious design work and concealing I know some very challenging thinking ahead for me.
To lighten proceedings a book I've been sent but it's a bit special so needs mentioning.
You may have spotted Darren Craske over at MeandMyBigMouth signing and drawing in the 1000 special limited first editions of his novel The Equivoque Principal published by The Friday Project.
So just look what came in the post.
My flabber was gasted and now I have to jump it through all those hoops to get a review on here, no special treatment. I'm being completely transparent and telling you all, this may be the last time you see it after all, but should I write in it as I read or not?
I mean it could be worth a mint one day?
Should I even read it?
I might crease it? Bend the spine.?
Can you see me on Antiques Roadshow in ten years time? Like the family a few weeks ago, selling all their Harry Potter first editions because they'd met JKR years ago at a baby clinic and become good friends when she was living in a cafe and had a baby in a buggy and no money and everything and gave them the books in return for baby-sitting or something and now they needed a new central heating system.
Oh my word! Gather round cameras, it's THE EQUIVOQUE PRINCIPLE !!! Surely not a first edition? NUMBER ONE!!!! SIGNED??? A HAND DRAWN PICTURE!!!!
But I'm afraid it's worthless because you've scribbled in it.

Bookhound finds...

Heading off in pouring rain to get the papers and some milk from town yesterday afternoon, I'm not quite sure how Bookhound diverted by about 35 miles to the second-hand bookshop on the other side of Dartmoor, but divert he did and it wasn't a wasted excursion.He can be relied on to do this, bit like the aunt of mine who went out to buy some Brillo pads and came back with a grand piano.
Introduction to African Literature edited by Ulli Beier will be very handy when I head there on my travels. I haven't given Africa a thought yet, though someone else in the house has.
The Kayaker off this week travelling around Africa for a few months with a team who plan to paddle the White Nile. First stop Uganda and he says he'll probably go and do the Zambezi again while he's there...as you do.
This is the Zambezi, the White Nile is bigger and faster apparently and just to help you get your bearings, the orange bit is the boat, the blue is the buoyancy aid (!) and the white is the helmet and he's inside all of that and meant to be going this way>>>>>>.Doesn't it look fun?
How a mother is supposed to sleep I know not but at least I have plenty of books to read and I will look forward to Africa when I arrive safely seated, warm and dry in my armchair of course.
Genius in the Drawing-Room, The Literary Salon in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries edited by Peter Quennell looks right up my street.

'From Juliette Recamier, who revived the Parisian salon during the Napoleonic epoch, to Emerald Cunard, whose drwaing-room at the Dorchester was a centre of conversation in wartime London, from Karel Capek in Prague to Salka Viertel in Hollywood, the literary salons of the last two centuries have provided a vital forum for the exchange of ideas between eminent men and women of the day.'

Thank goodness we keep 'the product of a leisured society' alive at Hotel Endsleigh in the twenty-first century.
I didn't think there could be many books written about Bloomsbury that I don't already have but trust Bookhound to find one.Bloomsbury : a house of Lions by Leon Edel published by the Hogarth Press in 1979 looks like an unusual read on the lives and personalities that comprised Bloomsbury as we know it.
In the words of Virginia Woolf,

'Gordon Square is like nothing so much as the lions house at the Zoo. One goes from cage to cage. All the animals are dangerous, rather suspicious of each other, and full of fascination and mystery.'

Leon Edel apparently recounts the saga in episodic form following his nine characters from childhood into middle age and I'll be intrigued to see if this shines a new light (but as it's 1979 actually an old light) on what he describes as 'nine characters in search of an author.'
I've already been intrigued enough by the street map endpapers in the book.The old hunting grounds and I've been poring over all those familiar street names.I regret to this day living in Bedford Place and environs all those years ago, right slap-bang under the 'bury' bit of Bloomsbury, and never really appreciating the literary nature of my surroundings.Too busy worrying about my sore hands and whether the laundry had come back and would I have a clean starched apron to wear.
It's also obvious why we spent many a winter's afternoon off-duty wandering around The British Museum.
It was free, warm and about a minute's walk away.

Pre-Christmas Sunday confessions after New Year

I have been double-Mullan-ed which is probably a good thing.How Novels Work in paperback and the latest Anonymity. Both excellent, readable, informative and the latter a study of why so many great authors chose to publish anonymously. The Currer Bells get a good outing along with Tennyson, George Eliot, Thackeray and the rest.
I've been nicely Hesperussed too and have had a lovely selection of Christmas Dickensian curl-ups alongside some reads for my arnchair travelling including a copy of A Private Affair by Beppe Fenoglio.I'd been very reliably informed that this was translated by Howard Curtis whose translation of Pirandello I enjoyed so much a few weeks ago. I can sometimes want to read a translator as much as the original author these days and this one has an introduction by Paul Bailey, so double magic there.
I'm known to find eighteenth century literature about as enjoyable as pulling teeth so I was delighted to hear that Professor Janet Todd wanted to come to my aid with Death and the Maidens, Fanny Wollstonecroft and the Shelley Circle. If I could just sneak in the back door and read something about the next generation perhaps my trip back will be more fruitful when I finally pluck up the courage to pick up some Mary, a bit of William Godwin, a morsel of Henry Fielding and a fraction of Samuel Richardson.They are there waiting and I feel I should at least try eventually.
A forthcoming book from Myrmidon has me very interested Mrs Lincoln by Janis Cooke Newman published as Mary in the US.I may not be able to wait until I get to America on my literary travels before I read this one.
A variety of other novels, The Long Delirious Burning Blue by Sharon Blackie published by Two Ravens Press for some courage, endurance and redemption.Two Ravens haven't disappointed so far, the exciting new writing of Lisa Glass with Prince Rupert's Teardrop and now Nightingale by Peter Dorward which had me gripped to the very last word, more on that one tomorrow.
I've already read and can highly recommend In Cold Daylight by Pauline Rowson published by Fathom for a gripping marine mystery (and long listed for the Spread the Word - World Book Day read) It was one of those books I picked up and couldn't put down until everything was sorted, enough tantalizing chapter ends to lead me on into the next and the next.
Edges O Israel O Palestine by Leora Skolkin-Smith published by Glad Day Books for boundary-less spaces of lost geography and people and, as you already know, this one has served me well as I set foot in Israel.
Two crime books from Poisoned Pen Press Two for Joy by Mary Reed and Eric Mayer and Noble Lies by Charles Benoit. I have certainly been enjoying Poisoned Pen reading over the last few months.
Then out of the blue came NHS plc by Allyson M.Pollock, subject - the progressive dismantling and privatisation of a health service that was established as a right.
Truthfully my heart sank a fraction, but it looks like a must-read.
'Confirms suspicions that something is rotten in the state of the UK's health system'
according to The Lancet
' a brave necessary book. And because the government thinks you shouldn't read it, you probably should'
says the British Medical Journal.

Sunday Confessions on a Sunday.

A small selection of the postman's burden this week and some confessions for you.
Children's World Growing Up in Russia 1890-1991 by Catriona Kelly and published by Yale University Press is 700 pages of compelling fascination.I've dipped in and found myself unable to get out again because books on childhood endlessly attract and here's one that offers great background to Russian reading whether it be fiction or non. First thoughts on this book soon.
Four books from Cambridge University Press that have me on the edge of my seat, it's sad I know but The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction by Miriam Bailin ?
How can I not be desperate to read a book like that?
Likewise Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women's Popular Novels by Pamela Gilbert, Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel by Monica Cohen and Charlotte Bronte and Victorian Psychology by Sally Shuttleworth. Suddenly the arguments, insights and variety of readings these books offer on well-known nineteenth-century novels give me cause to read them again as if for the first time.I suspect you'll be hearing about these throughout the coming months.
Still on the subject of Classics, a new translation of an unknown (to me) novel by Emile Zola, The Belly of Paris from Oxford World's Classics. With the focus on food, eating disorders, consumerism and the city and enthusiastic comparisons to the spirit of the much-loved, The Ladies' Paradise I can hardly wait to start this one either.
Also from Oxford University Press, and with much antsinthepantsation surrounding the forthcoming film, Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. I suspect the book may suit me better than the film because to see Alan Rickman singing might destroy the dream which has only just survived his role as Snape in Harry Potter.Unless they've dubbed in Rhydian that is.
Winter Wood by Steve Augarde was a fine surprise from David Fickling books. This is the third and final in the trilogy that was off to a flying start with The Various. Yes, we also had to have a first edition with one of Steve Augarde's little drawings in, except mine wasn't off eBay for £450. Bookhound drove halfway across the county to put our original copy under his nose and a very lovely chap Steve Augarde was too by all accounts. There was a long wait for the sequel Celandine and I had sadly lost the momentum of the first book and never read it. Now that I have Winter Wood I might just start the whole lot again and recapture the fantastic magic that held me spellbound especially as it's very much John Caple country too, set on the Somerset Levels.
I was delighted to receive a copy of It is Just You, Everything's Not Shit A Guide to All Things Nice by Steve Stack. The enigmatic Steve is a blogger himself and currently on a blog tour promoting his very own brand of "for goodness' sake stop being so b****y miserable" and here's the book to make every day a fluffy-bunny day if ever there was one. Lets banish grumpy old men and women and the 'everything in life is terrible because we expect it to be' mindset.There's a great recipe for bacon sandwiches, why eBay is so good, how to play sock football, TV programmes like One Man and His Dog (Come by, Shep...noooooo, easy, easy, good lad) and much more to make you smile.Steve has agreed to stop off here on his worldwide tour and I had some high-powered questions prepared but had mistaken his identity for this Steve Stack, but our Steve has agreed to answer them anyway, which is kind.

Sunday Confessions eventually

After a minor dearth brought on by the postal strike suddenly everything posted since early October arrived on the same day a while ago. Apologies but my sympathies for the postman were limited as he struggled up from the gate with a stack of parcels that completely obscured his vision.
Even the mighty Jane Austen completely dwarfed by this mountain, and there can be little doubt as to how I'll be spending my weekend. I can't begin to describe what an exciting prospect a vision like this is to a bookaholic in my advanced state.To sift through and find the gems I already know are in there is like prospecting for gold with the certain knowledge you're going to find some, and there was me thinking I didn't know what to read.
Two Raven's Press have sent me a pile of books following my love of Prince Rupert's Teardrop and I'm consistently impressed with the production quality of these books, I'll let you know about the content soon.
Gallic Books are those popular French contemporary novels being translated into English and I picked up The Officer's Prey by Armand Cabasson at random,snuck off for a crafty afternoon snooze and managed a hundred pages before I realized it was dark and possibly I should put in an appearance downstairs before it was time to go back to bed again.The Pere-Lachaise Mystery by Claude Izner (actually Parisian bookselling sisters) seems like an essential read for a Pere Lachaise cemetery addict like me.
Proof copies are now amongst my favourite reads because the cover design gives me no visual clues, so I have no idea what to expect.Well my thoughts on Devotion by Nell Leyshon nearer to publication time in February but that won't stop me writing about her writing which is brilliant and now I wish Nell Leyshon was Jodie Picoult and there was a back list of twenty novels, then we could have one a month and actually that still wouldn't be enough.
Holding that pile up, a new Beatles biography from Piatkus, Can't Buy Me Love by Jonathan Gould. This is reported to be a "stunning recreation of the 1960's in England and America through the prism of the world's most iconic band" so a mix of cultural, sociological and musical history which sounds like an interesting combination.On the back a quote from George Harrison 'The Beatles saved the world from boredom', never ones to underestimate.
Bill Liversidge sent me the funniest e mail asking if I might like to read his book A Half Life of One but he didn't want me to think he was bribing me in any way with the offer of the free book. Bribe away Bill said I, same rules apply, if I don't love the book it doesn't find its way onto the blog.
No time to waste must make a start.

Sing-along-a-blog

I've constructed this as a substitute for the build-your-own Empire State Building that was free in the paper last weekend. I've been a bit busy and sadly haven't been able to fit in the build so I hope you'll be happy with this.
I can't imagine why I've never really listened to audiobooks as I've driven round at work before, other than a vague feeling of devotion to the job and the idea that perhaps I should be using time spent behind the wheel at work thinking about work, with the radio chirping along in the background.
I've changed my mind about that and I now land on doorsteps refreshed and clear-minded and, thanks to this week's Ears on Wheels guest, singing like a banshee.
In fact let's try singing along to my tune of the week.It's whizzing around my head so it might as well whizz around yours as well and it saves me trying to install that widget that plays music on here while you read.
Perhaps Curzon would be so kind as to give us a D?
Thank you Curzon, that was lovely,
OK everyone, breath and project, eyes to the front, watch me, on the count of three and do try to enunciate the words clearly, 1-2-3
der-der-lerdle-derdle-derrr -- der-der-derrr -- der-der-derrr -- der-der-derrr,
STOP STOP, that was a little off key over in the US and I think the Scots were also a teensy bit flat, never mind you'll get it in a minute.
Try and listen to Norway, they have perfect pitch, well done Norway, lots of points for you.
So you can see how jolly all this is and how lucky I am to be getting a great selection of new audio books to review.Very occasionally the post arrives before I leave for work and if it's a square parcel I'm into it like a thing possessed and that's what happened last week. My Ears on Wheels guest was in the car and telling me his life story before you could say Fender Stratocaster and suddenly the prospect of a day out on the road, home visiting on my own, many lonely miles to travel, didn't seem quite so endless.There is now a right rowdy crowd queuing up impatiently to get in the Fiesta. We have Tony the Benn, Henry the Eighth, Bill the Shakespeare, Bill the Black Dress, Big Chris, Littlejohn, Legal John, Suite Irene, Susan the Hill , Donna the Leonheart, Karin the Killer , Robert the Harris and Haruki the Murakami.
And last week's guest?
Well, three huge clues I was the Yardbird who got The Cream with a bit of Blind Faith thrown in and we Layla-d around Devon all day.
Now try singing that song.
Oh dear, buck up Australia, Canada could you just go and gargle and could the Irish give it slightly less of the Daniel O'Donnell tone?
Do practice and we'll try again next week.

Second-Hand Birthday Confessions

Birthdays are lovely days if you make them so and I decided, after a particularly arduous day at work on our wedding anniversary a few weeks ago, that in future I would definitely treat family feast days as special occasions and book the time off midweek.
This can be a trauma in itself, planning who will do your phone cover, who will do the clinic which is bound to fall on that day.The stress rises the day before too, every time the phone rings you just know it's a pending social services disaster or the midwife discharging quadruplets.I was never so relieved to get to 5pm and change the voice mail (I love this moment, very satisfying) I will be on annual leave on...if you need to speak to a health visitor urgently on these days please contact... lock the filing cabinets and I'm out of there.
So we set off into the wild blue yonder and a mooch around Topsham, which is one of our favourite mooching places down on the River Exe.There is a second -hand bookshop which is room after room of heaven and it was our fault really.
We'd gone on a diversion to the Dart's Farm Coffee Shop which is a totally legitimate diversion and I had the white chocolate and strawberry cake and some of Bookhound's chocolate pecan cake because I couldn't decide whether I should have had that instead.By the time we reached the bookshop they were already gearing up to close for lunch. Lunch was thirty minutes away but you could tell they weren't pleased to see us.
I raced up to find some Bernard Malamud's because the new Philip Davis biography is challenging me to read them and there were rich pickings to be had on the Penguin shelves.I left a big gap as I scooped The Natural, The Fixer, The Tenants, The Assistant and Pictures of Fidelman.
But then I glanced at the floor.Stacks of books, about twelve high and four deep lining one wall and obviously a house clearance from a very discerning reader.It was only when I'd sat on the floor and sifted and sorted and slid and shoved the piles around that I realised all the books I had selected, including the Malamuds, were by Jewish writers.
Rummaging through I spotted a nice Grace Paley book, Later the Same Day. Grace Paley, I suspect, a writer I shall come to for the first time now that she has died and wonder where I've been all the years that she's been alive.
Then one of those lucky chance glances, the final dig into the depths of the books at the bottom of the pile in the most inaccessible corner and I caught sight of a new name on the spine of several books, an author I'd never heard of, Aharon Appelfeld. Holocaust survivor and winner of many literary awards and lauded in fulsome tones

"No one surpasses Aharon Appelfeld in  portraying the crisis of European civilisation both before and after the Second World War. He's one of the best novelists alive"

"A small masterpiece...the vision of a remarkable poet"

"Controlled fiction, compresses large themes into small spaces"

I picked up The Iron Tracks, Katerina, The Retreat, Tzili and For Every Sin but with some trepidation.
I don't find holocaust reading easy, but I also feel that for me it's an essential and ongoing foreground to any other Jewish reading I may do, and so I tend to read it at a slant. I was pleased to find this about Aharon Appelfeld in the New York Times

"Aharon Appelfeld's habitual strategy as a writer haunted by the Holocaust is to concentrate on its historical margins, either prelude or aftermath. The horrors to come or just done are a baleful flickering on the horizon of his fictions, while the forlorn figures of the foreground, rendered in muted style, repeatedly intimate that which defies all moral understanding."

I can learn as much if not more from that baleful flickering on the horizon as I can from reading about exact and actual horrors.
Laden with my booty you'd have thought the bookseller might have been delighted with a sale on a very quiet wet Devon day.
Not a bit of it.
We took a broadside for dripping rain onto the counter and were assured that we would have to leave as the shop had to close for an hour so that they could "practice their stage show".
But there's so much else I want to look at I bleated.
To no avail, clearly they are not in it for the money, what a lovely life, except I left the floor upstairs in a terrible muddle so that would have kept them busy all afternoon.

Sunday Confessions

Coincidences often happen in my reading life and so I shouldn't have been at all surprised, having read a review of a book published by Poisoned Pen Press, then, out of the blue, to get an e mail from them.Titles and catalogue duly arrived and I now have a good selection, Four for a Boy by Mary Reed & Eric Mayer, Sleeping Dog by Dick Lochte and The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R.King.First impressions are favourable, high quality paper and typeface and Sleeping Dog a great starter for ten.
In the same post another trainee, this time The Herring Seller's Apprentice by L.C.Tyler from Macmillan New Writing.
Wasn't there a whole load of hue and cry about Macmillan New Writing a while back? Isn't this the place to send agentless manuscripts, no advance but royalties if you are one of the lucky ones? Looks like another good one and funny too, I could do with a good reading laugh.
I now consider myself lucky enough to be on the receiving end of quite a few first novels from aspiring self-published writers and I will always give them the fifty page test. If they make it past that the chances are I'll read on, love them, finish them and they will make it on here and that's that. I'd love to have the time to offer more suggestions but I'm a reader, that's all, not an editor or a critic, just a reader and a book either works with me or it doesn't.Frederick Lightfoot is the latest arrival and has very kindly sent me copies of Migrants and Immigrants. The first thing I usually spot, since Scott Pack mentioned it, is the weight of a self-published book. I wasn't aware of this but apparently the high quality paper is a feature.Frederick Lightfoot's books are no exception but as I hate cheap scratchy paper his books find favour already.
A selection of titles from Bloomsbury.
I've heard so much about Eat, Pray and Love by Elizabeth Gilbert that it seemed meet and right to give it a try, Britney Spears says she can't get away from it and Annie Proulx suggests the writer has "incandescent talent", who am I to argue.I'm also up for Divas don't Knit by Gil McNeil, this looks like another funny read and after the great but turmoil-inducing Alice Sebold (more tomorrow) I need more funny.It's also got a ribbon bookmark which always appeals.
Agent ZigZag by Ben Macintyre is a true account of the life of wartime spy, Eddie Chapman. I haven't yet decided which side Eddie was on but it looks like both and I'm taking this round to the Tinker for immediate review. He'll love it and give it the war veteran's - eye view before I give it the daughter of the war veteran's- eye view.
Have I left anything out? Oh yes, In Stitches by Dr Nick Edwards, the highs and lows of life as an A&E doctor from The Friday Project. This is life as we know it down the NHS coalmines and I'll need to read it in small doses because it's all so true, especially the bureaucracy bits, and you just end up ranting in agreement at things you know go on but try to ignore on a daily basis.This in order to carry on spreading joy, happiness and healing amongst the nation's sick.Bless the A&E doctors, it's a thankless task.
Writing this earned me a pot of tea I felt, and as I wandered into the kitchen this sight greeted me. If it wasn't so funny he'd be dead meat because cats + kitchen worktops = verbotten here, but somehow I just had to laugh first and shoo next, they just can't resist that swaddled feeling can they?

Sunday Confessions on Thursday

I do have a lovely pile of books to share this week and, now that you've met Jim you can see what the poor man is going through.
A few biographies finding their way in and Bernard Malamud A Writer's Life by Philip Davis has me interested on several fronts.Firstly Philip Davis (if I have the right one) has just taken over from his wife Jane Davis as the editor of The Reader, another of my literary magazine subscription addictions, this one published by The University of Liverpool.The Reader hits a consistently high standard with its articles and I've enjoyed it for many years. I can't say the same about Bernard Malamud because he is but a known name to me. I have never read any of his writing because I tend to pigeon-hole him in the Roth-Bellow department and possibly erroneously as boy's stuff and not for me.
I should know better by now. So here's an interesting angle. I would normally read a literary biography on the back of enjoyment of the subject's writing and thus feel I almost knew them already. The biography would flesh out the real person so this time I'm going to approach it the other way round. Will Philip Davis (or anyone else stopping by here) convince me to read Malamud?
Also from Oxford Blasphemy in the Christian World A History by David Nash.Nothing like extending my horizons and, not least to start with, an understanding of exactly what blasphemy is.
What a seemingly dry (to me) but actually fascinating subject. I keep picking this up and dipping into it and suddenly an hour's gone by and I'm deeply into the arguments that raged around The Life of Brian.I think this rates as one of those academic books that could be read and enjoyed by anyone who fancied some new territory. Or perhaps you're all blasphemy experts and it's just me who didn't really have a clue.
Another biography which does indeed look fascinating My Father, Reith of the BBC by Marista Leishman, Reith's daughter and published by St Andrew Press, John Reith the man credited with the creation of the BBC and I can't do better than Stephen Fry's assessment of this book.
"The dark varnish covering the poular portrait of a patriarchal, dour and humourless Reith has been removed to reveal the twinkle and style of a much more interesting and important man".So far John Reith is shaping up to be quite a dictator both at work and at home and his daughter's perspective, as a sibling to John Reith's other child, the BBC, is a compelling one.
Also from St Andrew Press, one of a new series of Notes on famous composers and I plumped for Mendelssohn.I like the idea of "invaluable erudition, wit and accuracy, laced with racy anecdotal evidence" and though I may be an opera dummy I do love a wide range of classical music but with very little understanding of it. I shall test run this and let you know whether I emerge knowing more beyond the violin concerto and the Hebrides and has it made me want to extend my listening? Also a little book of poetry by Kenneth C. Steven. I thought Iona would make a good reading to the accompaniment of Mendelssohn
Alternative Medicine A History by Roberta Bivins has made a very timely appearance after my course of acupuncture courtesy of the NHS "do patients seek hope, holism or just the thrill of rebellion?" Am I what the world of mainstream medicine labels the "irrational consumer" ? (how very dare they!) I've had a good browse through this one and it's well worth a read if this is of interest.
Many thanks to Valerie Trueblood for a copy of her novel Seven Loves , to Irving Warner for a proof of The War Journal of Lila Ann Smith, both from the US, and to Lisa Glass for Prince Rupert's Teardrop which didn't have to travel quite so far , just up the road from Cornwall. More on these soon if they hit the mark with dgr scribbles.
And that spiral-bound book sitting on top of the pile? A proof copy of The Man in the Picture by Susan Hill and I'm saving this until the fire is lit and the curtains are drawn which won't be very long.I am the dummy that asked if this was proof or real because suddenly spiral bound fiction seemed like really quite a good idea.

Sunday Confessions on Friday

Having dipped in and out of Decca , the Letters of Jessica Mitford for the last year or so (you may remember I stupidly dithered about the purchase, daft because I've loved it and it's out in paperback any day now) imagine my delight at getting my hands on The Mitfords, Letters Between Six Sisters edited by Charlotte Mosley.
This a complete picture of lives that have spanned so many aspects of the 20th century and all chronicled in that endearing way that makes them so readable. An original and helpful touch, each sister is designated a symbol making the author of each letter instantly recognizable.As the blurb says, this is a rare correspondence not only for its completeness but for its social and historical record of an era.The sisters who all pursued their own lives and loves but never seemed to lose that connection that only siblings can have.There is ultimately a sadness too as gradually the family diminishes and eventually in 2003, Debo (Duchess of Devonshire) becomes the last surviving sister and the letters cease.I can't even begin to imagine that sadness.
The Gravedigger's Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates, the latest from an author moving swiftly up my list to read in depth. Just We Were The Mulvaneys read to date plus a book of collected writings and I don't know what's stopping me, I feel sure I will enjoy her books.This one the story of a girl born to a family in the US who have just arrived from Nazi Germany in the 1930's, and it's a long one,almost 600 pages.
The Long Exile by Melanie McGrath and this a book that promises to be a great read.A true story of deception and survival amongst the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic and just the thing for a chilly winter's evening and my love of all things Canadian combined.Then I discover that this is actually the true story of Nanook of the North.I'm often told I resemble Nanook as I wander round the house in my Uggz and thick jumpers all winter (you should see me when I step outside), it's not my fault if I feel the cold and use layering of clothes effectively and in quantity.All was not as it seemed with Nanook anyway so I'll report back but this might just go off to the Tinker first, I think he'll enjoy this one.
I've been sent a lovely shiny silver proof copy of the new Alice Sebold The Almost Moon and at this point I must own up that I haven't read The Lovely Bones yet. Someone I knew hated it with a vengeance unsurpassed and somehow that has entered my head every time I've even looked at it.This latest book set to have an even greater impact by all accounts so some catching up for me.
Song for Eloise by Leigh Sauerwein has been on my list for ages and this copy was one of those "must make up the postage" fill ins on an Amazon order. I read a great review of it here, twelfth century France and a medieval tale of doomed love.
Talking of which I mentioned that Words of Love by Pamela Norris was setting me off on new reading trails and I plan to use each section of the book as a springboard into new territory, so I've made a start with The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. Something intriguing about this doomed couple and wish I'd paid more attention as I wandered past their graves in Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris but Offspringette was dragging me off to visit Jim Morrison before the queue got too long.

Sunday Confessions

As well as Booker longlisters wending their way to Devon, a vast array of other reading material has arrived this week.
The Cobbler of Normandy by Otto A.Berliner arrived from the US, WWII allied intelligence, Resistance and a cobbler.This has the makings of a great story and I'm praying it will be because the premise has promise, if you see what I mean.
The Late Hector Kipling by David Thewlis.Billy Connolly loves this one and Jake Chapman laughed and laughed, mean cruel and refreshingly cynical.Great.
Sea Stories an anthology of short stories being published to mark the 70th anniversary of the opening of The National Maritime Museum, great range of writers and I will have many more good things to say about short stories very soon.The Loudest Sound and Nothing by Claire Wigfall has completed my rehabilitation, I'm now a short story fanatic and plan to always have a selection on the go.
The Fight for English, How language pundits ate, shot, and left by David Crystal has arrived in timely fashion just as my mind is exercised over this very subject. David Crystal my old mate from OU days, not personally I hasten to add, but thanks to his wonderful little book Rediscover Grammar I dropped far fewer clangers than may otherwise have been the case.He presents a compelling post-Trussian theory for saying $%&*"$% to all this grammar and punctuation zero tolerance balderdash...have I split an infinitive there? Does that sentence parse? I'll know soon.
Mrs Woolf & the Servants The Hidden Heart of Domestic Service by Alison Light, well I was just forced to buy this one, how could I not, can't wait to see how the dirt is dished.
Can you see a treasure in that stack?
Selected Letters of Charlotte Bronte edited by Margaret Smith. Year on year I borrow the occasional single volume of these from the library because at £102 a go they are never going to be mine, but I love them.I've got as far as stroking this book and have read a few extracts but when I go into 19th century rehab after the Bookerthon I shall be overdosing on these and all things Bronte-esque and Eliot-like with a bit of Oliphantine Gaskellitis thrown in.
That little stack at the top from Oxford University Press are lovely enough to merit a post of their own, individual biographies from the Oxford DNB, more soon.
Eons, if not light years ago Scott Pack mentioned a book on his blog entitled The Children's Hospital by Chris Adrian.
My antennae went up, children's hospital? That's right up my ward if ever there was one.
I half-heartedly looked for copies and then I forgot all about it until we met at a  meeting a few weeks ago and he mentioned it again.Then he foolishly owned up to having several spare copies.
Never mind that he had a child's birthday to shop for and was going on holiday the very next day; I have to read it, you have to send me one says I.
I'm a Registered Sick Children's Nurse, I owe it to Florence, it's my duty, it's imperative.
Well Scott being Scott and a man of his word he did.
It is beckoning to me even as I devote myself to the Booker longlist cause and I may not resist for long... in fact alright I'll own up. I've had a peek at pages one to fifty two inclusive and already I can see why Scott is raving about it.This is a very different hospital from Toby Litt's and I am already most paediatrically and literally intrigued.The Children's Hospital has had stunning reviews all over the place.
This will be the first book I read en route to post-Booker 19th century rehab (I think they're sending transport to fetch me) because it's important to wean myself off the Listeria Bibliophilogenes relapse very slowly, adrenobibliocortical crisis an ever-present threat.
There was a little note inside from Scott saying he might need the book back...how exactly do you type that funny sort of mad laugh you do with your lips sealed? Starts from the back of your throat, sort of bounces off the roof of your mouth and comes out of your ears?
You know the one I mean.

Sunday Confessions on Thursday

Probably a few books missing from this stack because they've already found their way on here or are in the offing but a varied selection of wonderful reads.
I'm in Richard Zimler mode with my maximum reading experience in progress with The Seventh Gate so it seemed wise to order a few more so The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon and Guardian of the Dawn at the ready. There is a link to all these books and I must have read them in the wrong order but I don't think it matters, each one seems to hold its own.
A lovely copy of A Hidden Life by Adele Geras and I can't wait to read this because Adele's books fill a special moment in my reading life and when it arrives I am very grateful to have one to hand. Adele I must add is my very own real-life snippeteer, never misses a dgr cutting or quote and kindly wings them all my way by first class post.
Transita send me all their new books and so The Gardener by Prue Leith, their latest and this a reissue of a book published some years ago as A Lovesome Thing by Penguin, looks interesting and has good blurbs from Sue MacGregor and Elizabeth Jane Howard (but not my current blurb friends Hilary Mantel and Joanne Harris)
Ernest Hecht from Souvenir Press has forgiven me that cheap jibe about Arsenal football club and sent through a great and varied selection of their books which will all take me off into new reading realms.The Assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford by Ron Hansen and subsequently a film with Brad Pitt who I assume was Jesse not the coward?
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities by Delmore Schwartz a book of short stories but the one of the title first published in 1937 and apparently highly influential on the writing of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. I have a bit of a love hate thing going on with Saul Bellow after Herzog but I'm told I need to read The Adventures of Augie March to really appreciate his writing so perhaps I'll try harder.
If I Should Die Before I Wake by Michelle Morris looks like one of those brace-yourself gritty reading challenges as Carla holds her sleeping father at gunpoint and proceeds to recount why.
A trip to Tesco's to buy fly killing equipment wouldn't be complete without a book purchase, so Matthew Kneale and English Passangers it was. I was so engrossed in the books I ended up buying everything else but fly killing supplies.We've had a major invasion and they are flocking indoors in their droves and, as I type, skilfully slaloming their way around the sticky fly papers and electrical execution machines.
Vanessa at Fidra Books is 100% responsible for the final purchase, Brown Owl's Guide to Life  by Kate Harrison. Vanessa made this sound like chick-lit that I could cope with as the Brownie values suddenly have relevance in the Lucy's life after the death of her mother who had been a feisty third generation Brown Owl. Once a Brownie forever a Brownie so there will be a right moment for this one.

Sunday Confessions

I must catch up with confessions. A nice stack of books waiting for me when I arrived home and some good reads in here.
The Secret River by Kate Grenville was one of my favourite reads of 2006 so I'm delighted with a copy of Searching For the Secret River published  by Canongate in which Kate Grenville recounts her journey of discovery whilst researching and writing the book.Also a copy of one of her earlier novels Lilian's Story. How does the daughter of prosperous middle-class family end up as an eccentric bag-lady living on the streets and quoting Shakespeare ? I'll report back.
Also from Canongate An Iliad by Alessandro Baricco translated by Ann Goldstein. I'm a confirmed fan of Alessandro after reading Silk and then Without Blood. Perfectly formed novellas that I can still recall several years on.An Iliad a recreation of the siege of Troy through the eyes and voices of each of the twenty-one major Homeric characters in turn.
Now I've owned up before, my knowledge of myth remains woeful no matter how much attention I give it. I suspect it's one of those things that should be introduced early in a reading life because surely it's the foundation of all storytelling?
Well I was too busy with Enid Blyton so n'er a myth did I meet for many a long year.
Karen Armstrong's A Short History of Myth plus the ensuing Canongate Myth series have helped enormously and now I think I might repair to Troy by Adele Geras before I graduate to Alessandro's version.
God's Spy by Juan Gomez-Jurado looks nicely Papal and Vatican-ish with a cold-blooded psychopathic serial killer mixed in.First line looks promising
"Father Selznick awoke in the middle of the night to find a fish knife pressed against his throat".
There's also some destroying of eyes and chopping off of hands which always bodes well I find.Quite a few recent reads have chopped off eyelids which seems a bit extreme I must say.That was probably Hospital by Toby Litt, not much stayed attached in that book.
Zed Books have sent me a copy of Afghan Women by Elaheh Rostami-Povey to complement my Islamic reading project coming up in the autumn.This will be a completely new trail for me and I'm looking forward to it.
Hybrids by David Thorpe was the winner of a Children's Book Writing competition run by Harper Collins in conjunction with Saga Magazine.The book has been tried and tested in the playground and found to be a great way of controlling the children at break time who wanted to do nothing other than listen to another instalment.We're talking about hysteria gripping the nation as a new virus which causes sufferers to merge with items of technology starts to spread.Looking forward to this one.
Finally David Baldacci is a name I saw all over Rhapsody of the Seas; up on Deck 8, down on Deck 5, by the pool, in the Schooner Bar, around the Windjammer Cafe, probably up on the bridge, everyone was reading a David Baldacci, so I was delighted to find a copy of The Collectors waiting for me when I arrived home. The heist of the century and the murky worlds of gambling, politics and espionage await.

U.S.book buying confessions

Beyond Galveston, bookshops were sparse on my travels I must admit but I did find one on Grand Cayman which held the joy of a couple more titles by Ernest J.Gaines, Of Love and Dust and In My Father's House both of which look eminently readable.Jonathan Yardley of Washington Post to the rescue "Gaines knows how to tell a story...with humour, a strong sense of drama and a compassionate understanding of people who find themselves in opposing posotions".Indeed he does and the fairly langorous Deep South pace of these may well be just the ticket as life speeds up again here.
Never one to shirk a Borders opportunity, and with four hours to kill at George Bush International Airport Houston...I wonder if we may start honouring our premiers in this way here in the UK, Tony Blair International? Nah, let's stick with Liverpool John Lennon.It was a long haul across to Terminal E but all worth it to breath in the air of U.S. bookshelves and a browse through some new titles.Plus fascinating to see how the U.S.market publishes some of our U.K. authors and as always I have to say I much prefer a U.S. paperback edition to a U.K.one.Floppy and friendly and stay open at the page with no spine cracking necessary.
I went round the shelves four times and also stopped to look at the Sony e readers.
Though I'm a confirmed book in the hand person I'm not ruling these out and they do look like a neat way to carry eighty books around with you.Page sized screen with a nice choice of leather holders.I've done all the reading for the Long Barn First Novel Prize judging this year on my laptop and by the end I was getting quite used to it.
New technology, I didn't even ask the price or the book downloading availability but it's all bound to shake down into something accessible eventually and I'll probably go there.
I was pleased to see another Per Petterson on the shelves In the Wake. Apparently this one will "hold me in its hypnotic thrall" and I believe it will. Out Stealing Horses had me entranced, there is something to Per Petterson's writing and translation by Anne Born that creates a special atmosphere around you as you read.
The Last Nightingale by Anthony Flacco, a thriller set in the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake was bought on blurb and cover alone and would have been my plane home reading had it not been for the subtle allure of When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods and Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age by Justin Kaplan.
Having just spent a week being waited on hand and foot in the most opulent of surroundings it seemed fitting to see how the idle rich managed it on a daily basis a century ago.This was sufficiently good to keep me reading on long into the night (or was it day?) and thus forgetting that it is nigh on impossible to sleep comfortably on a plane.

Sunday Confessions

Considering that we've had a postal strike this week there doesn't seem to have been any shortage of parcels arriving and in amongst them I think a few in-flight novels that will be just the ticket.
I have been up to my eyes with life and lists so apologies to anyone who hasn't received a thankyou message from me, I'm as grateful as ever for everything received.
Em at Snowbooks sent along The Book of Names by Jill Gregory and Karen Tintori and this is first on the in-flight reading pile; intelligent suspense thriller which looks so good and has a gorgeous sprinkling of subtle gold book-bling dust on the cover.
Next in the flight pile, The Black Tea Experiments by Ray Atkinson which is billed as one that can be read  "during a single average airline flight".
The Tinker and I will test it out.
In the same parcel Infamous Eve A History by May Sinclair.This will require application but looks like an enlightening trail around all the legends, stories and folktales that have surrounded Eve down the years. I think it will yield some gems.
Kate Williams very kindly sent me a copy of England's Mistress now out in paperback and I hot-footed off to my book group (we are called Goldfish, best not to ask for explanations, I'm not sure we really know but the library needs a collective name and we were in quirky mood) with this as my recommend for the next read.There's always a nerve-wracking moment before the chooser of the next read unveils their selection.
We ask around, who's read any great books lately?
Anyone read anything awful?
So you sit there having palpitations in case anyone trashes your choice before you've announced it.I wasn't in the least bit worried, this was one of my best reads of 2006 and I'm quietly confident they will enjoy it too.
Hesperus kindly sent their latest books and I have had a hard job not to carry on reading The Calligrapher's Night by Yasmine Ghata but I'm being disciplined and trying to clear the reading slate of all unfinished reads before I go away.It gets off to the most beautiful, lyrical start but it will be waiting on my return and make a useful addition to my Islamic reading project.
Zed Books have kindly sent a couple more general background non-fiction titles to give this project a bit of variety, Iraqi Women by Nadje Sadig Al-Ali and From Homebreakers to Jailbreakers : Southall Black Sisters edited by Rahila Gupta.I had to read some of this once I'd opened it and read the words "Victoria Climbie". These names become synonymous with child protection, when I first started health visiting it was Maria Colwell, but currently let no one be in any doubt, a great deal has been implemented since the Victoria Climbie inquiry.Sometimes almost too many lessons to be learnt.
The Darkroom of Damocles by W.F.Hermans originally published in 1958 and now back in print again thanks to Harvill Secker. Wartime assignments during the German occupation of Holland and the aftermath once the war is over.
Despite the postal strike a parcel from John Murray arrived at a very odd time of day and was mysteriously left under the doormat.Polly must had nipped down from London with it herself I think.A paperback copy of The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox which I'm delighted with as I only have a hefty proof copy. I read this as part of a reader's opinions survey before the book was published and I really enjoyed it. I know plenty who have hated it, nay loathed it, but I just found it a really entertaining read, start to finish.Then a wonderful contrast The Diplomatic Corpse  by Anne Marshall-Zwack.This is the diplomatic wife who discovers her husband's worldwide infidelities after his death and heads off on the revenge trip of a lifetime.
Good poolside read I think, this one's in.
Free from newbooksmag who are worth the subscription alone for any number of cut-price and free books you can get hold of, Wild Mary A Life of Mary Wesley by Patrick Marnham.An unusual and colourful life is what I'm expecting.Mary Wesley synonymous with my reading in 1988 the first year my journal began. That year we had a seven, a five and a three year old. I read thirty-one books (heaven knows when) and five of them were by Mary Wesley. Time must have been even more at a premium in 1989 when I only read twenty.
Finally I bought a book.
You didn't think a week could go by without expenditure did you? I missed Be Near Me by Andrew O'Hagan on last year's Booker longlist but it came highly recommended by many visitors here and it's just out in paperback.
Two books I left behind and now wish I hadn't, The Seventh Gate by Richard Zimler and The Lightning Keeper by Starling Lawrence, am I right? They both looked good.
 

Sunday Confessions on Tuesday

I don't think anyone can accuse of us of not constantly broadening our reading horizons here at dovegreyreader scribbles HQ.
My sojourn at Waterstone's Piccadilly a while ago was also a good chance to check out some of the books that have been recommended around the blogs in recent weeks.Armed with my Book of Books I amassed quite a pile to take to the sofas and peruse.I think little trolleys would be a good idea because I looked a bit like I was on Crackerjack.
Anyone else remember Crackerjack and the quiz where you got to stand on a drum and win armfuls of prizes and a cabbage if you dropped anything, but then the ultimate accolade, a Crackerjack pencil. I'd have tidied my bedroom every day for a year to get onto Crackerjack.
Anyway, back to the sofas and a good chance to look carefully at Hospital by Toby Litt which had come highly recommended but with a caveat of  'some confusion may ensue' from Jess over on the Book Bar.I started to read and was suitably involved and almost but not quite bought the book. The not quite was because it's a £14.99 posh paperback, ie stiffer covers, better quality paper and French flaps but none of that deflects from the fact that it's a paperback at hardback price.I did the obvious I'm afraid and came home and ordered from The Book Depository at £9.47 which felt better and I didn't have to lug it home on the train.
Books like Hospital make me feel that I'm reading cutting edge contemporary fiction which I love.If I end up as a casualty in intensive care as a result I'll let you know but I've made a start and I'm coping well.
The Richard and Judy Summer Read list is out so I was delighted to receive a copy of one of them, The House at Riverton by Kate Morton. 1924, glittering society party by the lake of a grand English country house, young poet takes his life.The only witnesses, sisters Hannah and Emmeline Hartford, will never speak to each other again...intriguing.
While we're on the subject I see Mary Lawson's The Other Side of the Bridge has also made the list, excellent.
Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin caught my eye and couldn't be resisted given my current bout of historical fiction addiction.Then I discover that Ariana Franklin is the nom de plume of Diana Norman, wife of film critic Barry.
Murder, mistrust and malice in medieval Cambridge, yes please.
This one shifted imperceptibly onto the Read Immediately Pile (the RIP?...perhaps not) on the strength of its cover (nice gold blingy bits) and a feeling of absence and loss on turning over the final page of The Needle in the Blood by Sarah Bower. Thoughts on that tomorrow.
Fifty pages in and I am not disappointed and guess what? My new reading friend Joanne Harris has read it and found it "entertaining, well researched and well written".
The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb arrived from Penguin.This one's going to require some intelligent concentration as I try and get my head around the principle espoused by Nassim Taleb. A Black Swan is defined as "a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: its unpredictability; its massive impact; and, after it has happened, our desire to make it appear less random and more predictable than it was." Easy to spot the obvious one but I'll need a holiday before I embark on my Black Swan moment.
The Swap by Antony Moore is described as hilarious black comedy meets superbly plotted thriller and is suggested reading for anyone planning to attend a school reunion.Too late, went to one and vowed never again but we'll see he makes of it all.
Imagine This by Sade Adeniran, the story of a young girl's journey from childhood to adulthood and London to Nigeria.Written in journal form and to be added to my Read Africa stack.
Finally I'm delighted with a parcel of Nawal El Saadawi titles from Zed Books.Woman at Point Zero, God Dies by the Nile and The Hidden Face of Eve. I am a blank page waiting to be written on as far as this author is concerned, but Nawal El Saadawi, now in her seventies, will be touring the UK in October so likely to be in the spotlight soon. My knowledge of Islamic society governed largely by the media to date so I'm looking forward to picking these up and exploring her writing in depth and sharing my thoughts on here.

Sunday Confessions on Wednesday

In London last Monday for the Long Barn Books Editorial Board meeting and catching an earlier train home so just a little nip into Waterstone's at Piccadilly for a quick inhale of the bookish air. I'd gone via the Royal Academy where I tripped over Laurence Llewelyn Bowen tossing his curls into place as he was being filmed for something or other. He was being upstaged slightly by a huge crowd of people being photographed on the steps and he looked very fed up with being a TV presenter.
All life was there and to us country dwellers it's always fascinating to gawp.
But off to Book Heaven and a pile of books to the sofas as I pondered what to buy.
The impending holiday is focusing my mind towards good holiday reads and I came away with some possibles but not yet definites.
Crow Lake by Mary Lawson much heralded after her Booker long list nomination last year for  The Other Side of the Bridge.Couldn't wait a minute longer and am well into this, brilliant, should have read it sooner.
Kept by D.J.Taylor not least because it comes highly recommended in the blurb by someone who says "Never loses its grip, clever and intricate, Conan Doyle, Dickens and Wilkie Collins knew how to do it, and Taylor has learned his lesson well"...thanks Susan.
I have no plans to take The Road by Cormac McCarthy on holiday because after all I want to have a good time and be happy but it feels like one of those books you have a duty to read. So many great recommends with caveats about it's gloomy redemption.
Bluestalking Reader in Chicago talked up the possible merits of Anna Gavalda and I'm always intrigued by another French writer so Hunting and Gathering in the bag and a deliciously presented book of short stories left behind.Deckle-edged pages, nice size, great title I Wish Someone Was Waiting For Me Somewhere. Next time if I enjoy this one, but blogpower verified as a recommend from France reaches Devon via Chicago.
William Maxwell has hovered on the edge of the radar and I know not from where, but I browsed his books  and ended up with The Chateau. I must have read reviews or articles somewhere that left a footprint on my mind.
From Macmillan a hardback copy of a book I read in proof, Self Help by Edward Docx. I enjoyed it and I think they have high hopes for Booker success with it so that will be interesting.
From Peter Owen, two more Anna Kavan's to fuel my reading frenzy of her books, Asylum Piece and The Parson.
From Adele Geras A Candle in the Dark which she rightly thought might complement my reading of The Tiger in the Attic about the children of the kindertransport.This one a children's book from an interesting series Flashbacks.Living history and important events presented as fictional accounts through the eyes of children, for young readers.
It's been a great big book gathering week.

Sunday Confessions

I'm as pleased as punch with one book in particular this week.
A blog commenter in the US suggested I might be interested in The Tiger in the Attic by Edith Milton and perhaps might try requesting a copy from the publisher as the book seems to have sunk without trace here in the UK. Perhaps it was reviewed but it certainly passed me by.
I was bold as is my wont,did just that and was delighted that the University of Chicago Press very kindly sent me a copy.
A quick diversion here, it arrived in a package from the US that had clearly been deliberately opened somewhere along the line and not taped up again, so I was relieved to find the book still safely inside. Obviously not a book loving thief then.
This book is sub-titled Memories of the Kindertransport and Growing Up English and Edith Milton tells how she and her sister Ruth left Germany in 1939 on the eve of Hitler's invasion of Poland.They came on the Kindertransport along with 10,000 other Jewish children who sought refuge in England.
Edith and Ruth then lived with an upper class British foster family for the next seven years.
I'm looking forward to reading it because it would seem this is no misery memoir.Edith and Ruth landed on their feet and Edith tells a "hopeful story about the kindness and generosity of strangers" as they grew up as outsiders in a foreign country.
I seem to have quite a collection of books on and about this subject.I'm drawn to anything that offers a child's eye view of history, though inevitably many on this subject make harrowing reading.
Hitler's Children by Guido Knopp
Into the Arms of Strangers by Mark Harris & Deborah Oppenheimer
Out of Harm's Way by Jessica Mann, the crime writer and sister of Nicola Beauman of Persephone books, who tells how at the age of  two she and her four year old brother, children of exiled German parents, were then sent to further safety in the USA.
No Time to Wave Goodbye by Ben Wicks
and finally Witnesses of War by Nicholas Stargardt which I haven't even been able to open.

Sunday Confessions

Lots in the door this week but always a moment of glee to be had finding a book that's been languishing on the "to find" list for ages.
The reading list for Woolf For Dummies wasn't extensive, tutor Mrs Hill-Wells was very sympathetic to our busy lives but she did recommend Bloomsbury Pie by Regina Marler (Ruth is this a relative? I've not heard you mention Aunt Regina I must admit) which is out of print. I've been on the look-out ever since so I swooped a bit noisily on this brand new copy in the second-hand bookshop at Ashburton this week.It's that pent up searching that all comes out at the moment of discovery I find.
There have been many acts of book-giving kindness this week too and in the interests of transparency I'll set them out here.
Philippa at Macmillan took pity on my lack of Dissolution by C.J.Sansom, which seemed to have mysteriously disappeared from the bookstore shelves, and sent me a copy. I have made an immediate start based on a sudden need for something in the historical fiction department and a suspicion that this series will carry me nicely into holiday reading.So far very good indeed, and very apt after yesterday's visit to monastic setting. Tonsures and pax vobiscums abound and clearly I'll be onto Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose in no time (that's a joke)
I can't tell you how long I have been meaning to read English Passengers and never quite got around to it so when Emma at Macmillan sent me a copy of the latest Matthew Kneale When We Were Romans ,it was all the help I needed to make a start on his writing.
Transita always send me their latest books so Blue Slipper Bay by Wendy Harris has arrived and I'm sure its moment will come.
Knowing how much I had enjoyed The Winter of Enchantment by Victoria Walker, Vanessa at Fidra very kindly sent me the next in the series The House Called Hadlows. Victoria Walker writes the best introductions ever, I loved the last one so I was into this one before the envelope had fallen from my hand. She's refreshingly self-effacing and you like her the minute you read her.
Oh heck, you'll be thinking I've given up book-buying at this rate because next in the post a copy of The Spoken Word Revolution Redux edited by Mark Eleveld.This is an anthology of poetry in the oral tradition and to that end it has a CD included.Performance poetry and all its many styles and this came from Sourcebooks in the US.Billy Collins is in there, that's good.
I now shamelessly beg from Peter Owen.Honestly what has happened to me? They took instant pity and came up with a lighteningly quick copy of A Stranger on Earth, The Life and Work of Anna Kavan by Jeremy Reed to help fuel my Anna Kavan-fest.
More Anna Kavan soon (ahem, I seem to be running low on these...)
Lastly, Possession by A.S.Byatt. I PAID real money for this.I have a big old heavy hardback edition so I needed a paperback for holiday reading, but the big question is will I join the YES YES YES team or the NO NO NO team?
If it's a NO NO NO this might end up in the Gulf of Mexico.
No of course I wouldn't throw it overboard, I was joking, besides it would find its way back on the Gulf Stream, isn' t that what keeps us warm here in the UK?
I shall perform an honourable Book Crossing desertion in Montego Bay to match my less honourable dumping of The Secret History by Donna Tartt in Barcelona.

Sunday Confessions

I often wonder whether to keep Sunday Confessions going but owning up does help me start the week with a clean book buying slate, a sort of purging, a regular weekly biblioholic irrigation, so needs must.
I did actually do a rare and unusual thing this week and bought some books in W.H.Smith's because he used to attend school in Tavistock (there's a blue plaque to prove it) and because I wanted them yesterday as it were. Suddenly I couldn't wait a minute longer to start reading The Observations by Jane Harris, not a minute longer. The need reached a crescendo through my morning baby clinic for some reason, so I ushered the last little person out of the door, left the toys all over the floor for the district nurses to trip over as they came in for their sandwiches and leg ulcer discussions, and dashed down to town in my lunch break.
I do this hand money over the counter for books thing so rarely nowadays since The Book Depository fairy has her sat.nav. permanently set to our house so I was a bit shocked to pay £19 + for three books even given the buy one get one half price offer.
"Surely not" I said.
"Surely yes" said the little girl behind the till.
When I said I'd be back on the internet for my next batch she said "oh is it cheaper then?" so clearly WHS keep their staff locked away in a back room.
I gave her a quick lesson on internet book buying and she looked deeply shocked possibly about to cry, as if I'd just told her Father Christmas wasn't real or something...which of course I wouldn't have done because he is.
More Orange shortlist reading with Digging to America by Anne Tyler and Sovereign by C.J.Sansom came in with that batch too. If I could get hold of Dissolution I'd be able to make inroads into Shardlake et al which I'm desperate to start and perhaps continue into holiday reading.
A parcel from Marion Boyars and Chocolate & Zucchini by Clotilde Dusoulier which is a blog - turned - book - turned - mouth - watering gathering of beautiful pictures and drooly recipes which makes you want to go and live in France because it all looks so clean and tidy and civilized and chocolatey and they have lovely handwriting. Also from Catheryn at MB The Devil in the Flesh by Raymond Radiguet. French, died at 20 of typhoid but managed this fine and delicate adolescent love story before he succumbed.Perhaps it's not so clean in France after all?
A  copy of Rant by Chuck Palahniuk (am I saying that right?  Palarneyuck?) arrived from the publishers and here we will be in virgin territory, I'm new to Chucky so we'll see what happens.I don't know the first thing about him but I expect I will soon.
Finally as you know I can't bear not to read a book if Adele Geras recommends it, they never fail.We must be tuned into the same reading frequency or something, so Shame by Karen Alvtegen has arrived and looks suitably thrillery, snowy and Nordically inclined as to be right up my bobsleigh run.
Talking of Marion Boyars, blogs, Adele Geras and books per se, take a look here.Yes a dgr Sunday Confessions pic has made it onto a book cover and I think we may get a mention inside too.
Excuse me while I just push David Bailey out of the way.

Sunday Confessions on Tuesday

I haven't owned up for quite a while so best get it all out in the open and be done with it.
Yes, yes I know I shouldn't order from The Book People because they buy in books for pence and nobody makes any money but how can you not buy ten original Vintage Classics for £9.99? Even if you have a few of them, which I have, it's still worth it for the others.Quite a few I've been meaning to read and to do that it helps to have the book on the shelf which I now do.
Offspringette immediately made off with The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin but that's fine because I've read that one.The Phurstborn (that was the name of her band many moons ago) is home for a few months inbetween university, a traineeship and career with the BBC, a charity skateboard roadtrip across Australia and an entirely new career in...well I'll tell you when it's certain. Meanwhile I've almost been prevailed upon to allow her to guest blog here for a week while I go off to sunnier climes in July.
Brace yourselves, these young media types have a wicked way with words and she might let slip a few truths about  life behind the scenes in live TV (Jeremy Paxman combing his hair, that sort of thing) and Bill Oddie's Springwatch of course,she loved getting into work for 6am to do that.
A welcome pile of books arrived from Mark Thwaite for me to review for The Book Depository. I'm starting to look forward to these, they are like magical mystery coach tours in a padded envelope. I never know where I will be going or what I need to pack but it's invariably different and unusual.In amongst them Nada by Carmen Laforet (and translated by Edith Grossman who got a favourable mention in comments yesterday) which looks darker than dark and Missing by Walter De La Mere which looks unsettling but in an empty deckchair sort of way if the cover is anything to go by.It's yet another of the Hesperus titles which are going to earn a shelf of their very own soon.
Jon at Orion sent me the most luxurious new edition of Rebecca, sufficiently luxurious to make me want to read it again and perhaps this is the one Daphne Du Maurier that doesn't tarnish with the years.
Restless by William Boyd is the choice of my other book group and I'm looking forward to this one as much for the people I meet at that evening as for the book.Not many of us but all with a lively approach to reading.This the group I failed to read Dr Zhivago for last time and as they only gave it a reluctant 3/10 they said it hardly mattered and I was much better off with Omar Sharif's version.
Finally a book from Camilla at Macmillan, The Missing Person's Guide to Love by Susanna Jones.This arrived on Thursday, my first day off of the week and so conditions were favourable for an immediate start and now I'm on the home run.More about that one soon.

Last Sunday's Confessions On Saturday and Oscar's Conker

Time for some more Fidra Books I decided so I whizzed off an order and I intentionally haven't shown the cover of The School on North Barrule by Mabel Esther Allan to make you all go to the Fidra website and take a look and then you'll see why I had to have it.
Who could possibly resist it? Nothing like a good boarding school story especially if set on an island, this one the Isle of Man.My last one of these was a Dorita Fairlie Bruce, The Girls of St Bride's from Girls Gone By Publishers.I've also added another Olivia Fitzroy, Steer by the Stars, more children's camping, fishing and sailing and plenty of free-spirited adventures.
Thanks to Gallic Books for a copy of Murder on the Eiffel Tower which has been much enjoyed around the blogs.Bringing translations of contemporary French authors to a British readership seems like such a simple and sensible idea you wonder it hasn't been done before.Perhaps it's taken this long for us to own up as a nation that, much as we'd like to think French learnt at school equipped us to tackle French novels, actually it hasn't...well mine hasn't and Mademoiselle Deadman did tell me as much.
A Little Blue Jacket by Lucy Ann White arrived from Lucy and I can't wait to start this one, another perfect cover and a lovely website to match.Lucy blogs here and her latest post offers some fascinating background to this book.I think when a book comes with a whole package such as this I'm even more interested.
Any new book from Adele Geras is gratefully received and so a proof of her latest A Hidden Life won't be lying unread for very long.Family feuds and a bookish inheritance with an explosive secret and that's me hooked.
Finally a wondrous challenge of a read from Peter Owen, Alfred Douglas, A Poet's Life and His Finest Work by Caspar Wintermans.This will be catapult me into a completely new reading galaxy and a probable return foray into all things Oscar.Bosie's story often overshadowed by Oscar Wilde's and this book described as "Greek tragedy with elements of soap opera" looks eminently readable.I always feel desperately sad for Oscar Wilde when I read that account of his death in Richard Ellman's biography, the loneliness, the agony of an abcess in his ear and that wallpaper.
Then I'll have to dig out my pics of the trip to Pere Lachaise in 1998 and Oscar Wilde's grave and I hope you didn't think I'd come away without a souvenir. Here's Oscar's Conker, I did try to grow a horse chestnut tree out of one of these but fortunately nothing happened.
What with this and Sylvia's Borage you'll think I've got a bit of thing about grave memorabilia.

Sunday Confessions

What a shocker of a week for book arrivals, nothing for days and days and then all these arrived together. There was another parcel too but that deserves a blog of its own.
I can lay the blame for many of these at the feet of others.
Frankly Scott Pack has quite a lot to answer for because he did such a great write up of The Illustrated 9/11 Commission Report by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon that I was compelled to buy it. Reproduced as a graphic and therefore comic-book style account of actual events on that day, with background and all the results of the inquiry and there is no doubt this one is stunning.A brilliant example of just how powerful this medium can be for conveying deadly serious messages.
Gatty's Tale by Kevin Crossley-Holland was an inevitable purchase and I lay the blame for that squarely with Ann over on Patternings.At least I haven't had to wait ages for this one having only just discovered the Arthur trilogy that everyone else started on about six years ago.
Anthills and Stars by Kevin Duffy arrived from Kevin Duffy himself via Scott's blog. Kevin has set up Bluemoose Books, an Indie publisher based in Hebden Bridge which is of course the birth place of Ted Hughes.That bit's irrelevant but the two are synonymous in my mind so have to be mentioned.
Self Help by Edward Docx arrived for a preview read before publication thanks to Macmillan and this one looks very exciting,everyone has high hopes for it this year so I can't wait to start it.
A couple of books from Persephone, House-Bound by Winifred Peck who was the sister of the famous Knox brothers and therefore aunt to Penelope Fitzgerald.The late and much admired Penelope wrote the afterword to this book in the year before her death and, as I have to have everyhting she ever wrote, here it is.
I've also been hankering after the Journal of Katherine Mansfield for some time.
Adele Geras is another one who I can blame for sending me dashing off to order books.I just find those messages from Adele that start "You absolutely must read..." completely irresistible.So when the call came in for Things To Make and Mend by Ruth Thomas I was onto the Book Depository fairy in a flash and the book was here in half a flash.It's got bling all over it, sequins on the cover and I only meant to read 10 pages or so but...
Then, topping out my construction, three more Andrea Camilleri's. I have discovered that these make perfect lunchtime reading, well-written but light and funny enough to distract without requiring too much brain power.That'll probably have Mr Camilleri taking out a hit on me but I don't mean it to be derogatory, I love these books and all the characters but I don't have to think too hard so I can stroll back into work with a smile on my face and enough kilowatts of brain left to get me through until 5pm.
More about that special parcel tomorrow.

Sunday Confessions

An odd mix this week but great delight at the arrival of Kevin Crossley-Holland's Arthurian trilogy.First up The Seeing Stone and already it's clear of course that Ann over on Patternings was right.I know I'm going to love these, I'm deeply involved in plot, place, time and character after finishing this one.
Everything else has come via publishers.
Cutting Confidential True Confessions and trade secrets of a celebrity hairdresser by...wait for it...Shaun Lockes! This is an anonymous expose written by a crimper & snipper to the stars, "a celebrity hairdresser who runs his own salon and hair product empire in London".
So I dash off to Boots to pay more attention to the names of hair products and am narrowing it down.I suspect it's a toss up between Pan Tene, Pal Molive or Alberto VO5.
I think I may already have identified the anonymous royal and the rest of the book is going to be like this. A sort of Hello magazine with all the names blacked out so I'm going to love this.I also now know why male hairdressers prefer to wear leather trousers but I couldn't possibly tell you.
Well I might later on, keep reading.
Another book I'm keen to read is Janey Lee Grace's Imperfectly Natural Baby and Toddler How to be a green parent in today's busy world. Janey's had loads of babies, put them in towelling nappies and breast fed them all and so have I, plus we also have our laundry balls in common.
I'll just whisper the bit we don't have in common about me being a health visitor because we don't get much of a mention in this book and are probably considered public enemy number one in the scheme of things.Oh yes and I haven't been a backing singer for George Michael (not publicly anyway) or had a top ten hit either.
In these days of evidence-based research we can rain a monsoon of facts on any party, rent-a-prophet-of- doom.com is us and you have no choice as a professional but to convey that information as it stands.Tricky territory and clearly Janey finds it so too, there seem to be caveats aplenty to all her advice which shows you what a litigious minefield it has all become.
I firmly believe it's all about informed decisions but also a question of balance and common sense.Health professionals can seize far too much of this territory and end up disempowering parents at a time when instinct should be their greatest friend.
Janey is certainly adding plenty more information to help anyone who wants to pursue green parenting.
I certainly think I've been a green parent but in the days when it meant something else entirely.
Loads of great websites to explore and I'll shut up now before I'm hauled up and flogged on the Steve Wright radio prog (Janey's the "green guru co-host on there)
Now Mr Darcy's Diary by Amanda Grange.I sense a sharp intake of breath out there.
A fictional imagining of Pride and Prejudice from the hero's point of view.These get a terrible press from the die-hard Austenites but I'm not one of those. I'm a bit take or leave it with Jane to be honest and I don't go into raptures over her which is terribly unfashionable at the moment I know.This is another book that is going to get a fair and impartial read from me and I'll let you know how I fare.
Yes, yes, of course I'll tell you about the wet shirt incident and whether he caught a chill or not,as if I'd keep that to myself.
Oh and the male crimpers and the leather trousers?
Well that's so they can brush the hairs off easily of course; fine wool Prada's let your hair snippings right through into their boxers where they cause havoc apparently.

Sunday Confessions Part Two

Most purchases made on a trip down to Truro last week. We did a road inspection too for the benefit of those of you who head this way on holiday and live in dread of the Bodmin to Indian Queens stretch.The new bit of the A30 is all but ready.
Truro is definitely up with the best for Cornish shopping and we timed our visit for Flea Market day which is always worth doing because the book stalls are unusual.
I hadn't really explored Nonsuch Publishing , probably down to a mental block because I went to a school of the same name (Nonsuch, not Publishing), and nor have I quite been able to figure out the pedigree or who this publisher belongs to.The books seem to be in a similar design league to Pushkin Press; compact and unusual classics and one stall had a huge selection of them which suggests bankrupt stock from somewhere.
I opted for The Slave Son by Mrs William Noy Wilkins. Written on the back of the commercial success of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, this book is set on the island of Trinidad in 1832.The book is worth it for Mrs Wilkins introduction alone which is a perceptive treatise on the injustices of racial inequality.
The next stall along had the most unusual selection of war books and I spotted The Patriot's Progress by Henry Williamson.He's been on my list to look out for.Local to Devon and so his books are plentiful down here. I read Tarka the Otter eons ago but I had no idea until recently (an Endsleigh Salon recommend) that he had written so much about The Great War having fought at the Battle of the Somme.This book arrived quite some time after the first flush of post-Great war fiction and was hailed as an unsurpassed masterpiece for its honesty "an overwhelming, unanswerable indictment of the institution of war". It also has the most striking set of lino cuts by Tasmanian artist, William Kermode.
As you jump out of the flea market you can hop into Waterstone's and there is something very odd going on in there.
The selection of 3 for 2's was unbelievable, I could have easily chosen 12 for 8 and that is a real first.
Spoilt for choice I plumped for Ice Trap by Kitty Sewell which Scott Pack recommended ages ago and then Dark Fire by C.J.Sansom because I have been keen to start his Shardlake trilogy.This series comes highly recommended (again at the Endsleigh Salon) and so to this end it would have been good if I had been paying attention and actually bought the first in the trilogy Dissolution and not the second one. I finally added in Disobedience by Naomi Alderman which I recommended to myself because I love these insightful funny Jewish family sagas.
In the post a lovely lovely copy of Adele Geras' latest book Made in Heaven which I am really looking forward to, it's all pink and flowery and you just know the coming together of these two families is not going to be in the least bit straight forward or smooth.
Finally my copy of Summer in Baden-Baden by Leonard Tsypkin which Susan Sontag posthumously tipped me the wink about in her book of essays At the Same Time and I'm delighted that the hardback edition that I tracked down contains her introduction.

Sunday Confessions

A minimalist week and I'm having to overcome the urge to open and start reading every single book as it comes in the door at the moment, not least What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn.
There is much a-crowing going on over at Crockatt & Powell's as they stake the discovery claim on this one and that's been endorsed by its appearance on the OBPF (Orange etc etc) longlist.I'd already decided there's hardly time to crack on through this before the shortlist is announced on April 17th so I've just picked a couple that are coming highly recommended.Hence Peripheral Vision by Patricia Ferguson also in the pile.
Yes this was the Patricia Ferguson, a nurse who writes, who I read back along (as we says down y'ere) Indefinite Nights one of my best reads of 1989.
My endorsement often the kiss of death in the prizelist scrum so apologies in advance.
A couple of books to review, Dana Spiotta's Eat the Document and Fangland by John Marks, both look nicely unusual for me and that's good.
Then a couple of second-hand finds, Master Georgie by Beryl Bainbridge, bought, opened and read to tie in with with Crimea-fest and expect a review of that any day.I may just have unlocked the door to Beryldom and me with this one.
Finally A Collection of the World's Greatest Letters edited by Michelle Lovric.I love reading letters even if they weren't sent to me and the scope and range of this collection is nicely eclectic.

PS The ungeeky idiot's guide to the secret of legible titles I'm advised is to set your camera to its highest pixels setting, which translates as the biggest and best quality picture it will do.Then when you come to resize it (and I have dug deep into my computer to find Microsoft Picture Editor within Microsoft Office for the simplest way, anything else too complicated for me ) and shrink it you have more pesky pixels squashed into a smaller space and therefore a clearer picture.
For your info, this picture started life the size of a double duvet cover.

Sunday Confessions

A week of joy and happiness in the book arrivals department, a lovely gift parcel of books and contained within Passion by Jude Morgan.This got rave reviews and must-read epithets at the recent Mary Shelley book group evening, so its unannounced arrival was timely.Also My Latest Grievance by Elinor Lipman, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell and The Mathematics of Love by Emma Darwin.I knew of all these but missed them when they were published.Lovely books.
I read about Salt Publishing over on the Snowblog and dashed over to check out the Salt website (which Snow books are very envious of) and then a penny dropped, that I'd heard about Family Connections by Chrissie Gittins in an e mail drop a few weeks ago and had added it to my wish list.
Drat, drat and a bucketful of more drat, subliminal marketing, I've been had.
But it worked because eventually I joined up all the bits of the jigsaw and ordered the book.These are short stories but the ones I've read so far are unusual, clever and funny.Some original twists to traditional plots.
On the subject of small publishers, I love the way the Indies support each other like this and generously signpost us around to them all. I'm not sure you'd ever see a large publisher promoting a potential rival.
Perhaps I'm being naive and really they are all married to each other and best friends and live in the same street, have dinner together, share the school run and offer to say nice things, but that doesn't actually matter to me.
If someone doesn't tell us they are there we don't know, or I certainly wouldn't and I can make up my own mind when I get there.Yes, I'd be envious of the Salt website too.
A sub to The Bookseller was £179 last time I looked. I'll let you into a secret, each time I get tantalizingly past the first sentence of an interesting piece and then hit the log in page I keep trying to get in via the back door at www.bugmenot.com to no avail. Have no fear Bookseller, you are a well-defended fortress impenetrable to us poor book bloggers.No worries, I think the blog world is now starting to tell me most of what I want to know, except I would like to have read the rest of this because according to The Guardian, book bloggers get a mention

  A  Way With the Web
"That old marketing chestnut "word of mouth" continues to be among the most effective drivers of book sales, with a quarter of people thought to base their reading choices on personal recommendations. With the average..."

Talking of which, Susan made me spend 19p on To Noto by Duncan Fallowell when I'd been cutting back on book expenditure but she has done it proud over on her blog and this will comfortably fit the bill for the Travel themed evening at the Endsleigh Salon for me in a couple of month's time.
I'm now quite excited about the discovery (for me) of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, and I suppose the Luis is just there to stop us saying Jorge Borges and enjoying the rhyme.I've gone for two anthologies, Fictions and The Total Library : Non-Fiction 1922-1986 and dipping in I see plenty in there to enjoy.
I shall forge a Jorge Borges gorge soon.

Sunday Confessions

Having decided to make inroads into current stock it's just a little stack this week.I've also had a lesson in pixels from Offspringette who finally instructs me in the art of keeping the pictures clear whilst shrinking, thus keeping the titles legible.
Apologies for a year of illegible titles I think I might know what I'm doing now.
I've already made mention of No Place For Ladies The Untold Story of Women in the Crimean War by Helen Rappaport and in fact I've almost finished this. Within pages I knew I was mining an excellent new reading seam and  before I was half way I knew I had to know much more about the redoubtable Mrs Fanny Duberley.
Fanny was the only officer's wife to witness the whole war and she wrote it all down in her own inimitable style, so the recently published Mrs Duberley's War : Journal and Letters from the Crimea edited by Christine Kelly was an inevitable purchase.Don't you love that cover picture of Fanny on her horse Bob? Oh yes, she took all her horses along too.
I'm now deeply into Crimean anything and for my next trick I think I really should try and find some of those knitting patterns.Queen Victoria was far more prolific than this Devon sock knitter and churned out pairs of her speciality Royal Muffatees by the dozen.These were "woollen coverings for the lower arms" and given the vast number of amputees one can only assume that the pairs were shared around.The Crimea was not only knee-deep in mud it was drowning in knitting as a veritable tidal wave of mitts, socks and comforters surged across from a homeland desperate to help.
Even more fascinating I discover Lord's Cardigan and Raglan made unique knitwear contributions of their own. Forget the death toll during the Charge of the Light Brigade; as long as Lord C's hair didn't get ruffled by pulling a jersey over his head, that's what mattered.
A lovely parcel from fellow blogger Ex Libris in Ohio and a copy of The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1918. I'm thrilled with this firstly because, shame on me, I had never heard of the book and only of Booth Tarkington in the deep recesses of my mind, but also because Ex Libris likens it to Edith Wharton's House of Mirth both in themes and content. All that aside I love to get book parcels and airmail ones are very exciting, thanks Sharon.
A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam also quickly made it onto the fiction in progress stack because it has a first line that instantly captured my attention " Dear Husband, I lost our children today".
Well how for goodness sake?
You can't not read on, just to be sure and very quickly Tahmima Anam has you immersed in her story "set against the backdrop of the Bangladesh War of Independence...the extraordinary story of a family, and of a country on the brink of revolution, at a moment when all things seemed possible".
Short is good on back cover blurbs, enough there to lure in this reader.
But right now I'm seriously worried because if there was a book called Knitting Patterns of the Crimean War I'd have to buy it.

Sunday Confessions

A nice surprise parcel from Coffee House Press this week and a couple of books and plenty of catalogues to browse. I have been dying to read Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife by Sam Savage ver since Bluestalking in Chicago gave it the thumbs up. Someone mentioned a book on China in the comments this week so perhaps The Last Communist Virgin by Wang Ping will fit the bill, Louise Erdrich calls it wickedly funny and I love all things Louise Erdrich so we'll see.
Still in that part of the world Atomic Sushi by Simon May and this arrived from Alma Books. Simon May was the first British Professor of Philosophy since 1882 to be invited to teach at Tokyo University.I've made a start on this and it's clear that just walking in the door of the university was going to require certificates above and beyond the usual GCSE/ A Level / Degree / Doctoral thesis standard.This is a great modern perspective on all that recent Japanese reading.
Tramps Like Us by Kristen Buckley, a memoir about growing up in the suburbs of New Jersey is billed as" wickedly irreverant", well I love a bit of that.
In complete contrast Take Off Your Party Dress by Dina Rabinovitch is a searingly honest account of her encounter with breast cancer and must be added to the current list of very well-written books on the subject.After reading and posting here about Cancer Vixen by Marisa Acocella Marchetto I'm gathering up good examples of these books for the Patient's Library in the surgery.They are moving into reality and telling it like it is after years of skirting around the subject and suggesting you should have eaten more tofu or something.More about this soon and yes Dina, I agree, "that" machine (the Squashogram) can only have been invented by a man, no woman would even have considered such an instrument of torture.
Finally, I am thrilled to have in my hands a copy of Dark Hearts of Chicago by William Horwood and Helen Rappaport. I reviewed William Horwood's Skallagrigg here and billed it as one of the very few books ever to make me actually burst into tears (P622) and this one is a collaboration with Helen who is a historian with a special interest in, amongst other things Mary Seacole, Florence Nightingale and the Crimean War. I've blogged about Mary Seacole too so much more about Helen Rappaport's other latest book No Place For Ladies: The Untold Story of the Women in the Crimean War very soon. My copy has just arrived from Aurum Press who also publish Imran Ahmad's Unimagined.
Meanwhile Dark Hearts of Chicago is a page-turner of a historical thriller and I should know because right now I can't quite turn the pages fast enough.

Sunday Confessions on Tuesday

Plenty to keep the postman happy and grumbling again last week.
You'll see I finally succumbed to Decca The Letters of Jessica Mitford edited by Peter Sussman, buy a book and starve the flu, never fails. What a gorgeous tome it is though.
I'm always pleased to be in contact with local writers and Hilary Lloyd, based in East Devon has kindly sent me a copy of her first novel A Necessary Killing. "Compelling, unpredictable and ultimately terrifying". Published by UKA Press, I'm intrigued and looking forward to this one.
From Fidra Books Fly-By-Night by K.M.Peyton.Never a horsey child I always felt completely left out from all that Jill and the Pony Club stuff because I was busy reading Sue Barton Student Nurse, so I'm going to make up for it all now and see whether I know my bridle from my stirrups by the end of this one.Bet I get the saddle on back to front and the horse will scare me.
I spotted a book in the Canongate catalogue that intrigued me, The Paris Review Interviews Vol. 1 and so I sent for it, here's a collection of some of the best from one of the best.The Paris Review interviews have long been considered the stellar example of the genre and in this volume voices as varied as Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Vonnegut, T.S.Eliot, Rebecca West and many more with Joan Didion right at the end.
It's another book with those pseudo-uncut pages, all rough and uneven and I have been known to send these back before now thinking I'd ended up with a seconds. I'm learning that this is now considered trendy and a bit retro so Iets assume this is intentional here.
I've also invested in Irene Nemirovsky her life and works by Jonathan Weiss because I suspect this is a writer I am now going to want to know everything about and more in order to arrive at a clear understanding of her work.Out of the parcel and the first 50 pages read before I realised and yes, it is a readable and riveting account and one that I suspect will offer some unique perspectives....suitcase on the cover again but this time the suitcase itself is of great significance and in a setting that offers even more, this time it works.
Lastly I've agreed to review a few audio books and a couple have arrived.I shall share this load with the Tinker (my famous father) who is a great audio book fan and has an iPod to prove it.I haven't recovered from trying to listen to Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveller's Wife on my iPod Shuffle which chose to "shuffle" an already complex book into a completely different order. Several people have told me this is the one book where it actually wouldn't matter but I got very confused all the same.
I'm going to listen to the very gentle Thrush Green by Miss Read as I travel the highways and byways on my visits.I'll doubtless pitch up at every door all soothed and tranquil. Meanwhile the Tinker will probably need regular blood pressure monitoring to cope with Map of Bones by James Rollins as "science and religion unite to unleash a threat not seen since the beginning of time".Right up his street.

Sunday Confessions on Monday

The postman is getting more and more fed up with this.He's been off sick for two weeks with the Village Flu (I think we have a mini-pandemic going on) and has now resumed his daily trudge to the door with parcels and it's taking a lot of smooth talking to keep him happy.He also keeps telling us which son he's seen with which girl in which pub and we keep saying we don't want to know.
This is a rural problem, you can have no secrets.
Realising the error of my ways in neglecting Alan Clark's diaries, two volumes quickly arrived and these, as I've said make fruitful and fascinating reading. I'm going backwards and having read about his death,my eyes are out on stalks at the sheer drudgery of his time as MP for Plymouth.
More books from the very kind Peter Owen and in there The Demanding Dead More Stories of Terror and the Supernatural by Edith Wharton, Kokoro by Natsume Soseki, a Japanese best-seller by all accounts and Loving Mephistopheles by Miranda Miller. This gets a good write up from Hilary Mantel so looks promising.
I was quickish off the mark and bagged one of the free books on offer over on Scott Pack's blog so The Angel Makers by Jessica Gregson has arrived "the bleak Hungarian plain, 1914,an isolated village shrouded in superstition and rumours of witchcraft..." I've resisted opening it but have only a mere shred of willpower left. Update: willpower dissolved, 120 pages in, very good indeed thus far. Update 2: Finished will be on blog very soon.
I've done a book exchange with A who comments on here and lives partly in France, so in return for an unread hardback copy of Moloka'i by Alan Brennert (it's on its way A) which was making me feel guilty I now have Seeking Whom He May Devour by Fred Vargas which comes highly recommended and a couple of books in French! This will be ambitious but one is by Amelie Nothomb and not yet translated,Cosmetique De L'Ennemi so needs must when you are starving.Also Les Grands Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier also in French and yes, this could all end in beaucoup de tears avec des grosse stamping of les pieds.
I also decided to plan ahead for this attempted monthly read of a volume of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time  and so I ordered Book 2, A Buyer's Market. Book 1 is going well but this is going to be a ridiculously expensive way to read these, too late now, I'm hooked on these manageable little books.
Coram Boy by Jamila Gavin has been on my list for ages.Old hunting grounds for me and many a happy hour spent in Coram's Fields as Gt. Ormond Street student nurses when we would wheel children out for some of that fresh London air.You could only go into Coram's Field if you had a child with you.This copy came from my local Indie so yes, it has the electronic tagging device stuck firmly inside the back cover, grrrrr and more grrrrr.

Sunday Confessions on Tuesday

A day in London for the Long Barn Books editorial board meeting and within a dove's flutter of Waterstone's flagship store in Piccadilly, so I was never going to come home empty handed.
There is something completely and utterly intoxicating to those of us regularly deprived of the experience; to walk into a really huge book shop and just smell those books (and the toilets in this instance, more on that in a minute).
I love going into this branch in particular because, back in 1972, one of my best and most elegant of school friends went to work in this very building as a trainee buyer when it was Simpsons the department store, while I pootled off in my K Skip Rosamund shoes and a lot of starch down to my ankles to be a student nurse in the slightly less grand environs (then) of Bloomsbury.I was thinking of her in this still splendid and stately environment, though I bet the toilets were a lot cleaner back then.
Waterstone's, this is your most glorious store and you can't afford bad water closet days.
Who's in charge? You really need to sort out that hourly rota, "This toilet was last checked at...on...by...".
I'm not neurotic about it, in fact after 30 years of health visiting it takes an awful lot of filth and dirt to impress me, but I'm bound to notice this sort of thing and I think I could actually see the E.Coli leap frogging over the MRSA. Some swabs and petrie dishes would have yielded spores galore.The smell wafting out of the door, the filthy roller towel long past its final tug and dragging on the floor, washbasins and toilets "out of order" and the electric hand dryer, dead as a dodo.
You are likely to spend hours in a shop this size and eat in the lovely restaurant or coffee shop too, so clean facilities are essential, a bout of Rotavirus or Norwalk is not.
In the end I was a model of buying restraint knowing what was sitting at home in Mt.Unread.
But I couldn't resist a set of Enter a Fox,The Smoking Diaries and The Year of the Jouncer by Simon Gray.Curzon and Susan have both enjoyed those recently, I'm sure I will too.
I'm just barely flexing an ankle at A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell.I'll try Volume One, A Question of Upbringing and see whether I want to read the other eleven.It lends itself in this format to a book a month but I'm not sure how I'll fare. Something has always scared me off these, heaven knows what.Probably just the sheer volume of continous reading but coming to it for the first time will be interesting.
Feeling chastened and mean about my Irene Nemirovsky failure I snapped up David Golder in an attempt to read it before any massive hype or reviews pitch up under my nose. I've finished this already  and I can declare a rapprochement so I'm hopeful that Irene and I will become friends after our Suite Francaise fall out.More soon.
Finally in the post, via Adele Geras,(thanks again Adele) a lovely signed copy of Linda Newbery's Set in Stone, winner of the Costa Children's Book Award.
In my hands in Waterstone's Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford and I was oh so tempted, but I dithered and dithering is fatal.
I put it back, persuade me someone.

Sunday Confessions

Some nice surprises this week.
A weighty parcel from a new Indie publisher, Myrmidon which had the postman staggering to the door. Contained within, Thirteen by Sebastian Beaumont, The Painted Messiah by Craig Smith and The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng.Look carefully and you'll see what happened with the Craig Smith and you'll read what I thought about that this week.Then I just sneaked a peek at the Tan Twan Eng and an hour later remembered that actually I'd been on my way to empty the dryer.These are looking good.
Dr Phil Whitaker, one for my 'doctors who write' reading project, kindly sent me his latest Freak of Nature and I had ordered The Face which arrived at the same time.Thanks Phil,more soon.
I'm still stocking up on classics, more Zolas because I am a born-again Zola-ite, L'Assommoir and The Kill and I plumped for a Balzac as I have never read any, Cousin Bette looked accessible, we'll see whether I become a Balzac-ite too.
When Me and My Big Mouth says "read this" you don't have much choice so Unimagined a Muslim boy meets the West by Imran Ahmad was here at warp speed (oh Book Depository, how do I love thee). I've sneaked a preview of this too and that's become a full-blown read.It is shaping up to be as remarkable as Scott says, a very unique voice.
Is that Imran on the cover? If so he's adorable and I just want to sit him on my knee (then,perhaps not now) and will forgive the weeny print.It is indeed a painfully insightful book and painful on my sight, thank heavens for my new specs.
Lastly let this be known, the tenderness of sons.It is entirely possible to train them to be kind and thoughtful young men, as the Kayaker returned from a trip to Plymouth clutching a copy of The  Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney for me, after my gnashing of teeth that very morning at having left it on the shelf pending paperback.

Sunday Confessions

I've had rather an overdose of Hermione Lee purchasing this week and it's all left the plastic in need of some resuscitation.Both expensive hardback books but thankfully nothing to grumble about on the quality of the book itself.I haven't done the rip test on the paper but it looks high grade.
Firstly Body Parts: Essays on Life Writing because after my read of Hermione Lee's introduction to On Being ill by Virginia Woolf I was keen to read more of her writing and too lazy to trot around my shelves and find all her introductions in books various.
I'm especially pleased to find in this volume a piece on Penelope Fitzgerald and another excellent essay entitled Reading in Bed. Much more on all these soon but a great deal to think about around the subject of biography contained therein.
On the subject of which she is here.
The eagerly anticipated Edith Wharton has arrived in the valley and sumptuous barely covers it. She has swept in for her visit with her unruly red hair plus an entourage of 854 pages and that will be my next reading trail once I can ease Thomas Hardy out of the guest room (he spends hours in the bathroom, what's he doing in there for goodness sake?)
I'm mad keen to get back to the US women writers and Edith is the perfect way in. I'm hoping I don't get Whartonia though because I've only just recovered from that nasty bout of hyper- Gaskellitis I caught at Christmas.
My own fault I know, I gorged.I'm pacing myself with the Hardy, just a small daily dose.
April in Paris by Michael Wallner, not yet published but kindly sent by John Murray and this is too tempting to resist for long because I'm in a heightened state of red alert for Blitz/WWII reads. I've had a public failure to connect with Suite Francaise, The Tinker's run off with Bless 'Em All which I did enjoy, so now we'll see how this one fares.
Charlotte Mendelson's When We Were Bad came from Macmillan and I'm now getting very excited about proofs, who needs covers? It's still a blank slate read for me as not for publication until May so no lit.supp. reviews yet.
Lovely.
This is starting to get a bit like not hearing the scores for a football match, fingers in ears...la la la la, Susan Hill was reading it the last I heard so there may be reader opinion over there too.
A copy of Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures  by Dr Vincent Lam came from his editor in Canada.This is my spare copy and, when the quest to find a doctor nearby who reads is successful, this will go their way for a diagnosis.Might have to feign QoF points for it or I'll have to pay them
That was not a nice thing to say so I've crossed it out.
Half Cut Publications sent me a book of short stories Residue by Andrew Hook "unflinching emotional close-ups effecting daily life" should that be "affecting"? No matter, whether cause or effect, there's my specialist day-job subject if ever there was one.
Knitting Vintage Socks by Nancy Bush has caused whoops of delight and much frantic winding of my Yarn Yard skeins of the month into knittable balls of wool in readiness.This was my BAFAB prize over on Write From Karen, who's already had one very big thank you from me, but here's another one, THANKS KAREN.This book will get a sock post of its own because it is a heel-turner to beat them all.
Finally, and I always seem to have one of these now. A book I felt I of all people should at least have on the shelf as a precursor to perhaps reading it one day, The Wings of the Dove by Henry James.

Sunday Confessions

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

Sunday Confessions

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

Sale Confessions

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

Sunday Confessions

This picture comes to you eventually courtesy of the Kayaker's action packed all-singing/dancing digital camera.I'm trying to improve the quality of the pictures here and I say eventually because I've just sat for a good long ten minutes pressing every button in an attempt to figure out why I couldn't see anything on the little camera screen.Taking the lens cover off has helped enormously.
Charles Frazier's latest novel Thirteen Moons just fell I tell you into the trolley at Tesco's.I was completely smitten by Cold Mountain and have high hopes for this one, 19th century America and some Cherokee wisdom by the looks of it.I am loving American fiction at the moment having completely  British-ed and Commonwealth-ed out with the Booker-thon.
The order from Bookseller Crow arrived complete with head lice bookmarks;a couple of books by Halldor Laxness just to see what the Icelandic Nobel Prize winner can do.It looks dense and I'll need my wits about me I think, but I've made a start on The Atom Station and will get to Independent People eventually.
Jonny at Alma Books made my day with a copy of The Last Resort by Carmen Posadas.This is a Moroccan mystery and so I'm now thinking it's a good ongoing reading project to hop from nation to nation and test out their crime fiction.I've always been an intermittent crime fiction reader but have resolved to be more consistent in 2007.I plan to just name my destination and sit back and wait for all your expert suggestions.
I'm grateful for a signpost to the next two books over on Catheryn Kilgarriff's newish publisher blog
riskingit
Harbor by Lorraine Adams is a book quite out of my normal territory, though, to be honest I'm not sure what my normal territory is any more.Blog recommends take me far and wide with my reading and I love the challenge of something new.This one is about illegal immigrants into the US, who watches them and who decides when they become a terrorist threat.More on that soon, I've nearly finished it.
Saving the best until last Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, delivered and read within days.I have a feeling it will make my top ten of the year with ease and will be my likely nomination for The Book Bloggers Book Prize having flagrantly flouted the "must be published in the UK" rule with my last choice.I've checked this time, it's legal.

 

Itching to confess

I mentioned Caroline Binch as one of my favourite children's book illustrators a while ago and I couldn't resist adding a few more to my shelves.Her artwork is quite exquisite.

Then there was the small matter of the large box from The Book People.The offers were too good to resist.3 books by Orhan Pamuk. I've heard and read so much about Snow it's time to add it to my shelves for a future read.It must be disheartening for Indies to see these sold at £3.99 for 3, doubtless someone will tell me how The Book People manage this and I'll feel terrible for supporting them.

Probably far worse for trade is this deluge of Daphne's for £9.99. Over the years my Daphne Du Maurier collection has become ragged and gappy where I've lent and lost originals so a refurbishment seemed affordable and actually a few in here I didn't have first time round.I've not had a bout of  Inflammatory Daphne-itis for ages, it might be time.
I also slid in a copy of The Invention of Childhood by Hugh Cunningham for the "about children" shelf.
Finally, a huge thank you to Kate Williams who has sent me a copy of her delicious looking biography of Emma Hamilton, England's Mistress. I really can't wait to read this, in fact why wait. I had a gap in the biography reading section  so I've made a start.It's accessible and fascinating and I agree with the great review I heard on the radio this week, it has the feel of a novel.So many books like this I start and surrender quite early on because they seem dry and dull to my non-historical mind. Not this one and not Emma Hamilton's life that's for sure.
Next week's pile is already accumulating and there's more Iceland in there and to appease the gods I bought some from that nice Indie bookseller who includes a free and gratis head louse with every book.I didn't recognise it, too many legs I thought. How wrong can I be, but in my defence I haven't seen one in ages.Do you remember that advert, two nice children's heads touching and the caption "a  head louse has found a new home"?

For speed of delivery,next day,  (not even time for a new hatching) and very nice wrapping technique I award Jonathan...