dovegreyreader scribbles

A Happy New Year

Here we all are, Family Munster dovegrey on Christmas Day, unusually all in the same place at the same time, about to sit down for dinner and sporting our joke Christmas Teeth. These are an annual tradition in our non-existent (this year) homemade crackers...don't we all look lovely in that Devon backwoods hillbilly sort of way? There's Offspringette on the left with the Gamekeeper behind, then me, the Tinker, Bookhound sporting traditional daft hat (before the pudding - brandy - premature match - eyebrow incident) and the Kayaker.
So we recover from all that Christmas idleness and just get going again and now it's time to be lazy once more for New Year.
The tree has been up long enough so we will de-festivate soon and pack it all away. It's just not going to make it to Twelfth Night still looking like a tree, more like an upright with occasional offshoots which is also starting to smell like a dead tree. Gone is the lingering fragrance of fresh spruce and I have my doubts about this much-lauded non-needle-shed capability. They look ready to roll to me and I suspect it will drop the lot as we try to wrestle it out of the front door because we will also have forgotten that we've tied it to the ceiling.
The Tinker heard a useful tip on the radio that he was keen to share with me yesterday as I fondly reminisced over his decorations which are all as old as me if not older. In these times of credit-crunching recessive depression someone has come up with a real money-saver...why not pack away your Christmas deccies carefully and then you could use them again next year?
This has left us all speechless, where on earth has this radio person been?
Are we really the only people in the land who have done that since about 1926 anyway?
Does everyone else go out and buy new deccies every year?
Surely not.
Anyway we probably are one of the few who metaphorically scrape the snow off the remains of the beautifully iced Christmas cake, remove the snowman, the santa, the reindeer, the Man Utd football players (don't ask, it's tradition) and stick in a candle for Bookhound's birthday on Friday. Metaphorical as in I never did get around to making that cake in October, feeding it slavishly and icing it lavishly, so he might have to make do with a battenburg from the Co-Op or something.
In fact nor did we get around to sending Christmas cards in the end.
Suddenly we just felt like a year off and this will mean letters start to arrive in January asking if we are divorced / ill / detained at Her Majesty's Pleasure...no no everyone, we are fine, look at us, a picture of rural chic. I promise I'll catch up next year.
Anyway, wishing you all a very happy New Year with much happy reading too, and of course best wishes from Rocky who is still doing an awful lot of this sun-puddle-bathing after his dovesleigh adventures.

Blogwarming party at Stella's...

So yes,we've lost some writer blogs this year, sturm and drang and silence, but look we're gaining ground again.
Great for nosey people like me who love all this nuts and bolts of the writing process stuff, behind the scenes of the £100,000 advance explained ( expect to get about £9.50 the way things are going), how writers unblock their drains (or don't) and unblock their writer's block (or don't) because I don't know about you but I like to know that writers have normal life events too.
The writer I hold entirely responsible for making me want to read Janet Frame has taken the plunge, crossed the divide, dash over and raise a blogwarming glass to Stella Duffy.

The dovegreyreader's dozen (11-13...of course)

"He was shivering. The water ran from his bath. He heard it go. It gurgled through the neighbouring pipes, and was the sound of blood in frightened veins, the sound a soldier hears."
A Dance for the Moon by Richard Burns (Bloomsbury) and the power of comments meant that Mike's suggestion was picked up by plenty of us who read and wondered quite how this one had faded into obscurity and off the Great War must-read lists. Mike kindly sent me all the contemporaneous pre-internet commentary on this book and on Richard Burns himself which all made for another 'complete' reading of a memorable book.

"I left my house with a knife, a length of rope, and an old Hudson's Bay blanket my father gave me. He'd used it out on the traplines. Its reds and blues, blacks and greens were faded with age now, the beaver marks, the stitching that shows its worth, faded to dove-grey."....
Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden. OK Joseph didn't say dove-grey, just grey, but it was dove-grey I'm certain and sometimes books are meant and this book, having travelled back in the Kayaker's luggage as a gift from Canada, was special before I opened it because any book I am bought gains extra significance. But reading it led to even more miraculous events, a Hudson's Bay blanket for starters and it will be going nowhere near the traplines.I curl up in it, Magic-Mountain style for langorous reading afternoons and send good vibes to all my hard-working colleagues out there in the icy rain. But the book too, it was all a magnificent Canadian reading experience and we can't get enough of those here. Also, because I hadn't bet £10 on it, Giller victory was assured. Look out for it in the UK in 2009 thanks to Orion.

All the best dozens are thirteen and so finally

Sputnik Caledonia by Andrew Crumey (Picador) and no quote from this one because I just read it cover to cover and couldn't stop to even think about anything other than what on earth was going on. Even now, I look back and can still recall that penny-dropping moment when the truth was revealed. I don't think I've read such a clever book with such a clever twist in ages.

So there you have it and now I just have to cross the final book-choosing hurdle of the year, the last book of 2008 and the first of 2009.

The dovegreyreader's dozen (7-10)

Moving on through 2008 it's no secret that Janet Frame has entered the inner sanctum so I haven't included her, but if confirmation were needed that any of these books had been special it came the minute they were off the shelf and back in my hands, a sort of Ready-Brek-warm glow emanated all round.     

"The family were bitterly disappointed not to have been allowed south to the warmth of their much-loved palace at Livadia on the Black Sea, where they would have happily lived out their lives in seclusion as an ordinary family."
Ekaterinburg by Helen Rappaport (Hutchinson) was another complete reading experience. I read the book, Helen visited us here on dovegreyreader for the day and talked of all things Romanov, then we met at Dartington. I listened spell-bound as Helen cradled the audience in the palm of her hand on the 90th anniversary of the death of the Tsar and his family, and we all gushed hopeless tears of emotion.

"My heart is distracted within me; I fade like a passing shadow. Not a soul in the world knew where she was, and this knowledge gave her pleasure."
The Outlander by Gil Adamson (House of Anansi Press). a book I spotted whilst browsing with envy the Canadian prize lists and I traded a picture from here with a Canadian TV company when they asked if they could use it in exchange for a copy of this book. It's wildly different and unusual and it somehow touched the reading chord in me that loves exactly that. It will be published by Bloomsbury here in the UK in 2009.

"Death will not be denied. To try is grandiose. It drives madness into the soul. It leaches out virtue. It injects poison into friendship and make a mockery of love."
The Spare Room by Helen Garner (Canongate), the book that didn't make the Booker for whatever reason but so many thought it should have done, one of the many books this year that I wouldn't have missed for the world, a unique reading experience, as the blurb says, it is indeed full of wisdom, dark laughter and truth.

" And that summed it up. She felt all she'd brought to this family were innumerable and faintly pathetic minor possessions, effortlessly chosen but easily replaced with something similar, or something quite different."
The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher (Fourth Estate), remember when buying a house would knock you back a mere £16,000 and the sitting room had one wall papered and the rest emulsioned, there'd be a Simca parked outside and Chili Con Carne was the new way to make mince interesting? I moved right on in, picked up on the gentle dramas of ordinary people living everyday lives and loved this book unashamedly, while others moved in tore the curtains off the Swish track and stamped all over them, that's the sign of a good book for you, love it or hate it. My record for never choosing the winner of the Booker remains intact, but this year I had hoped for good fortune and bet £10 on this even before the shortlist was announced, will I never learn?
Sorry Philip.

Silent night

So we didn't have a white one but we have had a spectacularly bright and sunny one; a run of completely cloudless days and deep cerulean blue skies since Christmas settling into breathtaking sunsets.
I've been reading Mikhail Bulgakov's White Guard and was struck by his descriptions of Kiev as evening descends and life and noise in the city becomes muffled and indistinct as a grey darkness falls.
Not surprisingly rural Devon is quite different, there is a sharp and focused clarity to dusk ably assisted no doubt by clear air and little noise or light pollution beyond what radiates from chez dovegrey.
Completely silent but for the last echoes of roosting pheasants and a little family of murmuring wrens who have taken over the vacant swallow's nest on the verandah. If disturbed too much the wrens panic and fly indoors, so this week we have had the dilemma of wrens perched in the Christmas tree and cats settling expectantly beneath, and we have now blessed and offered a sainthood to the person who suggested that the whole thing be tethered to a hook in the ceiling beams.
There is a brilliant single planet visible in the south-west night sky as dusk falls at the moment which we think is Venus, astronomers feel free to correct us, but all too beautiful for words, so here's the picture as we stand outside the front door, looking from us in Devon across to they in Cornwall and that planet.

Sunday Salon - The dovegreyreader's dozen (4-6)

"Never to whine; to accept what came; to wait for better; to take what you could; to let no one, not even yourself, know how near to giving in you were: these were his principles by which he lived..."
The Changeling by Robin Jenkins (Canongate) was possibly one of the most emotionally charged books of the year, memorable for everything it exposed about the era that I was born into, riven as it was by social class distinction and in this case the life of a little boy blighted by altruistic but sadly misplaced endeavours.

" Your house? said the whisperer. I don't think so. You are not the mistress here."
Daphne by Justine Picardie (Bloomsbury) ...well what I can say about this. Launched me on an envigorating Daphne redux reading trail, novels, letters, biographies, the chance to meet Justine, leave her in charge of the blog for a day to answer all your questions, meet up with Justine again and Catherine St Germans at Port Eliot for the special dovegreyreader evening in the library there (yes and to sit in George Bernard Shaw's chair ) and then do the event at Dartington together. It has been a privilege to meet Justine and ride in a very small way the waves of welcome Daphne du Maurier resurgence that this book created, and in case you're wondering, we haven't finished with Daphne here yet.

Don't Let Them Tell You How To Grieve by Gina Claye and one of the most relevant and useful books I have read on bereavement and dealing with the grieving process in a very long time. It was good to meet Gina and the Oxford Writers with Colin Dexter when I spoke at the Oxford Literary Festival and I know from comments and e mails that many of you also found Gina's book helpful.

Halfway, the rest of the dovegreyreader's dozen to follow.

The dovegreyreader's dozen (1-3)

Phew, that's that over with for another year. We had a good one and I hope you all did too, see it didn't matter that you hadn't done all those things you meant to do did it?
Everyone had a great time without the homemade crackers didn't they? We just heaped the contents (same for about the last ten years) on the table, all shouted 'Bang' and piled in as usual.
There was a rash moment of over-brandying of the pudding (the Kayaker, who else) followed by a premature approach with the lighted match,(Bookhound) but eyebrows don't take that long to grow back do they?
And we did manage to spoon the cream, spilt in the mayhem, off the tablecloth and back into the jug so that was fine too.
I've been having a massive clear up here in recent weeks, piles and piles of books seemed to have migrated off the shelves, all over the place and it felt like organised imbroglio (enjoying that word now) books gathered together for reading trails, a stack of started and not finished books, and I might add left unfinished for all the wrong reasons, distracted by something else (the Booker, Ways With Words) and not because the books themselves were in any way poor.
How can I have left these lying in semi-read state, The Truth Commissioner by David Park, Remember Me by Melvyn Bragg, Blood Kin by Ceridwen Dovey and I'm vexed because now I can't decide under the new Epstein Rules whether to revisit or not. I was enjoying all of them pre-interruption but it takes a lot to start over.
It's also the lure of the new arrivals that does it, each book arrives and suddenly I want to read it now.
So I've whittled it all down to essentials to kick off 2009, started some exciting reading trail stacks and I know there are some brilliant new books on the way too, so plenty to look forward to.
Looking back on Around the World in Eighty Books which began back in January and got stuck in the Levant, I think I have just about managed eighty books from around the world so at least I've managed to complete one reading journey I embarked on. But that is the joy of reading trails, they are there to be digressed from, it's in my rules, wherever the path leads I can follow.
Looking back on my 2008 reading and thinking I couldn't possibly choose my 'Best Books' I realised that there was a different way of doing it. Plenty of my favourites have emerged in the prize-draws but when I looked again a baker's dovegreyreader's dozen leapt out with ease.
Not necessarily published this year either but books that had created a very special reading experience, something unique, memorable and for reasons various, and in no particular order other than order of reading, here are the first three

"If you cannot visit your own orgins - reach out and touch them from time to time - you are for ever in some crucial sense untethered."
Oleander Jacaranda by Penelope Lively (Penguin and sent to me by Clara, thank you Clara) was the main reason my Around the World from the armchair trip stalled in The Levant. Imagine my pleasure then to meet Penelope at the Ways With Words Memoir Writing course in France and hear first-hand from her so much more about the writing of this and many more of her books. A writer who I have read and loved for years, what a treat and this a very thought-provoking look at a memoir.

"Beneath all differences was the belief that the whole house was essentially one. Together they were one world and could take on the world."
Amongst Women by John McGahern (Faber) whose writing always holds and plays that beautiful Irish chord just waiting to be played in my mind and I have many more still to read. Only discovered here in recent years, but a writer who sits me down and makes me consider the small details of the lives he writes.

"Modernity's like a badly trained dog: try and make it heel, even for a moment, and it turns and bites the hand that fed it."
Clear by Nicola Barker (Fourth Estate) just exemplifies for me how exciting contemporary fiction can be. Nicola Barker challenges my assumptions, plonks me (in this case literally) right outside the box and makes me see and read the world I live in very differently. This feels like one of the excellent benefits of a book; through its pages I can live in the past or I can live right in the here and now. Nor can I profess from down here in splendid rural etc to know all there is to know about the 'here and now' going on out there, but writers like Nicola Barker make sure I can find out, experience something new and understand just a bit more each time.

More tomorrow.

A star is born...

Right, now listen up everyone...Rocky here, Merry Christmas and all that, managed to get shot of that dovesleigh thing for a few days to concentrate on my image and thanks for the tip off Lisa in Oz. While they are all watching the Queen I've thrown together a quick promo photo shoot which I know you'll all be madwhiskers keen to see. I'll bet that dog Hoover doesn't have one of these. Aren't I just the epitome of feline gorgeousness and the music, well it's so me .

Happy Christmas from Rocky

Rocky has parked up the dovesleigh for now and was thrilled to find he'd obviously wowed them in the US because he's had a Christmas card from three devoted fans, Cowgirl, Stringbean and Dookie.
Here it is and we think it's quite a good likeness.
He's also very grateful to have been sent a book to review called What is the Perfect Pong by Hoover the Dog, and as dogs hold no fear for him (in fact Hoover looks considerably smaller) he's quite excited at this new career path in his literary life.
I'll be here intermittently before New Year to share those very special reads of 2008, my 'dovegreyreader's dozen' but now I must haste away and start wrapping.
Have a happy and peaceful Christmas everyone and here's wishing you all lots of books in your stockings and Canada, please may we have some of your snow?

 

Pymtastic

I'm not quite sure how I felt about reading a book called The Sweet Dove Died.
Laying not a single claim to sweetness but I do now feel a strange and warm affinity with dove-like and dove-grey references whenever they crop up in a book, but another Barbara Pym was just what I needed once Clifton Fadiman had urged me to examine my bedtime reading carefully.
Barbara Pym (who I discover has a society) nothing short of soothingly unhurried, pre-slumber reading, nil to disturb unduly or supply nightmarish material that I could detect in this slim volume and the ageing but still single Leonora playing off antique's dealer Humphrey off against his young nephew James. Leonora is not yet ready to be cast as a spinster and nor will she be surrendering readily to the ageing process but Barbara Pym's slight and often briefest of allusions are all it takes to understand the battle against fragility and the impending loneliness of Leonora's life,

'But those brown spots on her hands...were surely a sign of age? The headache began to return and she lay down again, the tears trickling slowly down her cheeks.'

or this

'Two fillings at one visit - even her beautiful teeth were going now.'

So much less always equals so much more with our Babs. How tempting it must have been to add 'sharply-defined' to those cheeks or something extra about the teeth but she knew exactly when to cut the extraneous.
The Keatsian origins of the title were buried too deep in my mind to retrieve so google had to rummage for it on my behalf,

'I had a dove and the sweet dove died;
And I have thought it died of grieving:
O what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied,
With a silken thread of my own hand’s weaving;'

It's the older Humphrey who should be a suitable match for Leonora but her eye is set firmly on young James and Barbara Pym draws on some up-to-the-minute issues for 1978 which I won't reveal for fear of spoiling, but she didn't shy away from tackling them head-on.
The Sweet Dove Died published in what could be termed Barbara Pym's second flowering after a gap of sixteen years and just two years before her death, but to her utter delight it received strong reviews and soared to number three in the bestseller lists.
A poignant letter to Philip Larkin, published in the equally soothing autobiography in letters and diaries, A Very Private Eye reveals that Barbara can't conceal her pride,

'It has been gratifyingly well-received, enough balm to sooth and heal all those wounds when only you and a few kind friends thought anything of my works.'

The week before Barbara had recorded her Desert Island Discs with Roy Plomley...

'it must be a kind of silly season for the programme if they are having a novelist.'

Barbara had chosen a recording of Philip reading his poem An Arundel Tomb , etched in my memory as the unseen peom in my O Level English exam of 1970, and for her book choice The Golden Bowl by Henry James (thankfully not featured in my O Level English exam) but the letter ends with a marvellously down-to-earth Pym comment,

' Must stop and go to the hairdresser (in the village) but shan't have that fashionable frizzy style that the young seem to be adopting.'

A Very Private Eye in many ways quite the obverse of its title and, selling at pence / cents online, a real asset to any bookshelf; a marvellously astute lens focused on the world of publishing through the mid-twentieth century, and I lose count every time I open it of the number of well-known, oft-read authors who weave through Barbara's life. Fascinating anecdotes and meetings that breath life into a rapidly receding era.
An unassuming novelist if ever there was one and what a pleasure it is to see Virago bringing more Barbara Pym's back into print, Excellent Women earlier this year in the birthday edition and No Fond Return of Love has just arrived looking very 'of the moment.' We have Some Tame Gazelle and A Glass of Blessings to look forward to in 2009.
Pymtastic.

Final winners

Just to put your minds at rest, here's Rocky this morning, home safely and resting up after dovesleigh exertions, just one more trip to do. He's also on AgaTurkeyGuard because eventually it's going to have to go in there and he wants to know about it when it does.
So the final winners and copies of The Story of Forgetting off to Kirsty, Harriet, Jade and Debbie Smith. Mary in Spokane will be knitting an evening jacket trimmed with swansdown from Vintage Knitting for Modern Knitters.
While The Rest is Noise will be thwacking onto the doormat of  Carolej  with a resoundingly harmonious thud.

Who to invite off the shelves for Christmas?

Bookhound came home with another one of his magical 50p finds from the market last week, A Passion for Books edited by Dale Salwak, a book cruelly and senselessly evicted from Devon Libraries, and their loss is indeed my gain because another splendid selection of essays on the love of reading.

'a celebration of the value and importance of reading and a spirited defence against the many gloomy voices in our so-caled electronic age who say the book will soon be obsolete...how do books nourish our lives.'

I could read this sort of thing all day, us addicts get great comfort from the musings of fellow sufferers and here's a very merry little self-help group. I can just see them all sitting in a circle.. my name's...and I'm addicted to reading.
Contributions from Margaret Drabble, Nina King, John Bayley, Alan Sillitoe, Ann Thwaite, Ferdinand Mount and many more, but my favourite in this volume so far an essay by Joseph Epstein (of Fred Astaire fame) entitled The Pleasures of Reading.
Joseph has just sat there on the hard wooden chair and laid bare his soul with a little blues reprise,

'I'm goin' to die someday, and now I say to myself, how 'bout some better readin', before I pass away..the notion that mirabile dictu, I am going to die someday, now all too realistic, makes me more cautious in what I choose to read.'

Feel the pain and so much that strikes a chord with me as a reader, who like him is inevitably getting (just a little bit) older. Reading not necessarily sacred but a 'pretty serious act' and one he accords with the utmost respect offering interesting suggestions as to why he now finds,

'the better the book the more slowly I tend to read it... if speed reading were to catch on, can speed-eating be far behind ?'.

I'm also pleased to find I have a partner in pencil crime,

' Whenever or wherever I read, I need a pencil nearby to make my inevitable sideline of something I consider important, or plan to return to, or need to look up.'

Phew, am I relieved because as you all know dovegreyreader has transformed a penchant for marginalia into a complete compulsion of mine too, I now can't read a book without a pencil within reach. Bless Margaret Drabble, she's afflicted likewise revelling if not frolicking in the conversation she can have with previous readers when she comes across an annotated book,

' These much-read volumes have a history in time, and they tell stories beyond their own.'

Becoming increasingly aware of his own mortality Joseph Epstein finds the two weeks that an eight-hundred page book may take out of his reading life requires serious consideration before he makes the investment.
Gertrude Stein apparently discovered that

'the happiest moment of her life was that moment in which she realized she wouldn't be able to read all the books in the world'

Suddenly the reader-anxiety dissipates, all very interesting as I reflect on a year of reading and ponder the next.
Did I say I wouldn't be doing my list of Best Reads?
Well I won't be quite, but reflection has revealed some books that have been exceptional for exceptional reasons this year, often circumstance, a meeting or perhaps an offering of inspiration for more reading and I'll share those before the year is out.
But trying to decide what to read over Christmas is almost as tricky as deciding what to read on holiday.
I'm tempted to consolidate this year because, though you may think I'm a fast reader, I really am not. I'm as fast or as slow as the book requests of me and also devote an inordinate amount of time to it all. Looking back in my diary I see I began George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss back in September and have been reading it ever since and am still barely halfway through, but I am relishing every word so there seems no need to gorge.
Similarly To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.
I listened carefully to the sage advice offered by all of you, stopped, started over and am reading it in an entirely different way. Yes, I was trying too hard, over-earnestly, now it's transformed into a flowing and bathing reading experience rather than an urgent, striving to the finish one, and I can't begin to describe the difference. I am reading very small amounts at a time, very very slowly and will probably wind up the year with it and finish on New Year's Eve.
But what about Christmas?
And the first book of 2009?
What exactly is required because these are always books I choose with care?
In previous years I've attempted and failed as usual with a big Dickens over Christmas but I often succeed with a Trollope, last year I had Mrs Gaskell to stay but caught hyper-Gaskellitis by Boxing Day and had to move her on...or was that the year before?
I still can't decide on anything new so I think I shall just stick with The Mill on the Floss, how about you?

The Sunday Salon : The shortest day and The Rest is Noise

So here we are on St Thomas's Day, the shortest day and the longest night and this was the sunset on this day a year ago when suddenly that copse of trees we see from our window, looking towards Cornwall in the distance, took on a new significance.
Tradition has it that on St Thomas's day the poor women of the village went begging or a-thomasing from door to door for the ingredients they needed for Christmas. So as we reach into the kitchener grafted toe at the foot of the dovegreyreader Christmas stocking-filler extravaganza and our final prize draw, a very big thank you to all the publishers who have responded so kindly to all my 'thomasing' on your behalf. There have been a staggering seventy-nine prizes and I don't know about you but we've loved every glorious give-away moment, especially as I've been able to sit back here at Mission Control while the publishers do all the hard work and post out the books Rocky has schlepped around the world harnessed up to the dove-sleigh.
But an even bigger thank you to all of you for joining in the Christmas-flavoured dovegrey mirth and merriment and for entering into the spirit of fun (English- eccentric our speciality) with which it was intended.
 So one last book and it seems a fitting finale, and also the only one of all those on offer that I haven't read yet but I've made a start, and I promise it's a great big cracker to end all crackers. A mammoth book which is gathering in accolades and prizes already, The Rest Is Noise Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross and published by Fourth Estate has won both the Guardian First Book Award. and The Samuel Johnson Prize.
I make no pretence to legendary music aficianado-ism,  I like plenty of classical music, folk and everything else, done my time in choirs, self-taught a couple of instruments (badly)  but there are some aspects of music I loath with all the qualities of a philistine, a veritable assault on my ears...opera buffs you may want to look away now.
It just grates like fingernails on the blackboard of my soul; forced to listen to an opera I'd turn it to 78rpm, 150 rpm if there was a setting, just to get it over with sooner, but Alex Ross may be about to hold my hand and explain things I don't understand with this book which has been highly praised for its inclusivity. It's so easy to feel on the outside looking in when it all gets technical, and if like me you have never known your basso buffo from your cabaletta (is that bread?) and think coloratura might be a multi-coloured symptom of renal malfunction then perhaps this might be the book to comfort and encourage us. Music to the backdrop of history might help me make more sense of it all.
Metro gave it 5 stars and said,

'This is a long book and a slow read: slow not because it is especially difficult, but because it is full of material you really need to savour. It is the superb selection of image and anecdote that makes this book work so well. Best of all are the moments when Ross really strikes you dumb with wonder, moments when the author's passion for the supreme significance of music raises his erudition to a new level. Warm, joyful and unfailingly adroit in his evocation of music in words -- Ross, with this book, establishes himself as the supreme champion of modern music. Read this and listen.'

So names in comments as long as for our stocking-filler grand finale you join in with some global polyphony and sing White Christmas until your knitted socks come off, and I can't tell you how delighted I am that Bryn and Katherine have agreed to join us.
Il Divo just begged to come along so I said OK.
Australia will you do the bass and keep your basso buffos in order, Bryn will take a lead role there. New Zealand can you take the top line but hold back on the fioritura and could you both try to keep in time ?
Can the Americas manage to invent a descant, Katherine will bolster but perhaps sit on the prima donnas a bit and Canada take the hauptstimme but temper the divas slightly ?
Now Asia and all points East I think the tessitura should suit you and why not go mad with the embellishments, give us sleigh bells.
Right Europe, listen carefully, we are all just going to go for imbroglio, keep your eyes fixed on Il Divo (difficult by try) and sing it all with gusto reverie (new term) and let's just hope the lads can keep in tune with us.
If there's anyone in Antarctica perhaps you could stand on a chair and conduct and shall we have a bit of a ritornello to start ?
I think we'll manage without a prova generale and just go for it.
Right, everyone ready...now Bryn comes very expensive and I could only afford him for five seconds so listen very carefully.
Bryn can we have a note please?
Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa ....heck these basso profundos, not a second over the five, honestly, off you go Bryn, we'll make do with Bing instead.

Bravo, brava, how lovely that sounded, yes indeed, the rest is noise, do carry on, names in comments and sorry it's back to boring old book thoughts tomorrow.

Brief Encounter meets Stitch n Bitch : An unmissable vintage knitting prize-draw.

I had to share it eventually because it's becoming an annual event here, so on the day that the words 'knitwear' and 'vintage' appear in a prize-draw book title it seemed like a good time to just get it over with.
There I am perched nervously (my feet give it away) on Santa's lap at Kennards in Croydon, wearing the prickly coat (velvet trimmed) with the gloves attached by elastic to the cuffs, the coat that I was none too fond of, and there's my brother too. As many of you know he sadly died of leukaemia when he was 24, and Christmas is one of those many times when I miss him for myriad reasons, but I don't think he'd have minded me sharing this with you all.
But look carefully because I am modelling the 1950s de rigueur home-knitted bonnet.
Just about any knitting was my mum's speciality, she was very fleet of finger and completely adept at it and one of the moments when I always think of and miss my mum is when I drop a stitch. We'd be watching Monty Python or something and I'd pass it on to her to sort, it was years before I figured how to do it for myself.
But the bonnets took the biscuit and I had a vast range of them as a child in a variety of colour combinations worn from about October to April. These were the the days when, despite the availability of antibiotics, there was still a huge legacy of pre-war fear about untreatable ear infections and mastoids and chills 'that could develop', so we were all wrapped up to the gills and not allowed out of the door unless we were. Despite all this I did once have pneumonia, Dr Watson was summoned and lauded my mother's early intervention, so that year I probably wore it all for the summer too.
But to the book, it's a treasure and I think the knitters out there will love it, a copy of Vintage Knitwear for Modern Knitters by Lise-Lotte Lystrup and published by Thames & Hudson to one lucky winner and it can go worldwide.
It's all beautifully Brief Encounter meets Stitch n Bitch which is all entirely appropriate in the week that marked Dame Celia Johnson's centenary. The patterns for jackets, jerseys, scarves, boleros and everything else get a little tweak here and there to make them 21st century compatible both knit and fashion-wise.
This is all good because in attempting to become a Modern Knitter is anyone else completely confused about needle sizes these days?
Gone from the patterns are the old imperial 8s and 10s for the basic double knit project and instead I have to fumble around trying to convert it all into 4mm and 3.25mm which are really US6 and US3. I've had to buy a gauge with helpful holes, but then should your needle go right through the hole or get stuck to know it's the right size?
But have no fear, everything as clear as day in Vintage Knitwear for Modern Knitters and patterns are helpfully graded for skill which should initially warn you that embarking on the Cardigan with First-Class Tailoring before you have mastered the Evening Wrap might end in tears and frogging. But be ye not afraid because eventually you will be tackling the Evening Jacket in Feather Pattern with Swansdown Trim.
Names in comments for a copy of this perfectly lovely gorgeous book as long as you are now feeling a little bit more Christmassy than you were a week ago.

Even more winners...

This is so exciting and Rocky and Mrs G. are doing a great job apart from the mix-up with some of the Virago winners and the bcc omission, everyone thought everyone else had won and not them, sorry.
Margaret in NY, Ruth and Cheryl Collins will all receive a copy of An Angel at my Table by Janet Frame.
Copies of Janet's previously unpublished novel Towards Another Summer will be winging their way to Maggie May, Rebecca Wood and Carole Dilley.
Meanwhile a copy of Katherine Mansfield's short stories will be going to Thelma, Carol and Melanie.
We've also done The Story of a Marriage draw in the hope that the books can at least get on their way to Anna, Kevin (hallelujah at last) Katy and Jilly who squeaked in last over the finish line but Mrs Glosser does love a tryer.
Last call for a couple of non-responders, Marion...where are you? You won the Macmillan copy of Touching Distance and a surprise proof book, and chrissussex, Fred Astaire is just desperado to foxtrot your way.
For this NZ themed trip Rocky (with bells on) has decided to dash and prance in harness on the dovesleigh with some sweet little kiwis (in Devon these can fly, we feed them something different) and he has promised not to eat them, because in fact if he looked at another dish of food he might just explode. Please do not feed him when he arrives (he'll insist but just be stern) or you may be stuck with him, getting airborne increasingly tricky and you may need to give him a bit of a push-start, praise be for the kiwis.

The Story of Forgetting for your stocking.

So from yesterday's book which everyone read, to this one which I think might have been a case of Billy-No-Reading-Mates around the UK blogs at least (but correct me please) but The Story of Forgetting by Stefan Merrill Block published by Faber quite took my breath away. Not only the plot and what felt to me like an ultimately very comforting fictional way of explaining and coming to terms with early-onset Alzheimers, but also because it was written by a very perceptive young man of just twenty-six years old.
At the time I wrote,

'As fifteen year old Seth Waller begins to investigate his mother's slowly disintegrating memory he unearths family connections and a fable that has resonated through his own life and been handed down through the generations. The land of Isidora, a 'fantastical land free from the sorrows of memory' and a story that his mother has told him since childhood.
Slowly Seth pieces together the jigsaw and makes sense of what has gone before as themes of genetics, inheritance and memory blend with the realities of people's lives in a book that eventually raises the spirits and lifts the world of memory loss onto a new and beautifully delineated plain. Somehow Stefan turns it into a far less fearful place to be and gives renewed meaning to lives so often discarded as spent once Alzheimer's has set in. In many ways it is a book which removes the terror and replaces that with something completely natural and acceptable. He writes with a heartfelt intuition for his subject and with a sensitivity and depth of understanding that somehow belies his age.'

I think that all means  I was really impressed with this book and as I tried to choose my Top Ten list for the year I realised it wasn't going to happen. I've had no trouble choosing these prize draw books and could have added in plenty more from my 2008 lists, the number of great reads this year is well into the high double figures, in the end it seemed pointless to even try and whittle it down, just check 2008 over here for books I've read <<<<< and Book Thoughts 2008 over here >>>>>> for links to those I've posted about.
Stefan Merrill Block has a keen and mature eye for the foibles of human nature and a depth of understanding of emotions that makes him a young writer to watch in my book and I look forward to reading anything else he writes.
I'd love to know what others think about this one so again, not one but FOUR copies of The Story of Forgetting can go worldwide, names in comments as long as you are singing Jingle Bells very nicely.

The Story of a Marriage, a prize draw and a new blogger joins the firmament.

'We think we know the ones we love...One morning we awaken. Beside us, that familiar sleeping body in the bed: a new kind of stranger. For me it came in 1953.'

So Pearlie's story began and I was moved and challenged in equal measure by The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer published by Faber. But If there was a single book this year which had a rather strange and inexplicable effect around the blogosphere this was possibly it.
It was a split decision.
I read it and tuned into it instantly, set as it was in post-World War Two America in the same year that I was born in Britain ( 1953 Coronation year baby) but into a world burdened with those same anxieties, fears and insecurities. I loved it unreservedly and regaled you all with my customary enthusiasm for a book which has absolutely touched me in some way, often difficult to pin down and sometimes difficult to know why, if a book works sometimes I have to settle for 'that's enough'.

'Maybe it's all down to the significant after-burn of a book that leaves so many sky trails across your thinking, but as I turned the final page I had one of those 'this will be a memorable book' moments.'

'...life for Pearlie is thrown into turmoil as she begins to deal with something that the world and she are not yet ready to understand.
To reveal much more would be to detract from the reading experience but this is a book which grapples with so much and so succinctly I was hard-pressed to put it down. Far from railing against the old slings and arrows Pearlie deals with everything in her own way, making any rush to judgement about just how she tackles this turmoil superfluous and all tempered by a real understanding of time, place and constraint cleverly evoked by Andrew Sean Greer's detail and characters.'

But plenty more disliked it intensely and there was some good-natured debate and banter about it all.
But good news, you can now decide for yourselves with not one but FOUR prize-draw copies of A Story of a Marriage for lucky winners worldwide today. Names in comments and if you win one, please come back and tell us which team you are on and don't feel obliged to be on mine, Mark Thwaite's very nice, I've met him.
Actually Scott Pack's very nice too though not sure if he read this one but I've met him as well and many thanks to Scott for the nod on this bit of news.
Don't miss this er...newbie blogger on the block  (also an ex editor-in-chief at Faber) who will be doing an interview over at Me and My Big Mouth soon, and who I am quite sure will never be in a dither or a tangle about why he has or has not liked a book.
In an age when the man himself declares that 'blogs are rampant', though we've all seen some favourites disappear this year, this is one new and welcome addition that I for one am looking forward to reading in 2009.

More winners...

It's all go here, took a vertically-challenged Nanook of the North Hoodie in off the street yesterday and put her to work.
Offspringette nipped over and we decorated the house much earlier than usual, but I'm home this year and want to enjoy it all. Offspringette tempers my rather ebullient  over-gilding the lily style and ensures the boundaries of stylish good taste are not exceeded...well she means to, but then we both get carried away, so the result is we are festooned, glittering, bedecked and illuminated.
Mother's Christmas Bough (a nice drooping tree branch) is propped in the corner of the kitchen as usual and in the absence of the Kayaker ( who assumed tree responsibility in disgust the year after Bookhound left it too late and came home with a 2ft twig) the remaining men raised the tree. There was the usual good-natured 'no you don't want to do it like that' debate and eventually it was tethered  to a hook on a ceiling beam for fear of a repeat of the Year of the Great Tree Topple. That was the year we witnessed a great depletion in the ancient heirloom glass tree decorations and we couldn't cope with that trauma again.
I think on reflection it was a form of compliment to be told that I had worn better than the blond bombshell Fairy, who is the same age as me, and emerged laughing hysterically from her box after a year in the attic.Looking a tad madder and scarier year on year I think, (the doll that is...well probably me too) but I was christened at Christmas and this was a gift from a Godmother, so her place is assured.
She's up on her lofty perch now which thankfully dilutes that gaze and that hair.
I do hope your tinsel is thinking of twinkling too and some more prize winners to announce and add to the festive cheer.
Annabel is going to be giving a home to John Caple whilst the Make Your Own Socks will be created by lacer. Peta will be sporting a smart new shopping bag and reading Elizabeth Baines while Loelia will be deciding exactly where God's Own Country lies. Chrissussex will be whisked off his/her feet by Fred Astaire and Frances Evangelista can see what she makes of The Believers.
We will be prize-drawing right up until the weekend if you have the staying power and there are some cracking good books still to come, all you knitters don't whatever you do miss Saturday's book. Then we'll be going out with a very great big stocking-filler rousing worldwide chorus of a book on Sunday, the only one of all those offered that I haven't read but I can't wait to open it.

Katherine Mansfield and a prize draw

I am making slow, steady progress through Volume 5 of Katherine Mansfield's letters and when I've finished I will start again where I should have done, with Volume 1. I now have a complete set and they have captured my imagination wholesale but I just can't desert Katherine in Volume 5 now.
It is 1922, the final year of Katherine's life, she has left Montana in Switzerland for Paris where she is in the midst of some very whacky (what NHS Blog Doctor would call Wibble) treatment under the auspices of Ivan Manoukhin. By all accounts something of a charlatan with a pretty poor bedside manner as he administers what turn out to be useless daily doses of X rays to Katherine's spleen in an effort to halt the progress of her pulmonary tuberculosis. The sessions are called seances which perhaps adds a further element of  wibble, and they are cripplingly expensive, which doubtless confirms that it probably is wibble. Double confirmation comes in the words of Manoukhin himself

'I can promise to cure you, to make you as though you have never had this disease.'

But with our PhDs in Hindsight we know this is 1922 and as Dorothy Crawford explained so cogently, Mycobacterium tuberculosis amongst the most ancient of human pathogens, thought to have jumped from cattle to humans some 15,000 - 20,000 years ago, and it would be another thirty years before successful drug treatments emerged. Katherine clings desperately onto even the faintest promise of good health yet day by day feels worse and worse, though living in constant expectation that she will turn a corner at any moment,

' Manoukhin says in three weeks I shall have a real reaction & then be able to do even less than that for the next three weeks. Its rather like waiting to have an infant - newborn health.'

'Ten minutes after a seance I am so dead tired I feel as if I had swum across Wellington harbour.'

'This man squeezes three hundred francs a time out me...if it is all my eye at the end I shall look awfully silly and dear knows what will happen.'

John Middleton Murry has joined her in Paris and apart from daily sorties to the clinic for treatment Katherine, increasingly weakened and debilitated, spends much of her day in bed. Despite being in desperate need of money she has  little energy or inspiration for writing stories, yet whilst that muse seems to evade her Katherine still needs to write something somehow to survive, and so letters to friends become her daily oxygen and a prolific correspondence emerges.
Each letter reflects moments of joy and hope as she continues to pin her chances on this treatment and they make terribly poignant reading, but Katherine also has a brusqueness about her, and her tolerance for long-suffering friend Ida Baker, currently keeping Chalet des Sapins afloat on a shoestring budget back in Switzerland, is stretched to the limit and diminishing daily. Yet Ida is essential to Katherine, if only to mind the flea-ridden cat Wingley, she can't afford to fall out with her and so a letter of repentance often follows hot on the heels of a stinker.
But then would tolerance be even a remotely possible virtue when the effects of the wibble treatment mean that,

'After 5 doses of X rays one is hotted up inside like a furnace and one's very bones seem to be melting.'

or

' One burns with heat in one's hands & feet and bones, then suddenly you are racked with neuritis, but such neuritis that you cant lift your arm. Then ones head begins to pound. It's the moment when if I were a proper martyr I should begin to have that awful smile that martyrs in the flames put on when they begin to sizzle.'

It's all so involving. Reading letters again proving the most fascinating way to explore a life, not quite so 'served on a plate' as a biography and always interesting to apply your own interpretations and arrive at your own conclusions. Katherine Mansfield's short story The Prelude I discover was the third book produced by the Woolf's Hogarth Press, 300 copies at 3/6d each, but you don't even have to pay that much.
A copy of the Oxford World's Classics edition of Selected Stories (including The Prelude) to three lucky winners.
Names in comments as long as, to give me hope, you tell me you haven't written your Christmas cards yet either (fib if necessary).

You too can be Framed, an antipodean stocking filler

I've probably already revealed my best reads of 2008 with all these prize draws (though you'll get a list anyway) but if there has been one discovery this year that has moved me beyond all other it is the writing of Janet Frame.
That will come as no surprise to regular visitors here because I've been waxing uncontrollably lyrical about Janet who has hovered there on the edges of my reading radar for so long. You may recall it was Stella Duffy's passionate pleading (and that laugh)  at the du Maurier festival back in May that finally tipped me over the edge and into reading and Linda Grant who egged me on to discover more.
Now I find that I have gathered in another one of those special writers who, no exaggeration, will be at my reading right-hand and alongside me forever. I'll read and re-read and though the books are not easy to find here in the UK at the moment I suspect that Janet's star will be in the ascendency in 2009 as Virago bring more of her books back into print here.
So we must all be prepared with an advent of our own and of course I'll willingly guide you in the right direction, so six very lucky winners today as Virago have kindly offered three copies of Janet's complete autobiography An Angel at My Table and three copies of the previously unpublished novel Towards Another Summer.
Is that good or is that absolutely amazing?
This prize draw so ecstatically marvellous that I almost wish I could enter it myself except I've got both books welded to my reading hand already, and I have a Janet Frame shelf slowly filling up too, and I've even got a little pet kiwi on my desk.
Names in comments and God bless Janet I say (oh yes and New Zealand too of course).

I'm a Believer that this could fill your stocking nicely...

Sorry about that title to all Monkees fans who were expecting a prize-draw Micky Dolenz doll to be waiting (he was my favourite) but another great read of recent months and linking in nicely with this morning's ostrich post, a prize-draw copy of The Believers by Zoe Heller could be yours.
Names in comments and try to bury your head in the sand along with Family Litvinoff, except not a lot of sand in New York (that I know of).
In that case be daring, just count your chickens and put all your eggs in one basket and who knows ruffle a few feathers and if Rocky survives this encounter with an ostrich cousin he will wing this one your way.
PS Don't miss Curzon's very generous  offer which was buried in the deluge of comments,

"My Christmas spirit is waking up and stretching........ I'll send my copy of Cupboard Love to the first person who emails me at ctussaud at blueyonder.co.uk "

On your marks...get set...GONE.

Plumes by Sarah Abrevaya Stein and another stocking filler waltzing your way

So Christmas is around the corner and I'm sitting here reading a book about ostrich feathers.
Stir-up-Sunday has passed me by and there's every chance Card-Writing-Tuesday and Getting-The-Deccies-Out-Of-The-Loft Friday will do likewise unless I wrap this one up quickly.
I'm thankfully aware that all these non-fiction reads of late will garner plenty of academic peer reviews on the literary pages, and that will be the place to look for a sensible, objective analytical approach to such incredibly scholarly works. However I also hope there's a place and plenty of space here for the joyous celebration of an accessible, knowledge-bearing book, hopefully without giving the impression that I am in any way demeaning the years and years that these authors will have spent working on them.
I really didn't want Plumes, Ostrich Feather, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce by Sarah Abrevaya Stein published by Yale University Press to end and it's all most bizarre.
First things first, the book arrived, I put my hand in the jiffy bag and got the fright of my life, because there was an ostrich feather included. I was probably emotionally ostrich-feather susceptible after that Fred and Ginger encounter a few weeks ago, recalling Ginger's Cheek to Cheek moulting frock that had Fred in a tiz.
But that aside global commerce is not really my forte, nor do I nurture a secret desire to make it so, but Sarah Stein has made this previously unknown single-commodity world of feathers strangely compelling.
There was big money in ostriches for a while and of course the potential for puns is vast (thankfully Sarah Stein can't resist them either) but I'm only going to say it the once, put all your eggs in one basket and there could be trouble.
Feather 'boom' in the 1880s went to feather 'bust' post First World War, but in that time a global and largely Jewish-mediated market created a Feather Road from the Western Cape of South Africa to the London Plumage warehouses (Salaman & Company had shop premises at 69 Lamb's Conduit Street, a feather's breath from here and a mere flutter from here) and thence on to the fashion markets of Paris, London and New York.
The US even tried the grow-your-own ostriches approach in Pasadena.
But it was also a world that, if I've grasped it correctly, Sarah Stein wanted to examine without privileging the usual overtly and slightly weary stereotype of the Jewish people as

'quintessential 'service nomads'...outsiders - urban, literate, peripatetic and in possession of contacts of kith and kin over seas. oceans and political boundaries.'

whilst still exploring Jewish culture identity and communities.
So a book where commerce does take centre stage and I now have a good hold on the folly of dealing in Feather Futures (that's about counting your chickens ostrich feathers before they've hatched grown) and won't ever dabble, but I did admittedly home in willingly on the over-arching themes of the Jewish diaspora whether Sarah Stein intended me to or not.
In the process I have also understood something new about the scattering and displacement of a people and how a deep sense of faith and family can be of advantage. But those issues of identity and communities, social and working conditions, the dictates and whims of fashion all proved fascinating too, and tragically in many ways, as Sarah Stein states, this is a story about failure because

'when the market was booming, there was little indication that plumes would have a more finite appeal than say diamonds.'

Whilst the powerful De Beers diamond syndicate controlled prices and cleverly advertised and marketed diamonds as 'enduring, classy and a mark of fidelity' sadly the ostrich feather became a tawdry symbol of dated and fragile decadence.
Quite surprisingly, and I had never thought of this, ostrich feathers in hats went right out of fashion with the arrival of the car and in came the cloche.
Mind you, first catch your ostrich and heaven knows how that was done when the feathers were plucked from the live (and kicking) bird. Obviously a spate of broken legs and someone must have had the bright idea of clipping rather than plucking, which the ostrich was quite pleased about no doubt.
So my recent non-fiction reading trail leaves me dangerously well-nformed about Pompeii, Stonehenge, the Memorial on the Somme, Fred and Ginger, anaesthesia, bubonic plague, and now ostriches so where to next?
Well. I have made a very promising start on The Making of Mr. Gray's Anatomy Bodies, Books Fortunes and Fame by Ruth Richardson so expect some good did-you-know dissection stories to follow.
Meanwhile I bet you knew it was coming didn't you?
Your patience is rewarded, thanks to Yale University Press a prize draw copy of Fred Astaire by Joseph Epstein will be quickstepping its way anywhere in the world to sweep one lucky winner off their feet.
Names in comments as long as you are wearing an ostrich feather boa of course.

More winners...

Mrs Glosser has steam coming out her random number generator if you can imagine that but we are more scrupulous than the BBC here, trust us and so more winners have been drawn and be assured we do sift out duplicate comments which seems to be a  typepad gremlin at the moment so don't worry if that happens.
So though Donna did comment twice and e mail to apologise she was still lucky and a signed copy of The Various will be on its way, with Celandine off to Becca (lucky again Becca!)
Robert Burdock will be swotting up on bugs and microbes with Deadly Companions and Sally Z can doze off with Blessed Days of Anaesthesia.
Touching Distance is Marion's and Queen Victoria will be arriving at Frances Howard-Brown's to tell all about Becoming Queen, better get the red carpet out Frances.
Now I'm off to re-live Beijing and if Becky Adlington doesn't win BBC Sports Personality I will be very upset, even more upset than I was about the Strictly debacle which only Alexandra winning the X Factor could mitigate.
Is it Dancing on Ice soon? 

Devon-ly bliss and God's Own Country prize draw

I loved Diana Birchall's lightbrightandsparkling post  on just how a blog is finally conquered by the lure of the feline.
Diana, author of the much-loved Mrs Darcy's Dilemma, vowed it would never happen but it has and in triplicate too.
Cats do seem to find their way in eventually in much the same way that they home in on a lap when you are reading a book.
While the lad's away with the dove-sleigh it seemed like a good moment to quickly sneak in a picture of the much lesser known Sister of Rocky again.
Tess really hates the limelight, a beautifully gentle cat with a lovely personality, timid but adoring of attention and spends hours each day like her brother doing this, but on a blanket of her own. You may recall that Tess was the one who cost that staggering amount of money at the vets this year for a minor op, and as you can see she's justified the expense in that she's still with us despite all those dire warnings about ageing feline renal function. In our experience the minute you fork out hundreds on them, no matter what age, they succumb to something.
'Go on'
we say to these supposedly non-pampered felines last thing at night,
'off you go and be real country cats, earn your keep, chase rabbits, catch mice and rats.'
and they obligingly set off to forage and fend across the moonlit fields, chance their luck with the foxes and the owls who hoot and screech around too. Then if something spooks the pheasants the birds all fall out of the trees and make a terrible din, (Concorde's supersonic boom when it reached the Western Approaches used to cause havoc at about 9pm every night ) it's all very busy out there and probably 'little people' to contend with too.
What brave fearless little things they are.
But fear not, we are pretty sure they nobly step forth and head straight for the straw in the woodshed and just carry right on sleeping.
Talking of God's own country as we were yesterday, and which Somerset might be but Devon surely is, names in comments for a copy of God's Own Country by Ross Raisin, another favourite read from 2008 and just see whether Yorkshire can compete.
Of course if you leave a comment you must assure us that you made your Christmas Cake in October and have been 'feeding' it regularly ever since, as we all have in Devon...or meant to.

PS Apologies if you have been having problems leaving comments or the perennial slow-loading issues, the gremlins are here too. Typepad and I have been in consultation and I have pruned out a number of sidebar lists and reduced visible posts which will hopefully help, just click on 'next' when you reach the end of the last post if you've missed any.
Please do let me know if it still misbehaves

Sunday Salon - Adding a pinch of Salt to the Christmas stocking filler prize draw

I have given a home to some fine pinches of Salt this year, lovely books from an innovative publisher and among my best reads of 2008, Elizabeth Baines's book of short stories, Balancing on the Edge of the World.
This was one of those neat little books that packs the huge punch and it captured my imagination completely. I'd read it hot on the heels of Richard Kelly's Crusaders and whilst his canvas was sweepingly broad, vast and enormous, great big lashes of paint, suddenly I was struck by the fact the Elizabeth was, in complete contrast painting in miniature.

'Suddenly my focus was narrowed down and my concentration total as I watched. Reading as an onlooker is such a treat and Elizabeth Baines positions the fulcrum of each story with absolute precision and then, with the most feather-weight whispers, proceeds to tip the balance of power first one way then the next. The whispers often so slight that I was often listening too loudly to hear them if that make sense.'

Elizabeth will be visiting here as part of her tour of the blogs to answer questions on Balancing early in 2009 but I didn't want to wait that long to offer a prize draw copy of this little masterpiece, and to go with this little treaure of a book Salt have very kindly added in one of their very big and very sought after hessian bags, you won't be disappointed with either gift I can promise you that.
Names in comments for a book in a bag to go anywhere in the world but only if you are sitting there wearing some tinsel...now be honest.

The dovegreyreader Make-Your-Own-Gift stocking filler

Time for the very special one-off dovegreyreader Make-Your-Own-Gift stocking-filler prize draw and though
this may of course have limited appeal, it is from me to you as a thank you to everyone for visiting, reading, joining in or just being out there and enjoying.
I think we've discovered some great books between us all this year and I have some exciting new reading trails shaping up for 2009. I have had sack-loads of  appreciative e mails through the year from many of you for which I thank you profusely.
So what's the Make-Your-Own-Gift then?
Well I think you can probably hazard a guess from this...

and this will really give the game away

You guessed, a set of 2.75 double pointed needles and enough wool to knit a pair of perfectly lovely gorgeous socks. I'm going to include a test-run preview copy of my Special Everyday dovegreyreader Sock Pattern (annotated with handy tips and encouraging words) and some bookmarks for your Christmas reading too, so there can be no excuse for you not to get casting on and making a start.
Let everyone else cook the Christmas dinner, you will have very important 'work' to do.
Don't be scared if socks are a new departure, there is a great big sock-knitting world waiting for you once you've traversed the turned heel and negotiated the valley of the shadow of the Kitchener grafted toe.
We'll happily send this worldwide if that's what Rocky and Mrs Glosser command, which means it may not arrive until Easter, but at least that's something to look forward to.
Names in comments as long as you can assure us you are feeling a teeny bit Christmassy and are decking the halls with boughs of holly... you can stop singing Little Donkey now.

Somerset and singing for your stocking

A morning and an afternoon prize draw today and lest there be any doubt anywhere that Christmas will happen, take a look at Tavistock's benchmark shop this week.
Established in 1881, once Creber's declares Christmas the season is well and truly in progress. A few doors along the very depressing Woolworth's sale was packing them in and we can but fear for what will come next there, but hopefully the tradition that is Creber's will never leave the town.

And apropos of no link whatsoever to Creber's that I can think of but no better prize-draw book to accompany yesterday's offering of The Various than another special book from the end of 2007, Somerset by John Caple published by Plymouth, Barbican-based White Lane Press.
I was instantly smitten as I think will be anyone anywhere in the world who may harbour a sense of that folklore-laden English county.
A truly heart-warming glimpse of English rural tradition.
So smitten was I that John's book has sat on a bookstand alongside my desk ever since and I now can't imagine life without his wonderfully original eye and the folklore that accompanies each painting.

There is always a page to fit the season and currently the book is open here...
"Old Christmas Eve, It is an old belief that for one hour after midnight on Christmas Eve all the beasts of the field have the power of speech and that a farmer may go and join them in song."
Names in comments as long as you are singing Little Donkey.

More winners...

Rocky and Mrs Glosser have just put their heads, hands and paws together and come up with Mary McCartney as the lucky winner of Laura Lockington's must-read Cupboard Love, whilst a copy of The Pitmen Painters will be heading to Bet, Emma, Ruth and thank goodness for this,Curzon who should all have had e mails by now.
Getting into Geordie role Rocky says you've aal been git welcoming but he's noo tiring of salmon an waad prefer a dish of tuna, plus a canny plump cushion fre a rest.

Queen Vic in your stocking

Rummaging through the prize-draw trunk I see that we have a long way to go before we reach the end so I'm afraid we must just keep ploughing on through if you can possibly bear it. There will be some fine prize draws right through the weekend and into next week; do pop in and out because I think you'd hate to miss Fred and Janet for starters, and help yourself to a cup of tea when you fancy one.
Kettle on the boil again now the Aga's working and some more winner announcements later.
There is a very delectable Queen of the little people in Steve Augarde's The Various and she's not your average queen by any stretch,

' She was dumpy and her eyebrows met in a deep scowl. Her grey hair was tied back in an untidy bun...The Queen sat, carefully posed, and looking ridiculously pompous, in a sort of wickerwork sedan chair - a rickety affair with carrying handles at either end. Her off-white dress had a purplish stain down the front of it (blackberry?) and she held a tatty black fan, half-raised and motionless, as though she were poised to issue a command....this tubby little creature in her faded finery...'

Of course nothing like Queen Victoria...or perhaps?
Kate Williams wrote one of my favourite books of recent years, England's Mistress, the life, times and fancies of Emma Hamilton and we have a copy of Kate's latest book Becoming Queen How a tragic and untimely death shaped the reign of Queen Victoria published by Hutchinson for another prize draw today.
I am savouring every word and this will be a favourite too because, as always with Kate's books there is a vast and meticulous amount of research presented in the most accessibly readable and enjoyable way, so a huge amount to learn in the process and I don't want to miss a thing. This is life behind the scenes of nineteenth-century royalty and as I'm reading I'm getting a real sense of the times, both for the Royals and the people.
That little Princess Charlotte is going to be trouble for sure.
I'm loving the book as I am sure you will too, so names in comments and Rocky will be most honoured to tuck Queen Victoria up in the dove-sleigh with a rug over her knees and deliver her to a doorstep somewhere in the world.

Gremlins and Various little people , and win some of your own...

I want you to see this not to create envy over the fact we have one (don't be envious, the thing is fickle and cremates mince pies to a crisp if you forget and find them pushed to the back in February) but because it's an unusual and fair dazzling sight to behold it in this as-new condition.
There is really only one single, solitary advantage to this thing conking out in December (because it was so cold all summer you kept it going and didn't have it serviced properly which means you didn't really clean it either...for those who don't have one, you can't clean a hot Aga properly) and here is the glorious and gleaming evidence of a morning well-spent, trying to keep warm waiting for the Aga Man, because the kitchen is freezing without it.
There are many nooks and crannies for a gremlin to invade when you live miles from civilization, chinks in the complex network of wires, pipes and drains and currently we seem to have little gremlins everywhere. Call me a pessimist by all means but we've gone way beyond the 'three' things going wrong and might be into double figures the rate we're going, and I just know it will all culminate in the traditional Christmas Eve collapse of the washing machine.
There, I've said it now.
Mind you, this is all for the good because your house won't have any gremlins at the moment because we have them all here and who knows, perhaps they are 'little people', and that leads seamlessly on (sorry, best link I could think of) to today's prize draw.
Appealing to your inner child again, except Steve Augarde's trilogy will appeal just as much to your inner grown-up and Steve has kindly offered to send a signed copy of The Various and the sequel Celandine to one lucky winner, but I think we'll split the prize in half and spread the Augarde bounty, so two winners.
We discovered The Various here quite by chance back in 2003 and we were hooked.
There is much to be enthralled about with Steve's books, not least his illustrations but also his creation of an alternative world that is but a feather's breath away from us,

'Many eyes are watching you and many hearts are wary of your presence'

and once met never forgotten I can promise you.
These are very special little Somerset people and safely contained within a book, not let loose in your house...although...
Steve is an 'illustrator, paper engineer and semi-pro jazz musician' according to the endflap details, but he's also a very good writer and so I am very grateful to him for offering these.
Name in comments and the 'little people' can travel worldwide, you'll adore them.

On the subject of microbes...another stocking filler

Whilst we are on a roll with all things medical it seems like a good moment to add in another prize draw for another favourite read of this year.
Touching Distance by Rebecca Abrams was a book which had an enormous impact on me as I read this fictional account of the discovery of the causes of childbed fever and the struggle for the recognition and prevention of this scourge of childbearing. You can read my thoughts here and then here for everything that followed on from that book, it was blogendipity at its best and most inspiring.
I learnt so much from all that reading and the e mails that followed.
So names in comments for a copy of Touching Distance and Macmillan are going to add in a Secret Santa suprise proof copy of a book from their 2009 list as well and even I don't know what that will be.

Deadly Companions : How Microbes Shaped Our History by Dorothy Crawford and a prize draw.

Now where were we?
Ah yes, rats (three fleas on the average black rat) and bubonic plague so perhaps first I'd better issue a health warning.
If you happen to be one of those people ( and there is no shame in this, there are many of you) who read about a disease over breakfast, by lunchtime are convinced that you have it and by dinner you can't face food because it's obvious you won't live much longer, then this might not be the best book for you.
Even if a bout of bubonic plague is seeming most unlikely, no Xenopsylla cheopsis (rat flea) to your certain knowledge has regurgitated its stomach contents containing 25,000 bacteria into your bloodstream, and you have no excruciatingly painful buboes ready to rupture (hope you're not eating porridge) that you are aware of, really no amount of reassurance from Dorothy Crawford or I is going to help if you are that way inclined, just don't read Deadly Companions, How Microbes Shaped Our History.
Meanwhile the rest of us can just plunge headlong into this fascinating cauldron of disease and putrefaction and emerge so well-informed that you'll wonder how you've managed this long without knowing it all.
If it crawls, flies, wriggles, squirms or just plain magics itself through the air the whole disease trail is mapped out down the ages, and though I'll admit I got slightly bogged down in the early epidemiology sections( but plenty of you will eat all that up easily) I soldiered on because I knew there would be glorious treats in store and I wasn't disappointed as you can tell already.
I am now a bulging buboe of  disease information, stick a needle in me and I could give you the lot.
In those days when I worked (now seeming like many light years ago) I had within reach of my right hand something called The Spotty Book. This was a real face-saver, a sort of vade mecum to cope with the myriad phone calls I would get about florid rashes and incubation times and can you get shingles from someone with chickenpox (no) and might this be scabies(possibly) and waaaaaahhhhhh we've found head lice. I might have sounded like I was reeling it off out of my head but in fact I would be frantically rummaging for the disease in my Spotty Book for fear of muddling my Parvovirus B 19 with my Coxsackie or my Impetigo with my Erysipelas.
Dorothy Crawford moves in a much bigger world than rural Devon and chapters like Microbes Go Global, explaining as it did quite what happened when crowd disease microbes hit the Americas, made for a succession of 'did you know' moments.
Did you know for example that most microbes jumped from domestic animals to humans but the Americans were such efficient hunter-gatherers that very few animals remained to be domesticated, just the odd turkey, couple of guinea pigs, few llamas, one or two alpacas, none of which transmit too much of note.They were reasonably disease free until the Europeans arrived and shared so generously causing a 90% decrease in Native American population over the next 120 years.
That's staggering because there had been 100 million of them to start with.
The background to the history of disease transmission should by rights be quite deadly boring but not in the hands of Dorothy Crawford with this informative quote from 1547,

' The cause of these impediments or infyrmytes doth come many ways, it maye come by lyenge in the sheets or bedded there where a pocky person hath the night before lyenin, it maye come with lyenge with a pocky person, it may come by syttenge on a draught or sege where as a pocky person did lately syt, it may come by drynkynge oft with a pocky person, but specially it is taken when one pocky person doth synne in lechery the one with another.'

Don't say you haven't been warned.
Our anaesthetist friend John Snow gets a mention for tracing the 1854 London cholera outbreak to the Broad Street pump which is probably a good time to mention that a prize copy of both Deadly Companions by Dorothy H. Crawford and Blessed Days of Anaesthesia by Stephanie J.Snow up for grabs today from Oxford University Press. Names on the operating list in comments and we'll lance the boil choose the two winners once it's come to a head eventually.

and the winner is...

Congratulations to Cristina who can now peep behind the doors of The English House.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another winner...

Books flying out all over the world now but how excited were we when Rocky pressed Mrs Glosser for a number tonight for the prize-draw copy of So I Have Thought of You The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald and bless her, she came up with no. 26. Mike Petty.
Congratulations to Mike who kindly brought that amazing book A Dance for The Moon by Richard Burns to our attention during the Remembrance Read.
And yes, Kevin from Canada and Nan a guided tour of the Book Room will follow, meanwhile here's the way in and just a tiny glimpse of Bookhound's own Book Room (we have 'his' and 'hers') on the left there.

An Endsleigh Salon update and stocking filler prize draw

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

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

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

Some in-house announcements and more winners...

Thought I'd share a picture of Mission Control with you and nice pot of tea.
We're gradually gathering in all the winning addresses though I suspect a few e mails may be going astray, but top of the table for efficiency are Team Secret Scripture, they all took about 5 minutes and the dovesleigh was off. 
Mega-Team The Reader close runners up, we are just waiting for one more out of twenty-one, Margaret Powling where are you?
Team Balzac are waiting for Loretta Dunne, Loretta a copy of Balzac heading your way when we have your address.
Also TJ (with a cat called Bailey I think) you won a copy of A Christmas Carol so do send us your address (offblog of course)
Congratulations to another eight winners who should have had e mails by now.
Spyology winging its way around the world to margaretdancing, Lisa in Toronto and another Lisa in Australia.
Copies of Unimagined going to Trevor Berrett (proof that Mrs Glosser does pick number one sometimes, I had wondered) and Dee Weaver. Many thanks to everyone for reading this and leaving such heartwarming comments, it has been an absolute pleasure to host Imran at dovegreyreader and I know he will have been greatly encouraged by your support. (Someone tell Oprah for goodness' sake, she can call in if she wants, we don't stand on ceremony here).
Copies of The Thirty-Nine Steps going to Pamela Kerr, blithe spirit and Catherine.
Gosh are we excited, thanks so much to everyone who is joining in the fun and please please don't feel in the least bit guilty about adding your name every day, by Christmas there will have been over eighty winners.
Coming up tomorrow...nope, let's not spoil the surprise.

Listmania and a very perfect prize draw.

Newspaper lists coming out of our ears as the great and the good share their favourite books,
My Best Reads of 2008.
My Best Reads Ever.
My Christmas Book Suggestions.
I love reading them and of course there's every chance I'll make a list or two of my own and ask you for yours too, what better way to spread the news of good reads.
But it's the Guardian lists that have had my attention this week. It's always interesting for us lowly bloggeurs to see if anyone 'famous' is lauding any of the books that we've read.
Sebastian Barry finds Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden

'a novel of gratitude-inspiring prose'

A.S.Byatt on The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher finds that

'Hensher understands people and he understands politics'

and on The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser

'one of the best-written books I've read for years. She writes with clarity and wit and thoughtfulness.'

Jonathan Coe enjoyed Sputnik Caledonia by Andrew Crumey,

'the most impressive achievement yet from a still undervalued writer ; in its combination of dystopian science fiction with warm but unsentimental childhood memoir.'

Margaret Drabble was with me on Deaf Sentence by David Lodge,

'a touching and humane treatment of deafness, disability and ageing, at once sad and stoic and intermittently witty...readable and accessible.'

 Now Anne Enright and I always agree and this time it's over Helen Garner's The Spare Room,

'a voice of great honesty and energy...both compassionate and angry at the same time.'

Antonia Fraser is in agreement (almost) over The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry,

'by far the best novel I have read this year...the finest thing he has done.'

as is Jonathan Coe and with mitigation for the ending,

'deserves all the attention it got and more...the way it threw a brilliantly calculated curve ball at the reader in its closing pages and then finished with a satisfying click.'

Blake Morrison loved The Three of Us by Julia Blackburn,

'told with verve but no self-pity.'

David Hare and Joseph O'Neill both loved Zoe Heller's The Believers,

'Heller has got the stuff we look for in our best novelists : the sentences, the constant drift towards truth.'

Now Simon Schama and I know a good book when we read one, Disquiet by Julia Leigh,

'Why aren't the praises of Julia Leigh, one of the greatest living writers, sung often and everywhere? Because she's Australian? Because she writes glinting slivers of the imagination rather than door-stoppers? '

So there you have a quick round up of the great and the good and a few that have gone in prize draws here through the year, and actually a few of these to come as prizes in the next few days but there's one more.
Carmen Callil like me has spent many happy hours reading So I have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald and suggests,

'Every letter made me think; if Jane Austen had been permitted to live a century or two later, had lived in England through two world wars and had been allowed to take part in the ups and downs of domestic and literary life, she would have been just like Penelope Fitzgerald.'

This book has been at my right hand since it arrived. Penelope Fitzgerald's letters, so self-effacing, so ordinary yet revealing so much about the extraordinarily special person that she was.
It's possible to walk up the road and follow in her footsteps here and how I'd love to have bumped into her in the village shop or passed her walking along the lanes.
This book is the next best thing, so a copy of So I Have Thought of You , The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald could be at your right hand too thanks to Fourth Estate. Names in comments and a prize-draw copy of this very precious book can go to one lucky winner somewhere in the world.
I did say it was going to be a good week.

Roll up, prize draw, stocking filler up for grabs Rupert Penry-Jones

...starring in BBC TV Christmas production of this book.
Sorry, sorry was that a bit misleading, I couldn't get it all on one line...
I haven't even thought about what might be on TV over Christmas but I do know that the BBC have a new production of John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps planned and it's probably about time.
We're just going to have to put up with Rupert Penry-Jones instead of Robert Donat as Richard Hannay, so I suppose that will be compensation for the fact that he won't be dangling off the clock face of Big Ben in this new production, which is apparently more faithful to the original story.
So to round off our weekend of espionage and meeting a wannabee James Bond, three prize draw copies of The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan from Oxford University Press, because it would seem most of us have forgotten the original 1915 story after watching the Hitchcock version so many times down the years.
With apologies to anyone who may have googled Rupert and been disappointed but why not enter the draw while you're here?
Names in comments and these can go worldwide and remember Spy Rule 11 : If You Haven't Got It, Fake It. Rocky will deliver these looking remarkably like Rupert Penry-Jones, we are working on the disguise right now.

More winners...

...because we've just spent three hours doing The Reader draw and e mailing all the winners.
Stacey won the year's subscription and twenty more of you around the world will be getting a free copy of a 2008 edition of the magazine.
I hope you've all had your e mails from Rocky who is just having a little rest in a sun-puddle, but is actually proving the master of efficiency with his clipboard, ticking off names and loading the dove-sleigh.There have been hints that he's getting a bit fed up with salmon now and could fancy a bit of cod (just leave out the parsley, he hates it).
Quite a nice spies and spooks stocking filler coming up later to round off our weekend prizes plus we'll draw the Spyology winners and then we start another week of more daily prize-draws tomorrow, do hope you're coping.

Sunday Salon : Unimagined - uncut and another Christmas stocking prize draw.

It is a well-known fact that my favourite non-fiction read of 2007 was Unimagined by Imran Ahmad and also memorable in that I flaunted that cover picture of the lovely cuddly Imran even when Imran asked me to put up the new paperback cover instead. So in my trip around blogfriends to gather in Christmas Stocking fillers I stopped off at Imran's and he has very kindly offered two signed copies of his book which he will send to the prize draw winners himself, and I asked him if he'd write a brief piece about the book as an introduction.
No worries, I said, when 64mgb appeared in my in box and that's probably the December bandwidth shot to pieces and no, I'm not offended that this went to Oprah first in the hope that she'll love the US edition of your book and I just KNOW she'll reply eventually.
Besides, we're ready for a full-length guest author feature, my readers have a superb attention span and they will love to set a few hours aside on a Sunday in the run up to Christmas to read it. This might take you through a huge pot of tea and probably set lunch back an hour as well but in the end this is Imran's journey into print and I decided to let you have it uncut.
I hope you enjoy it, Imran has offered a fascinating insight into his Unimagined journey. The rocky road to publication and fabulous wealth, plus that moment of sharing his talent with the 'aspiring writer', so selfless and all in his own inimitable style. So my thanks to Imran for sharing 64mgbs with us and for the prize-draw copies of the book, names in comments and that lovely cuddly Imran will send them to the very lucky winners.

The Unimagined Path to Publication

           

             1975

• Walking to school, I imagine how cool it would be to be a famous writer who wrote a book that everyone read. But writing a book must be such a lot of work. I can't be bovvered.

 2001

• After Sept 11 2001, the horrible, vitriolic comments about Muslims written on popular message boards (AOL, Yahoo! etc) make me despair.  We're not terrorists - we are really boring people who pray all the time and don't drink! But then the responses of some apparent Muslims are provocative and insensitive. This kind of hatred and stereotyping is only going to make things worse – a cycle of hatred and violence and more hatred.  I know I have to do something …

 2004

• Finally, on Boxing Day, I sit down in the dining room with my laptop computer, to write the book.  I write for about half-an-hour, then read what I have written.  It’s not bad.  And it was quite enjoyable to write.  I continue.

 

• I still do my day job.

 2005

• I thought that writing the book would be hard and getting it published would be easy. The reverse is true.  Writing the book is easy, a wonderful experience – it practically writes itself!  All I have to do is type as fast as I can.
• Every day, I come into the office at 7am and write until about 8:30am.  I write all evening and all weekend. 
• At various stages, I e-mail the manuscript to friends in the UK, US and Australia. They all love it and say it’s really good!  (What are friends for?)
• February: I finish the book – at least a manuscript with a beginning, a middle and an end.
  With a manuscript completed, I read The Writers’ Handbook 2005.

• I write a book proposal (with one-page Executive Summary at the front) and send it to countless literary agents.
• I wait.
• I expect I’ll get a big advance, be able to give up work immediately and become a full-time writer.  That Nigerian girl who wrote ‘The Icarus Girl’, she got £400,000 apparently.  My book’s at least as good as that, so I can count on that much.  It’ll probably be published this summer, or autumn at the latest.
• I imagine my sombre grey-suited fellow commuters on the 7:02 am train to Waterloo reading my book and smiling.
• I imagine myself on The Heaven and Earth Show – a spirituality/current affairs programme on BBC 1.
• I imagine myself on Midweek – a literary programme on BBC Radio 4.
• I imagine myself talking at literary festivals.
• I agonise over what kind of convertible car to buy after I get my big advance.  Saabs look the most comfortable, but I think I’d prefer one with a metal roof.  Peugeot make those.  The 206 looks really cramped, so it would have to be a 308.  Silver, I think.  Do they have built-in Sat-Navs?
• I wait for my mobile phone to ring – one of the literary agents calling, breathless with excitement.
• Over the weeks, my mobile phone never rings with the longed-for call, but all the stamped-addressed-envelopes come back with rejection slips.

• I write to another round of literary agents.
• I wait.
• All the stamped-addressed-envelopes come back with rejection slips.

• I decide to make aggressive approaches to some publishers, and I manage to convince several of them to take a look at the manuscript.
• I wait.

• July 7: the London train bombings.  An awful day.  The same cycle of hatred starts up again.  I am desperate – this book is more important than ever, to counter the awful demonization that is taking place.  Surely publishers will see it this way?

• July 15: I’m in the US on a business trip.  This evening I’m in Barnes & Noble, Richmond, Virginia.  Harry Potter VI is being released at midnight. The atmosphere in the store is wonderful, with kids in costumes.  The store manager is dressed as a wizard.  I’m enjoying this, so I loiter around in the store, drinking a latte and looking at magazines.
• One article catches my eye: ‘Ten Things To Do With A Thousand Dollars’.  One of them is self-publish your own book.  It talks about a company called BookSurge, owned by Amazon.
• Back in my hotel room, I look at the BookSurge website.  It looks so easy!  They only want my credit card number.

• Back in London, I wait.
• All of the publishers reject the book.

• August: I decide to go ahead with self-publishing via BookSurge.  Excitedly, I run through the manuscript a couple more times, spend an hour designing a fabulous cover and submit the files.  We go through a round of corrections when I receive the proofs.
• September.  A small FedEx package arrives at the office.  I take it to a conference room and close the door.  I take out the first copy of my book.  I’ve arrived!  I’m a published author!  It looks great! 

 

• My batch of 250 books arrives and the book gets listed on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
• I begin my marketing campaign.  I send a copy, with covering letter, to every single national newspaper, to magazines, to notable individuals. 
• I send a copy to every single member of The Heaven and Earth Show production team – over 25 people!  I send copies to BBC Radio for Midweek. 
• I convince friends to buy the book and see a small number of sales on my Amazon sales report from BookSurge – about 40 books.

• I send a copy to Scott Pack – the Head Buyer of Waterstone’s, the UK’s biggest bookstore chain. He is known as the most powerful man in the UK’s book industry.  In an e-mail response, he says that he will look at it when he has a chance (he receives hundreds of books).
• One Friday evening, before I go to bed, I run a BookSurge sales report.  50 copies have sold in the US on Amazon.com, in the last 12 hours! 
• The next morning, I run a BookSurge sales report.  250 copies have sold in the US on Amazon.com, in the last 24 hours!  250 copies in 24 hours!  Something must have happened in the US.  One of my friends must have got Unimagined mentioned on a radio show or in a newspaper, and 250 Americans have bought it from Amazon.  God bless America! 
• I mark-up the sales report in red, highlighting the sudden surge in sales, and write an accompanying letter to Scott Pack.  I deliver it to the security guard at the Waterstone’s office on Sunday night.  When Scott Pack sees this, he will definitely take a look at my book.
• On Tuesday, BookSurge advises me that a computer error caused one single order (from Lucretia, a friend in California) to loop around and be copied endless times.  There was only one sale, not 250!  I run the sales report again and the 250 orders have disappeared.
• I don’t say anything about this computer error to Scott Pack.

• A week later, Scott Pack e-mails me with his opinion.  Thanks to the impressive Amazon sales report, he took some time out to read the book.  He really likes the content of the book, but the physical book is not of sufficient quality for him to stock in Waterstone’s.  He says the book deserves a ‘proper publisher’ and he can pass the book onto a literary agency, if I am willing.
• I think about it. Do I really want to go backwards a step to a literary agent?  I mean, I’m already published!  But, the truth is that my marketing campaign yielded no response whatsoever.  The truth is: no-one is interested in a self-published book.  (I did get ‘thank you’ notes from Cherie Blair and Hillary Clinton, but that was it.)
• I ask Scott Pack to send the book to the literary agent.
• Two days later, I’m in a meeting at the office when Charlie Viney of Mulcahy & Viney literary agency e-mails me, enthusing about the book.  We have a meeting.  He loves the book and would like to represent me.  He says Scott Pack told him the writing is great, but “the cover is awful”. He suggests areas where I should write some more, and I must discontinue the self-published book.
• Charlie asks me for some childhood photos. I show him the one from the Bonnie Baby competition, when I was dressed in a suit at 15-months-old.  He exclaims: “That’s the cover of the book!”

• I shut down the self-published book and spend the Christmas/New Year holiday on the sofa, tapping away happily on my laptop until the early hours, with Carry On films and old comedy programmes playing on the television.  Again, the book just writes itself.

• I still do my day job.
  

2006

• January: I e-mail the manuscript to Charlie.  He phones me in the office.  He just loves it!  This is going to sell so easily.  He sends it to the top ten UK publishers.
• Over the coming weeks, I wait.  Again I agonise over my choice of convertible car.
• February:  All of the publishers rejected it.  Charlie says that the most common comment was that it was “not miserable enough”.  But it’s not supposed to be miserable! 

• March: Charlie submits to four smaller publishers. We get offers from two of them!  A choice of offers!  I go with Karen Ings from Aurum Press, who writes in an e-mail: “Seldom have I enjoyed a manuscript so much.”
• We sign the deal.  Publication will be in March 2007.  The advance isn’t quite enough for me to stop work.  It’s barely enough to buy a second-hand Skoda.

• In the summer, the editing process is easy.  Karen doesn’t ask for any significant changes or for it to be ‘sexed up’. She likes the story just as it is.
• Aurum produces an advance proof of Unimagined and sends it off for reviews. 
• I set-up my website www.unimagined.co.uk and place on it every comment about Unimagined that I can get.

• December: Googling myself, I discover that the Guardian newspaper has mistaken the advance proof for an actual book and, thanks to Sue Townsend’s glowing comments, listed Unimagined in ‘Books of the Year’!  (It’s not even published yet!)

• I still do my day job.

2007

• I organise a charity book launch at my old school (which plays a major role in Unimagined).  I will give away ‘free’ copies of Unimagined (which I have to pay the publisher for) in exchange for minimum £20 donations to the Shooting Star Children’s Hospice.  I send invitations to many famous people, including the well-known British actor Lionel Roebuck (not his real name, to protect his privacy).  I’ve never met him, but I write to him c/o his agency.
• I am desperate to have a musical group at the charity book launch, but I’m getting nowhere.  I run into an old colleague I have not seen in 15 years.  We talk. I tell her about my music group problem.  She says that she knows a music tutor who can rustle up a jazz group.  He agrees to do it! 

• Monday: I receive a very nice handwritten letter from Lionel Roebuck to say that he cannot make it to the book launch, but he will buy my book the next time he is in town.  He encloses a cheque for £50 for the Shooting Star Children’s Hospice.
• Tuesday: I send him a copy of Unimagined with the inscription: ‘Lionel, Thank you for decades of fine acting. Best wishes, Imran Ahmad’
• Wednesday: I leave my office in Strand to go to the bank at lunchtime and run into Lionel Roebuck!  (This is unbelievable!) I thank him profusely for the generous cheque.  He says he’s just going to buy my book.  I say: “No need! There’s a copy at your agency right now!”  I am walking on air. I am so grateful for this wonderful synchronicity! 

• March: The book is released. 

• I send a copy to Catherine Lockerbie, the Director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
• The Daily Mail gives Unimagined a fabulous full page review.
• The charity book launch is really successful (the jazz band is brilliant!) and raises thousands of pounds for The Shooting Star Children’s Hospice.
• I appear on The Heaven and Earth Show and Midweek, just like I imagined!
• I have my first public book reading, at Borders in Islington (North London).  It’s a miserable experience – there are only two people in the audience! I go home feeling humiliated.

• I decide to send an inscribed copy to each of the UK’s 646 Members of Parliament, in the House of Commons.  I have to pay the publisher for the books.  The process of inscribing and signing each book, putting it in an envelope and attaching an address label takes me over 40 solid hours of work, which I do over three weekends.( Think about it : 646 x 4 mins = 2584 mins = 43 hrs)
• But there’s one MP I don’t feel like sending it to.  In the media, Ann Widdecombe always comes across as a grumpy old woman – a Conservative with a huge capital C.  There’s no way she is going to read my book.  I’m just wasting my money and time.  You know, instead of sending the book to 646 MPs, I could just send it to 645, but I can say that I sent it to all 646, and nobody will ever know. 
• I hesitate, but eventually I do inscribe, sign and pack the book for Ann Widdecombe.
  
• I load the 646 books into my car and drive to the House of Commons. The policeman at the delivery gate is not very amused, but that is another story. An intern from the publisher is there to assist me with the unloading, and a very kind gentleman from the House of Commons post room is of indispensable help with a trolley. I still have to give them a cheque for the postage, even though I'm delivering the books, as they have to send them on to each MP's preferred address.
  

• Catherine Lockerbie invites me to have a session at the Edinburgh International Book Festival !
• I receive hundreds of letters back from Members of Parliament, thanking me for the book.  (Nothing from Ann Widdecombe, of course, grumpy old woman.)  Some say that they have already read it and enjoyed it very much.  David Cameron writes me a handwritten note saying how much he has been enjoying it.
• A publisher in the Netherlands contacts me requesting the Dutch rights.  He is a small spirituality publisher and is very enthusiastic about Unimagined.  I let him have the Dutch rights for a zero advance.
• The Government invites me to a private conference on ‘Islam and the West’.  I meet the Prime Minister (Mr Blair), the future Prime Minister (Mr Brown) and the Leader of the Opposition (Mr Cameron).

• I go to the Edinburgh International Book Festival.  My event is a huge success!  Over 200 people, and their booms of laughter can be heard all over the Festival grounds.  The place is buzzing when I come out – everyone wants to know what this event was!  This is better than I ever imagined!

 

• A woman comes up to me, introduces herself as Sarah LeFanu the Director of the Bath Literature Festival, and asks me if I would consider appearing at her Festival. I enthusiastically agree.
• Catherine Lockerbie later tells me that she does not normally consider unsolicited approaches, but she “just loved Unimagined so much!”
• My last evening at the Edinburgh Festival, I am loitering in the Writers’ Tent, as it is pouring with rain.  There is an attractive, elegant woman sitting here, making notes in her personal organiser.  I dare to engage her in conversation, starting with a comment about the awful weather.  She says that she is Wendy Were – the Director of the Sydney Writers’ Festival.  A voice inside me cries out: “You must go to Sydney!”  I give Wendy a breathless two-minute pitch on what a great book I have written.  She looks politely bored (this happens to her all the time), but she does give me her business card.

• A film/television producer e-mails me and we have a meeting.  He tells me that he picked up Unimagined at the Edinburgh International Book Festival and read the first thirty pages just standing there in the bookstore.  He came to my event, saw how well it went, and decided there and then that he would like to make the screen version of Unimagined. 
• After a short negotiation, I sell him the screen rights for a modest advance.  He starts working on the development of a 10 x 30 min television series.  We start bickering over who should play me (I want Pierce Brosnan).

• I send a copy of Unimagined to Wendy Were’s office in Australia.
• Wendy Were sends me a discouraging e-mail to say that she does not think it makes sense to invite someone to the Sydney Writers’ Festival if their book is not being actively promoted in Australia. (She hasn’t read it yet.)
• This e-mail is troubling.  I am desperate to go to the Sydney Writers’ Festival.
• I have to get some attention for Unimagined in Australia, so I send copies to the ‘Literary Editor’ (whoever that is) of the Sydney Morning Herald and other Australian media. 

• My agent goes on a trip to the US and presents Unimagined to all of the major US publishers.  This is really important to me, as I wrote Unimagined with an American audience in mind.
• I wait.
• My publisher tell me that Unimagined has been shortlisted for the YoungMinds Book Award, and that the selectors “just loved it”.
• I don’t hear anything from Australia, so I send another batch of copies to the same media again.

• November:  As usual, I Google myself in the morning and discover a wonderful review of Unimagined by Bruce Elder in the Sydney Morning Herald.

• December: The Independent newspaper selects Unimagined in its ‘Best Books of 2007’ list.  Ann Widdecombe writes in the Independent that Unimagined was “my favourite book of 2007.”  I am ashamed and humbled, and I have tears in my eyes. I’m a horrible, horrible person.  How could I have judged her just based on how the media present her?  I was completely wrong about her!  I write her a heartfelt ‘thank you’ letter.
• Nancy Northrop, a sales rep with the Australian distributor, e-mails me from Sydney.  She has fallen in love with Unimagined.  She says, “You must come down here to promote it.”  I tell her I’m hoping to be invited to the Sydney Writers’ Festival.
• December: The Sydney Morning Herald lists Unimagined in ‘The Pick of the Literary Crop 2007’!
• Some chick in Devon called ‘dovegreyreader’ selects Unimagined as her ‘Best Non-Fiction Read of 2007’.

• I still do my day job.
  

2008

• January : I am invited to address the Cambridge Union in a debate. Unbelievable! I finally buy a dinner suit

  
  

• February: Wendy Were sends me an e-mail.  She says, “I finally got around to reading Unimagined” and she would like to invite me to the Sydney Writers’ Festival !
• I tell Nancy Northrop that I’m coming to Sydney.  She starts work on a promotional campaign.
  
• I agree with my publisher that they can distribute the UK version of Unimagined in America, until I get a US publisher.  Distribution in the US will start in October 2008.

• The Dutch version is released.  It is called Mohammed, Jezus en James Bond (there being no magical word for ‘Unimagined’ in Dutch, apparently).
• Nancy Northrop arranges a packed schedule for me in Australia, in addition to my events at the Sydney Writers' Festival.
• Catherine Lockerbie invites me to have a session at the 2008 Edinburgh International Book Festival, even though it is not normal to invite an author back unless they have written a new book, but she says that I was “a very special guest”.
  
• At my own expense, I mail a signed paperback to 200 randomly selected secondary schools, addressing it to the Head of the English Department, I get a response from one school who invite me to do a workshop. I don't hear back from any other school - a 0.5% success rate.
  

• May: I travel to Australia for the Sydney Writers’ Festival. I will have a television show to record on the day of my arrival, after my 24 hour journey.  The trip on British Airways is wonderful, and I arrive rested and relaxed for the TV appearance, which goes brilliantly. 
• This time in Australia is truly magical and spiritual.  I am overcome with joy by everyone’s kindness and warmth towards me.  Nancy Northrop has done a fantastic job in arranging media interviews for me, and my events at the Festival go very well. 
• Nancy drives me around everywhere. We become great friends.  She says: “Unimagined is like a secret.  Nobody knows about it, but everyone who reads it loves it!”

• At the Festival, I meet Janet DeNeefe – Director of the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali – and keep bumping into her. One evening she sits down next to me in the hotel lounge, takes something out of her handbag and shows it to me.  It is the business card of Juliet Rogers – CEO of Murdoch Books.  Janet was given it at the Murdoch Books party (to which I wasn’t invited, being a complete unknown). Inexplicably, Janet gives me the business card.
• I e-mail Juliet Rogers and she asks me to meet her in her office after the Festival.  (Her office is five minutes’ walk from my hotel.)
• I’m involved in an unfortunate incident at a reception at Government House, involving the Governor of New South Wales and a rogue canapé.

• My final event is An Unimagined Journey, in which I address the audience and am interviewed by Bruce Elder, the non-fiction reviewer of the Sydney Morning Herald.  The venue is a cabaret style location with round tables, and it is packed to capacity – 250 people!   The atmosphere is amazing and the audience is absolutely wonderful.The applause at the end is tremendous and my signing queue is huge.  This could not have gone better! 
  

 

    

 

    

• After the Festival, I go to meet Juliet Rogers.  She says: “We read Unimagined this weekend, and we all loved it.  I learned more about Islam and the West from reading Unimagined than I did from everything else I’ve read, put together.”  She wants to buy the rights to publish an Australian edition! 
• I go to thank Wendy Were at her office and take a box of chocolates for her staff.  She tells me that Unimagined ranked 11^th in the Festival sales!  (This is later confirmed in the Sydney Morning Herald.)  In fact, Unimagined would have ranked higher, but they ran out of copies.  Not bad for a book by an author completely unknown in Australia! 
• These days in Australia were the best ten days of my life!  I made many friends and met many people whose kindness and warmth towards me just touched me deeply.  Yes, I really did have to go to Sydney!

• Back in London, I’m a feeling a little blue, until I get an e-mail from Janet DeNeefe.  She’s read Unimagined and she would like to invite me to her literary festival in Bali in October.  This keeps happening to me! 
• I receive an e-mail from Juliet Rogers.  Murdoch Books has bought the rights and she is really excited about publishing Unimagined in Australia.
  
• The Billingsgate Book Club in Sydney choose Unimagined as their book of the month and then write the most horrid review, calling me a "hypocritical twerp". I bury my face in my arms and cry myself to sleep. My boss wakes me and reminds me about my presentation for the Executive Steering Committee meeting at 2pm.
  

• Bruce Elder of the Sydney Morning Herald writes the most amazing Foreword for the Australian edition of Unimagined. 
  
• I meet Professor Ruth Evans - Head of English Studies at Stirling University - at the University 40-year celebration, and she sends me the most wonderful e-mail about Unimagined. Subsequent to this, she agrees to contribute to the Reading Group Notes of the Australian edition.
• Leading up to the US release in October, Unimagined gets a wonderful review in Kirkus Reviews, the US book industry's internal journal. 
• August: I return to the Edinburgh International Book Festival and meet other aspiring writers.

• October: I travel to Bali for the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival. It's okay. While I'm there, I get an Indonesian publishing deal, and also invitations to the Perth and Byron Bay festivals in 2009.
  

 

• November: Manchester Grammar School selects Unimagined in its Year 9 Top Ten reading list. Now this is true recognition.
• December: Working on my tax return, I calculate that I still haven't made a penny in profit from my book - in fact I'm still running at a huge loss.
• The Department of English Studies at Stirling University places Unimagined on the core undergraduate reading list. This really brings a tear to my eye. I'm not even dead yet.
  
• I still do my day job. (Thank God for the annual 25 vacation days)

• 

Lessons Learned

• Do it for joy not money.
• It takes years.
• Keep on trying.
• Follow every lead.
• You need some good luck along the way.
• Don't give up your day job.
• Keep your website up-to-date

And in case it's slipped your mind, names in comments and Imran will send a signed hardback and a signed paperback to two lucky winners. 

 

Spooks and Spies in your stockings...sorry more prizes.

And don't for one minute think the fun stops over the weekend.
Oh no, I'm afraid we've really got to keep filling your stockings if you can bear with us, or we won't have time to impart the bounty before it's time to go and catch our turkey.
Pull up a chair on Sunday too and don't miss a special Guest Author posting from a good friend of dovegreyreader scribbles, the international Man of Mystery himself, the man who dreamed of being James Bond as a child (and possibly still does as a grown-up), the author of one of my favourite reads of 2007 and he will be offering you the chance to win a personally signed copy of his book too and then later in the day yet another little spy-related book prize.
So this seems like a good moment to drop in a very exciting book for all the grown-up children out there and perhaps the three lucky winners could all see their way to sharing these with a child too?
I did actually feel as excited as a child when Spyology (and don't miss the Ology website, it is amazing)  arrived months ago, it's a great big (almost a foot square) heavy silver-covered book, and even back in August life flashed back to those Christmas mornings and three children leaping about at 2am, stockings opened and asking if it was time to get up.
Slowly over the years it changes and you wonder whether they might be out of bed in time for dinner.
Then you move dinner to later in the day.
Then you move dinner to November or February because they are all scattered across the world.
But still they insist on stockings.
Well I know three children who would have opened three of these on Christmas morning (one book alone would have been carnage) and carried them around all day, in fact they'd have been like little seen-and-not-heards for the rest of the year and we could probably have sent them off to MI 5, ready for the field, by January.
They would have immediately gone into training and built up disguises and cover stories,(Spy Rule 4: Stand Out...To Blend In)  gone on surveillance  missions, (Spy Rule 5 : Eyes Peeled, Ears Open) and pulled out all the wonderful little 'things' scattered in secret pockets throughout the book.
Then there's the Codes and Ciphers section (Spy Rule 6 : Keep Secrets Safe - Encode) and all these perfect little devices for creating enigma like codes and then the gadgets page ( Spy Rule 7: Clever Spies Use Clever Gadgets) would have pleased the Gamekeeper no end. There are many saboteur-like uses for an exploding rat by all accounts and we must all be on the look out for the poison-tipped umbrella. If you could catch a pigeon and strap a camera to it then you'd be doing what the British and the Germans did in WW II.
How to recognise a German Defence Force Homing Pigeon?
It will have Wehrmachtbrieftaube printed on its wing of course. But then there is Spy Rule 11 : If You Haven't Got It, Fake It, so I should imagine you could substitute a budgie quite creatively.
Just think how exciting and subversively quiet this could all make your Christmas Day?
Names in comments for three copies of this lovely book which can go worldwide to three lucky would-be spies out there, but remember Spy Rule 3 : The Spymaster Is Always Right.
He says spying is an illegal activity so you must promise you will only try this at home or you will get us all into a heap big lot of trouble.

More winners...

Right, keeping order here and we have winners for Stocking Fillers 3 & 4 who have should all have had emails by now,
At last Rebecca!
Someone from The Salon has won a prize, heaven knows they've tried hard enough!
The Paris Review Interviews Volume III will be winging its way to you.
The Balzac's will be going to Mary, Loretta Dunne and Claire T.
The four copies of The Secret Scripture will be going to Marg, Michelle, (both Australia I think, Rocky's very excited, will he need his swimming trunks?) JoAnn and Book Addict.
Congratulations and excuse me while we go and load the dove-sleigh.

Roll up and fill up your Christmas stockings - Prize draw 5 and twenty-one winners!

Someone said these daily prizes are like opening the doors on an Advent Calendar and it feels like that here too, very exciting, and perhaps we're beating recession depression just a fraction.Today, heaven help us, there will be TWENTY-ONE winners.
So talk of opening doors is a perfect route into today's prize draw because one of the great pleasures in my reading life is something which does just that, The Reader magazine (and the blog here.)
For anyone who isn't aware of it, you are missing a little treasure trove of brilliant writing which is all destined to make books and reading enjoyable and accessible to everyone and my thoughts are all gathered here.
Based at Liverpool University and regular visitors here may recall that I wondered back along (as we say in Devon) quite how Jane Davis would manage to transfer editiorial responsibility to husband Phil this year without a bit of a fracas over the breakfast table Chez Davis.
I mean, Jane had it all looking just so, absolutely tickety-boo and cosy in there and in comes Phil wielding a paint brush, new curtains up in a flash and a new look edition of The Reader started to drop into the post box every three months here.
Well we're loving it just the same because nothing will change that ethos of the unpretentious all-inclusive approach to the written word, and I am especially delighted to be part of the regular Reader panel who are sent a mystery classic to read and then write 75 words-worth of thoughts on for each edition (we've just been up-graded from 50 words, it was bliss).
I've just read...no, no, I'll keep it a secret until the next edition comes up, but it was a Thomas Hardy lifelong favourite, possibly my fourth reading, if not more and I had to give it my first top 5* rating.
So tonight's Christmas stocking filler is quite special and there will be a very happy winner indeed because The Reader have very kindly offered a prize-draw of one year's free subscription to the magazine and for twenty (yes twenty) runners up a free copy of an edition from 2008 and this prize can go worldwide.
This means that twenty-one of you will be able to read Kirsty Other Stories fab back cover quote, why we all love The Reader, sandwiched in alongside mine, Antonia's (Byatt), Seamus's (Heaney) and Doris's (Lessing) ...Kirsty's is the best though.
Names in comments and Rocky, currently Aga-hugging and resting up after a busy week, will brace for this mammoth selection and delivery task  and I hope he doesn't  think he can rest over the weekend, lots more to come.

Watching...

Things are going from bad to worse here because now not only am I knitting in the day...well, I can hardly bring myself to tell you but... oh God, how can I say it...though you might not be surprised because I hinted at it yesterday...
I'm watching DVDs as well.
There it's out now.
I have had absolutely no time to watch anything for years now, in fact watching had all sadly become quite a low priority in amongst work and reading, dovegreyreader writing and washing the kitchen floor. But that doesn't mean I haven't been vigilant, and consequently I have a gathered in a backlog of DVDs various, bought as and when Amazon have had them on special offer at rock-bottom prices.
Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters, North and South, George Eliot's Middlemarch, a glut of Jane Austen's in all manner of castings and productions,Cinema Paradiso because I adore the music, the three hour predominantly silent DVD Into Great Silence, the monastic life at Grande Chartreuse recommended by Curzon and Susan Hill.
Then there's a whole heap of Trollopes and that's where I've made a very promising start.
I missed most of the 26 episodes of The Pallisers back in the 1970s when I suspect shift work wasn't conducive to following a TV series, but I did buy this box set about three years ago during an intense Trollope reading phase and now finally I'm settling to it but with a worrying degree of addiction.
I glance at the clock and wonder if anyone will notice if I sneak in a quick episode at 11am, then perhaps another at about 3ish, then there's time for at least two legitimately in the evening.
Once I'm through with these I have Barchester Chronicles, He Knew He Was Right and The Way We Live Now lined up meanwhile The Tinker (father of dgr) has taken those off for some pre-Christmas viewing and a verdict.
But The Pallisers is marvellous, 1970s studio sets where we pretend we're in the Alps, lots of pseudo carriage drives, and lovely fights with a lot of 'take that you blaggard', which all serve to emphasise how authentic productions are today. Lady Glencora would really be driving those horses if this was filmed now. But the costumes are exquisite, Susan Hampshire is splendid as Glencora Palliser, and dear old Plantagenet, Philip Latham is mellowing slowly and all against the shadowy backdrop of Parliamentary and electoral shenanigans.
Yes, I've been well and truly Trolloped.

Roll up and fill up your Christmas stockings - Prize draw 4

Are you keeping up?
Well it's only Day Four of the dovegreyreader stocking filler extravaganza but we're having great fun here sharing the bounty of a year of great and often very exciting reading.
Rocky's not back from the Canada drop yet, so we're assuming the salmon was good.
But which book that I have really really enjoyed this year sits comfortably as a prize draw alongside a post about Janet Frame?
Well thanks to publisher bounty we have plenty to choose from but for tonight I've picked The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry published by Faber and shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Faber have kindly offered four copies of this which can be posted worldwide so four very lucky winners will be drawn tomorrow evening.
In many ways Roseanne McNulty's life lived in Roscommon mental hospital could so easily have been Janet's but for fortuitous events and Janet's guardian angels watching over her.
Roseanne's desolation palpable and, but for Dr Grene, her guardian angels scarce,

'I am only a thing left over, a remnant woman, and I do not even look like a human being no more, but a scraggy stretch of skin and bone in bleak skirt and blouse, and a canvas jacket, and I sit here in my niche like a songless robin - no, like a mouse that died under the hearthstone where it was warm, and lies now like a mummy in the pyramids.'

A desolation reflected so often in Janet's writing too yet none of it depressing to read and nor is The Secret Scripture.
Now I did whinge a bit about the ending I know, but have since read much more which tempers initial disbelief, and I love Sebastian Barry's writing so very much that really in the end, nothing can detract from the sublime effect of the words on the page, something I also find with Janet Frame.
So names in comments and I think I just have to extract one tiny promise from the winners...that you will seek out and read A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry (if you haven't already) to date my Best Book That Never Won the Booker.
William who won the last copy on here did and just look what happened.

'A Long Long Way absolutely floored me. I'm not a man given to tears and maybe I was just a bit tired but as I read the final few pages of this book I wept like a great big girly.'

Calling New Zealand...I've been Framed again.

Calling New Zealand...are you there New Zealand?
Do you receive me?
I'm just semaphoring across the oceans to let you know that I think you are a very fortunate country indeed to be able to lay claim to an author like Janet Frame. I hope there are trusts and monuments and preserved houses, a Janet Frame national holiday and the rest because what a legacy.
Look, I'm even flying your flag for the day in recognition. I've read through the rules and I think it's allowed.
Having read Towards Another Summer and then The Lagoon a few weeks ago now I've turned the final page of Owls Do Cry after carrying this little Bloomsbury Classics edition of the book around with me for so long. Perfect bag-sized reading and yet another book I didn't want to end.
Janet Frame's first novel, feels semi-autobiographical and to read her really is like luxuriating in a bathful of glorious words and I really didn't want to get out.
The ethereal sense of the world of the child mediated through the child's stream of consciousness is remarkable in so many ways, but mostly because I effectively moved into this childhood world and lived alongside Francie, Daphne, Toby and Chicks and saw through their eyes all those childlike things that an adult misses but Janet doesn't.
Fears, hopes, dreams and that interpretation of the world all piercingly accurate.
This is a book of two halves, childhood and adult life, and woven in amongst it all I spotted the lightly disguised events of Janet's life, and whilst she may have been beset by that ever-present sense of doubt in her own personal worth and the attendant inadequacy and low self-esteem, there is no question that on the page Janet Frame shapes up as one of the most superlatively adequate and exceptional writers that I have come across.
It would seem that Janet never looked on Owls Do Cry as a novel, more a fictional exploration drawing on both personal experience and imagination whilst making no distinction between the two, a writer who in her own typically self-effacing words,

'chose rags from an old bundle, stitched them together, waved a wand, and found herself with a completely new dress...I do collect bundles of rags and I like to sew them together. I suppose I must accept the fact that I have no wand.'

At the same time I'm dipping in and out of An Angel at My Table, Janet's autobiography and Wrestling With the Angel, Michael King's biography and if that wasn't all enough I spent an evening watching the film version of An Angel at My Table directed by Jane Campion (and at £5.98, a cheap-as-chips bargain on Amazon right now)
 

I've been completely and willingly Framed.
It's all left me feeling I have a wealth of differing perspectives from which to read more of her writing.
The film is astonishingly good and worthy of the accolades it has won. Perfectly cast young, teenage and adult Janets and a beautiful voice-over who all convey just the right sense of Janet, painfully shy and nervous in company, completely self-conscious about her appearance and the mass of bright red and uncontrollably frizzy hair.
Add in a family living on the brink of poverty and the associated stigma, family illness, tragic sudden deaths and the mental illness that dogged Janet for years until finally the mis-diagnosis was exposed, and expect to be moved to tears.
Jane Campion beautifully spotlights the vitally important guardian angels who appeared at certain times in Janet's life. The inspiring teacher, the psychiatrist who finally gets it right and gives Janet permission to write, Frank Sargeson the fellow writer who offers her a writing refuge from life at Willowglen and all its attendant miseries and memories when she is discharged from hospital, and we have them all to thank for the existence of Owls Do Cry and all that followed.
I will own up that there were certain moments during the film when I just had to keep my hands busy frantically frogging and skeining the half-knitted Colinette jumper, because some of the scenes in the mental hospital were harrowing even though often just a glimpse. Janet was kept there for eight interminable years and endured over 200 sessions of ECT (the fear of which she likened to facing execution every single time) but all part of her story and therefore essential to the whole.
Much worse for me would be to have never discovered Janet Frame's life and writing at all.

The stockings are filling...we have winners!

Better than the Twelve Days of Christmas Becca because I think we have enough for at least 25 days and probably more!
Just a few formalities so that you all know how Rocky chooses.
We close the comments and then number from the first to the last and enter the numbers 1 to whatever into Mrs Glosser's Random Number Generator, press enter and hey presto, we have a winning number. Then it's really very exciting counting up the list to see who has won.
We are scrupulously fair about it, so every chance you could win several times. Perhaps we'd draw the line after say...ten!
First batch have had e mails from Santa's Little Helper who will soon be busy harnessing up the sleigh and sorting out the CatNav.
So congratulations to Janis, Margaret & TJ who have Classical Comic editions of A Christmas Carol on board and then I think Rocky might be off to Canada with The Morville Hours for Darlene, he's very excited as you can see, alert and up for the mission, and Kevin, any old salmon will do, but don't tell him I said that.

Roll up and fill up your Christmas stockings - Prize draw 3

Bonsoir and just take a look at tonight's stocking fillers for four lucky winners!
Firstly a prize-draw copy of The Paris Review Interviews Volume III from Canongate and just a hint of a Balzacian geographical link there. Established in Paris in 1953 (so it's the same age as me but unlike me now seems to have migrated to the US) with a specific remit,

“The Paris Review hopes to emphasize creative work—fiction and poetry—not to the exclusion of criticism, but with the aim in mind of merely removing criticism from the dominating place it holds in most literary magazines and putting it pretty much where it belongs, i.e., somewhere near the back of the book.'

and more specifically the Interviews,

'In addition to the focus on original creative work, the founding editors found another alternative to criticism—letting the authors talk about their work themselves. The Review’s Writers at Work interview series offers authors a rare opportunity to discuss their life and art at length; they have responded with some of the most revealing self-portraits in literature.'

And what an absolute goldmine of revelation they have proved to be. As interesting and revealing as the interview is the information about the actual process offered beforehand by the interviewers themselves; shall we say some of these literary luminaries display more than a touch of their prima donna-ish tendencies but it's all recounted in the most professionally objective fashion.
My thoughts here on Volumes I & II  , I'm reading Volume III at the moment and I promise you won't be disappointed to find this one turning up in your stocking.
Now before anyone in the USA and Canada gets too over-excited I'm really sorry but Canongate can't post Rocky can't deliver this one to you for copyright reasons, but the rest of the world is fine.

But to the rescue Oxford University Press who can send Oxford World's Classics to infinity and beyond plus the moon or anywhere else, and they have kindly offered a Balzacian bundle so that you can all catch hyper-Balzacitis along with me, and we can all go into quarantine together and drink Balzac Lattes and write our thoughts on blue-tinged paper with raven quills.
Very tres bien belle epoch eh?
So a copy of Eugenie Grandet, Pere Goriot and Cousin Bette up for grabs too.
So off you go again, and have no fear about entering every day if you want to, that's what draws are for, names in comments for a copy of these absolutely fabulous must-have volumes and Rocky will be drawing the names for Prizes 1 & 2 and e mailing the winners later this evening so that they can get the salmon on to cook.