dovegreyreader scribbles

A Day at the Laces

Sorry, that was the best line I could think of to describe a day spent by-passing Exeter and mooching around Honiton this week, but truth be told, not a lot of lace did we find, however Bonhams Auction House did look very appealing with a Vintage Toy Auction in the offing.
Just look at those tiny sewing machines on the top.
But firstly I must digress and explain why we diverted past Exeter.
Did anyone happen to catch University Challenge this week?
Bookhound and I often watch, just to learn the very few new things that we don't already know about differential calculus and we also have an elaborate scoring system of our own, one that awards ten bonus points for getting the same incorrect answer, because this is often the only way to get points.
 Well this week it was a quarter final, Corpus Christi - Oxford, v Exeter University and I had to declare a double interest. Exeter, home of the brave, esteemed and beautiful Cathedral city of my birth and Corpus Christi, Oxford, my alma mater.
The former is undoubtedly true but the latter is a bit of an exaggeration because I did only actually spend one night staying in Corpus Christi (Oxford Literary Festival 08) rather than three years studying , but it was memorable all the same. Mostly because I couldn't remember which was the Corpus Christi door (no signs outside) it was 11pm at night and I ended up trying my key in the doors of many Oxford colleges before I could shriek with some relief  'it fits'.
Anyway this week I quite think we witnessed one of the greatest University Challenge contests in many a long year, thanks to Corpus Christi Trimble.
The whole programme went something like this
Jeremy Paxman - asks question
BUZZ - announcer - "Corpus Christi, Trimble" - answer - correct
Jeremy Paxman - asks question
BUZZ - announcer - "Corpus Christi, Trimble" - answer - correct
Jeremy Paxman - asks question
BUZZ - announcer - "Corpus Christi, Trimble" - answer - correct
Jeremy Paxman - asks question
BUZZ - announcer - Corpus Christi, Trimble - answer - correct

I don't think I've ever seen such a lovely, fresh, self-effacing, lightning-fast intellect in action, any allegations of smug arrogance occasionally levelled at floppy-haired University Challenge contestants from the sofas chez dovegrey were silenced, Corpus Christi Trimble was a treat to watch in action. Nor have I ever heard an embarrassed Paxo half-groan and suggest that Corpus Christi Trimble was finding the questions easy (they absolutely were not) and then to see poor Corpus Christi Trimble apologise (yes really) so politely for getting them all right.
Halfway through the programme The Kayaker flew in through the front door from Croatia to pick up his snow-boarding gear to go to Bulgaria (this sounds like a very long way round to me but best not to ask). It was about all we could do to ask 'good flight' before returning to the starters for ten. The Kayaker watched for a while, declared that Corpus Christi Trimble probably never went to parties which we said wasn't nice at all because by this time we were in thrall to her every utterance, and so off he went for a bath.
So why did we by-pass Exeter on our travels?
It was no good I couldn't face the chagrin and humiliation of a visit to my home city the morning after Exeter had been so soundly trounced with a grand total of 15 to Corpus Christi's 350 something, but actually because I also wanted to find Fiddlesticks, the Honiton wool shop.
It was tipping down with that very wet Devon rain and it was unusually cold but I did find and move into Fiddlesticks, while Bookhound went off around the antique emporiums and charity shops.
I emerged cash-poor but wool-rich and can now say that if you are coming to Devon any time soon, divert to Honiton too and go and say hi to Barbara and Wendy who are knee-deep in Noro, Debbie Bliss, Bergere and plenty more delightful offerings of the sheep et al.
If that shelf looks a bit untidy blame me.
Meanwhile Bookhound emerged having quite excelled himself in the Oxfam shop by finding a copy of Dorothy Whipple's autobiography, The Other Day for £3.99. He is indeed a treasure having subliminally absorbed the names that matter and I have no plans to trade him in any day soon.
Too cold and wet to go searching for lace, another day.

Inner Child reading : Five Children and It - E.Nesbit

What a great idea this has been for January, regressing to childhood, snuggled under a blanket with a book that just opens the flood gates of memory and what a wonderful time I've had with Five Children and It by E.Nesbit and a delight to be reunited with the gorgeously stroppy little Psammaed.

'Grown-up people find it very difficult to believe really wonderful things, unless they have what they call proof. But children will believe almost anything and grown-ups know this.'

How much time I may have spent as a child hoping to find a Psammead is another thing entirely because, yes I did believe just about everything I was told and so this book would have been no exception. But how amazing that I can read it again now and be so deeply embedded in the whole story all over again, because I truly was.
How easy it is then still to relate to the writing of Edith Nesbit when she says things like

'The best part of it all was that there were no rules about not going to places and not doing things. In London almost everything is labelled 'You mustn't touch', and though the label is invisible, it's just as bad, because you know it's there, or if you don't you jolly soon get told.'

And so I was on the train and travelling to the house in the country with Anthea, Cyril, Robert, Jane and the big nuisance baby known as the Lamb. Off we went to dig in the gravel pit because yet again the parents have been dispensed with, the servants are in charge and we are all free to roam. The bad-tempered little sand fairy, the Psammead appears out of the gravel to grant a daily wish and the fun begins.
My favourite was the day we all asked for wings because,

'...really there is nothing like wings for getting you into trouble. But on the other hand, if you are in trouble, there is nothing like wings for getting you out of it.'

There are lessons to be learned and as Edith herself suggests, morals will slip in come what may,

'morals are nasty forward  beings and will keep shoving their oars in where they are not wanted.'

It's all wonderfully controlled subversion but with consequences which the children have to consider each time they make a wish which then goes hopelessly off on a frolic of it's own.
Be warned, wishing a house into a castle is a risky business and do err on the side of caution when asking for your baby Lamb to be taken away by gypsies because this will also land you in terrible trouble that you might regret.
Quite interesting how I'm now noticing that it is essential to get the parents out of the way before the fun can begin and I know exactly how this translated when I was a child, Sunday Evensong that's how.
Once we'd shown willing at Sunday School and Church in the morning my brother and I were exempt from Evensong but at twelve (him) and ten (me) considered old enough and responsible enough to manage home alone for about an hour and a half.
I knew we'd get caught out and it was not my idea for the one in the back garden (my brother) to try and shoot arrows right over the house to the one waiting in the front garden (me).
Well I waited and I waited until breathless he suddenly appeared,
'Just come and take a look at this' he gushed and to this day I still marvel at the sight of that arrow stuck firmly to the parents' bedroom ceiling. It had somehow shot through the little open fanlight window (praise be the thing was open or this could have been much worse)  and there it was a-quivering. Of course pulling it off left a great big black blob on the ceiling which neither of us thought would be in the least incriminating but of course we hadn't reckoned on the Tinker's astute powers of observation.
I think the end result was a lot of laughter but the bow and arrow was certainly confiscated and we returned to being good children for a week or so, and that might have been either before or after my earliest illicit encounter with a sewing machine, which was also a Sunday Evensong moment, but one which I'll save for another day, that was the daring 1950s for you.
I defy anyone not to find their Inner Child and roll up laughing when they read Five Children and It, some moments of pure un-adult-erated childish joy emerged as I read, and the end result is of course that I must be happy with my lot in life and I must not wish for the wool shop to be moved to my spare room...though many would argue that's unnecessary, it's already there.
Next Friday I'll share my selection for my second Inner Child reading weekend of 2009 and I can't wait to read them, have you chosen yours?

Vicarious antipodean loveliness

I never cease to be amazed by the generosity of spirit that hovers out there and wings its way towards dovegreyreader scribbles and I am eternally grateful for it. It is something that can never be taken for granted but it adds an immeasurable amount of feel-good factor to the scribbling.
I was immensely relieved to know that Pamela Gordon, neice of Janet Frame and executor of her literary estate looked favourably on my tentative steps towards complete Janet adulation. It's a bit like arriving at a party when everyone else has been rocking for hours and you don't quite know what's gone before, very easy to stroll and in and get it all completely wrong. Except can there be rights and wrongs in the way a book affects you, I think not, but I think very easy to rush to judgement and get it wrong about aspects of Janet's life and history, which is why I'm reading it all voraciously and aiming for accuracy and sensitivity when I invest it all with my own thoughts.
So having heaved a sigh and shared some lovely e mails with Pamela, imagine my delight when two parcels arrived from New Zealand. Bookhound received these from Jim who may be getting a little weary of my doorstep delight as he struggles in the gate, especially after the Canada moment.
I jump up and down on the verandah trilling, 
'Brilliant Jim, ooooohhh fantastic' and enthuse from the doorstep.
Bookhound says apologetically,
'Sorry Jim' and dashes out to help.
Finding Janet's books here in the UK is proving quite  a challenge and I am shopping all over the internet to find decent copies at affordable prices and they are starting to arrive, but I was thrilled to receive two books (actually three) from Pamela none of which I have.
One hefty volume containing Intensive Care and Daughter Buffalo and another You Are Now Entering the Human Heart, a collection of Janet's writing chosen by herself. I've also gathered in Faces in the Water and Scented Gardens for the Blind.
Note to Stella : Yellow Flowers in the Antipodean Room has arrived (saying it three times was enough)
Pamela also very kindly added in a little New Zealand calendar which is hanging right by my desk and this month people, let me tell you I am vicariously visiting the Prince of Wales Feathers Geyser, Whakarewarewa in Rotarua with another little aerial shot of Waiotapu. I'm assuming the water shoots up in a sort of three-fold Ich Dien feather formation but I could be wrong all the way back here in Devon, where a geyser is what we used to have over the bath to heat up the water.
I have also been blessed with some genuine New Zealand fabric bought for me in Kaikoura by the friend who retired recently and went off on a round the world trip, so I have some antipodean stitching to consider too. I shall be reading Janet closely for some quilt block hints, Janet's Star...Snowy Owl...Ocean Waves...Sister's Choice...expect a little Janet Frame wallhanging. I'm suddenly inspired to join up the reading and the sewing again and now that I'm on the Bernina Thermal surely this one's calling out to be made.

Even more exciting book news...

Two bouts of good news in one day are you keeping up? It's all too much and suddenly January's looking up very big time, first Sebastian and now Libby.
Now I am really excited about this because Libby's been keeping me in the loop and things have got more and more exciting.
I've just been bursting a gasket waiting for the official announcement and it's arrived.
Anyone who was visiting here last year may recall a self-published book which I read alongside The Guernsey Potato and Things book called War on the Margins by Libby Cone. In reality it slightly eclipsed the Spud book for me, just arriving out of the blue like that and without an ounce of hype or publicity to force itself onto anyones' shelves, and I decided it was so good I'd hitch it a little press on the back of the Peelings in the hope that a publisher somewhere might just notice it.
Now whether it was down to dovegrey publicity who knows because we are just writing about books we love here and have not the first clue what's going on out there, just as long as someone somewhere recognised the true worth of this book.
I know they did and now it's official.
This from The Bookseller.

"Duckworth has bought world rights for a debut novel about the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands. Mary Morris, commissioning editor, acquired the rights to War on the Margins from the author, Libby Cone.
The title has previously been self-published in the USA and has had much blog coverage. Duckworth plans to publish the book in July this year. Morris said: "This gripping, unforgettable novel follows the deepening horror of the Nazi regime in Jersey and the extraordinary bravery of those who sought
to subvert it."
Although fiction, the story draws on many Second World War documents, broadcasts and private letters. It tells the story of two artists whose anti-Nazi campaign leads to imprisonment and a death sentence."

I can't tell you what a privilege it has been to have contributed even a tiny fraction to Libby's success with War on the Margins, because I have no doubt it will do well and the credit must be all hers for such meticulous work on a brilliant book which deserves wide recogniton, and who knows, you might perhaps almost just possibly have read about it here nearly first.

The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry - redux

I rarely bring a post out of the archives for a reincarnation but I decided to pluck this one from the back of the dovegreyreader shelves because today is a special day and I am just so thrilled that Sebastian Barry has finally won a much-deserved prize for The Secret Scripture (whilst never forgetting the we-was-robbed Booker moment of A Long Long Way,) congratulations to him and to everyone at Faber for the Costa Book Award.

'...that strange glow, just a few fields east of happiness.'

As if I could ever speak in any language but the superlative about anything that Sebastian Barry writes?
I know I've only read one other, but A Long Long Way still for me the best book that never won the Booker prize, and all the evidence I would ever need that Sebastian is incapable of writing a duff line.
But I'm also mindful of something else I have read recently.
A very revealing piece by Robert McCrum here.
An overview of changes in the literary world of the last ten years. Blogs get a mention and with it the suggestion that as the home of the Common Reader they may generate more heat than light. It was all enough to set me thinking because in one respect he's very right. It's certainly hard to temper enthusiasm and not plunge overboard without a lifebelt when a book touches your heart.
That said it would seem I'll never learn.
Some books are just a blessing.
To read them is to be elevated to some higher literary plain and it would seem that any topic happening to stray into Sebastian Barry's poetic writing firmament can expect to get the treatment.  It's difficult not to sink into descriptive cliche but the book is hauntingly elegiac and here it is the life of Roseanne McNulty which is so beautifully crafted in such exquisitely carved prose. Quite breathtaking to read line after line of it to be honest and this is most certainly not a book to rush. I just savoured every single word and couldn't bear to turn the final page.
Roseanne may be almost a hundred years old, no one can be sure, but much of her life has been spent in the Roscommon Mental Hospital. Through Roseanne's own telling of her story alongside the Commonplace journal of her psychiatrist, Dr Grene, the sad story of her life slowly emerges.
It's sadder than sad, it's heartbreaking and beneath it all Ireland glistens pure emerald, its island history replete with flaws,

'a country of cupboards, every one with a skeleton in it, especially after the civil war, no one was exempt.'

Glinting through small chinks in Roseanne's story, history told at a slant, so here's a book that you emerge from both informed as well as strangely uplifted, if a little emotionally wrung out. Sebastian Barry constantly reminding his reader that all may not be as it seems, and the untrustworthiness of any historical account is placed under the microscopic lens as Roseanna recounts her memories alongside Dr Grene's account. Roseanne witnessing events as a child, saw only what a child could see and knew only what, as a child, she had been told, whilst knowing full and well that 'a child is never the author of his own history.'

'It makes me a little dizzy to contemplate the possibility that everything I remember may not be real, I suppose. There was so much turmoil at that time that - that what? I took refuge in other impossible histories, in dreams, in fantasies? I don't know.'

This is the world of 'grief as a wailing of the soul' so prepare for a compelling and deeply satisfying novel, and one that leaves a profound and lasting impression about a woman who describes herself thus,

'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 a bleak skirt and blouse...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.'

And a doctor who must decide

'What is wrong about her account if she sincerely believes it? Is not most history written in a sort of wayward sincerity? I suspect so....the one thing that is fatal in the reading of an impromptu history is a wrongful desire for accuracy. There is no such thing.'

If I have the vaguest hint of a shadow of the merest sliver of a doubt it concerns the ending.
Far be it from me to unplait Sebastian's carefully woven and intricately wrought, nay masterly, storytelling, but in my very humble opinion the book could have easily coped with uncertainty in its final pages, in fact much within suggested that would be the case. Had Sebastian gently left me wandering in that melancholy but deeply poetic place to which he seems to transport a reader I would have thrived. But let nothing mar the accolades, the writing is far far too memorable for anything so minor to stand in its way.
So back to Robert. I do so agree with what he says but in this instance make no apology, sometimes a lot of heat encourages readers to discover their own light and that feels like no bad thing to me.

I rarely bring a post out of the archives for a reincarnation but I decided to pluck this one from the back of the dovegreyreader shelves because today is a special day and I am just so thrilled that Sebastian Barry has finally won a much-deserved prize for The Secret Scripture (whilst never forgetting the we-was-robbed Booker moment of A Long Long Way,) congratulations to him and to everyone at Faber for the Costa Book Award.

'...that strange glow, just a few fields east of happiness.'

As if I could ever speak in any language but the superlative about anything that Sebastian Barry writes?
I know I've only read one other, but A Long Long Way still for me the best book that never won the Booker prize, and all the evidence I would ever need that Sebastian is incapable of writing a duff line.
But I'm also mindful of something else I have read recently.
A very revealing piece by Robert McCrum here.
An overview of changes in the literary world of the last ten years. Blogs get a mention and with it the suggestion that as the home of the Common Reader they may generate more heat than light. It was all enough to set me thinking because in one respect he's very right. It's certainly hard to temper enthusiasm and not plunge overboard without a lifebelt when a book touches your heart.
That said it would seem I'll never learn.
Some books are just a blessing.
To read them is to be elevated to some higher literary plain and it would seem that any topic happening to stray into Sebastian Barry's poetic writing firmament can expect to get the treatment.  It's difficult not to sink into descriptive cliche but the book is hauntingly elegiac and here it is the life of Roseanne McNulty which is so beautifully crafted in such exquisitely carved prose. Quite breathtaking to read line after line of it to be honest and this is most certainly not a book to rush. I just savoured every single word and couldn't bear to turn the final page.
Roseanne may be almost a hundred years old, no one can be sure, but much of her life has been spent in the Roscommon Mental Hospital. Through Roseanne's own telling of her story alongside the Commonplace journal of her psychiatrist, Dr Grene, the sad story of her life slowly emerges.
It's sadder than sad, it's heartbreaking and beneath it all Ireland glistens pure emerald, its island history replete with flaws,

'a country of cupboards, every one with a skeleton in it, especially after the civil war, no one was exempt.'

Glinting through small chinks in Roseanne's story, history told at a slant, so here's a book that you emerge from both informed as well as strangely uplifted, if a little emotionally wrung out. Sebastian Barry constantly reminding his reader that all may not be as it seems, and the untrustworthiness of any historical account is placed under the microscopic lens as Roseanna recounts her memories alongside Dr Grene's account. Roseanne witnessing events as a child, saw only what a child could see and knew only what, as a child, she had been told, whilst knowing full and well that 'a child is never the author of his own history.'

'It makes me a little dizzy to contemplate the possibility that everything I remember may not be real, I suppose. There was so much turmoil at that time that - that what? I took refuge in other impossible histories, in dreams, in fantasies? I don't know.'

This is the world of 'grief as a wailing of the soul' so prepare for a compelling and deeply satisfying novel, and one that leaves a profound and lasting impression about a woman who describes herself thus,

'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 a bleak skirt and blouse...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.'

And a doctor who must decide

'What is wrong about her account if she sincerely believes it? Is not most history written in a sort of wayward sincerity? I suspect so....the one thing that is fatal in the reading of an impromptu history is a wrongful desire for accuracy. There is no such thing.'

If I have the vaguest hint of a shadow of the merest sliver of a doubt it concerns the ending.
Far be it from me to unplait Sebastian's carefully woven and intricately wrought, nay masterly, storytelling, but in my very humble opinion the book could have easily coped with uncertainty in its final pages, in fact much within suggested that would be the case. Had Sebastian gently left me wandering in that melancholy but deeply poetic place to which he seems to transport a reader I would have thrived. But let nothing mar the accolades, the writing is far far too memorable for anything so minor to stand in its way.
So back to Robert. I do so agree with what he says but in this instance make no apology, sometimes a lot of heat encourages readers to discover their own light and that feels like no bad thing to me.

Pym-poodleness

I'm still pouring a regular tipple of Pym's into my reading punch and No Fond Return of Love has been my latest Babs read and what can I say beyond, loved, loved, loved it?
Barbara Pym just has the eye to wither and dissect what she sees in front of her, dessicate and then rehydrate to give it all some context within her plot and hey presto, you have life as it was then.
Dulcie, a woman of means and Viola, a woman of pecuniary disadvantage, meet at a conference and I was instantly reminded of similar events I have been to.
You pitch up in your little student cell block bedroom, unpack and then you get that sinking lonely feeling and wonder what on earth you are doing there.
Where has that initial enthusiasm gone, the excitement that induced you to book months ago and then to travel halfway across the country to be there.
You thought you were looking forward to it but all of a sudden you wish you hadn't, or that might just be me?
I do get very homesick when I'm away. Penelope Fitzgerald was the same and wrote about it in House of Air.

'Homesickness is a real illness and that reason has no power against.'

But I digress, this conference is going to be fascinating because it's on the subject of Indexing.
That's right, writing indexes to books. Viola knocks on Dulcie's door in the middle of the night with an acute attack of something akin to homesickness and the seeds of an odd friendship are sown as Dulcie talks Viola out of her slough of despond,

'What a pity we can't make a cup of Ovaltine, was her last conscious thought. Life's problems are often eased by hot milky drinks.'

Pure Pym.
Dulcie and Viola both are unwitting stalkers of men, mostly lecturers and vicars it would seem, there's no two ways about it, as they pursue their prey gently but with resolve half way around the country and somehow cope unashamedly with the unexpected confrontations and meetings as they figure out the romantic course that their lives will take. Viola is the assertive one compared to Dulcie's quiet but dogged approach to life but as they scour cemeteries in the West Country resort of Taviscombe for the grave of the husband of the widow who is the mother of the lecturer whose brother is a vicar, (have you got that?) you can't help but giggle. Barbara Pym is masterly at demonstrating the hold that an inquisitive and largely unrecognised infatuation can have and the lengths her women will go to in achieving their aim.
This was the era of women with blue rinses clutching a matching blue-rinsed poodle which begs the question which I needs must now ask, where have all the poodles gone?
Everyone had a poodle in the 1950s and 60s and now I'm very sorry and can only apologise for taking you along this discussion route, please skip this bit if you want to, but suddenly I need to know; we were always trying to avoid the white poodle poo on the pavements, it used to play havoc with the wheels of my roller skates...did you have this trouble?
Is white poodle poo a figment of my imagination?
Likewise I've been trying to remember when the Dressing Gown became the House Coat because those feature in this book too, and I distinctly remember my transition from red, corded and tasselled robe to a sort of light hyacinth blue with flowers, quilted, nylon affair and I thought I was absolutely the bee's knees and probably wanted to wear it to school (but didn't).
Barbara Pym never fails to delight, even when, as with this book, events take a turn for the farce I was still lapping it all up and laughing because Babs can do very funny too 

'Celibacy so often did stick out a mile, and not only among the clergy.'

Well, I laughed and there is plenty more laughter in No Fond Return of Love, perfect January reading.

Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day here in the UK, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
When I posted on here recently about my Irene Nemirovsky reading, Hannah kindly left a comment alerting everyone to the Irene Nemirovsky exhibition currently on display at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.
Sadly, a flight to the Big Apple not really on my January agenda but inquiries about an exhibition catalogue proved positive, Warren in the museum shop and I discussed postage and he managed it as cheaply and quickly as possible and so I ordered one there and then. Sometimes I'm just really thankful that I  bother to do these things and usually purchases like this will be on impulse. Given the flimsy pound situation I do think twice these days, but once I knew of this book I had to have it ('twas ever thus)  and so I was delighted when not what we might call a catalogue (floppy softback ) but a very smartly bound hardback book with fabric binding arrived from the US, Woman of Letters Irene Nemirovsky and Suite Francaise.
Poor Jim the Postie, more excited squealing from me on the doorstep in my pyjamas.
Having done this the direct way I can now tell you rather sheepishly that Woman of Letters seems to be readily available on Amazon UK (and silly me for not checking that) but you can all benefit from that discovery if you want to, and that will make me feel better about my impulsive extravagance, but in any case hopefully I've helped the cause and I am more than very delighted to have this book on my shelves. A wealth of writing and photographs bring to life the young Irene born in Kiev on February 11th 1903, who wrote her first poems in Russian in 1918

'Born among so many different people
Now I know I am a stranger here
And I could have had another destiny
The destiny to which I devote all my dreams.'

As you know I've had a battle royal with both the hype and what to me felt like the incongruous image of the new suitcase on the cover of Suite Francaise, I'd love to have read this French edition (which I bought and then realised was in French), but I have managed the UK edition at last, read the book over several weeks because there was no rushing this, and was predictably completely swept up and along by both parts.
Storm in June, the exodus from Paris after the Nazi Occupation, the threads of people's lives running alongside each other, in Irene's own words on April 24th 1942,

'Suite Francaise will be the struggle between individual and community destiny.'

People experiencing the same event from so many differing perspectives, occasionally and unknowingly glancing off each other and the honest but fictional observations that Irene Nemirovsky wanted to pin down and record for posterity.

'Now don't forget what is good in War and Peace e.g.,it's in the middle of all these incredible upheavals that people carry on with their lives more or less normally and in the end, only think about surviving, loving, eating etc.'

Then Dolce and the tiny threads that weave in from Storm in June as the trials, deceits and courage of a life of Occupation begin in earnest. Alongside it's impossible to ignore the grand vision that Irene had of the whole, and much of her planning for the next books makes clear that Captivity and the following two volumes, tentatively called Battles and Peace, would have been utterly magnificent in their scope and vision.
To finish Suite Francaise is to end on a note of inevitable loss, a sort of thwarted sense of anticipation for what we don't have to look forward to. Irene's writing so good that I think I could intuitively sense where she might go next, which lives she would follow, and I absolutely wanted to go there too.
I was delighted to hear Denise Epstein (Irene's daughter) talking about her mother here and then to read her thoughts on this whole 'suitcase' metaphor in a telling and informative interview in Woman of Letters, because it is one that had worried her when it was suggested that the case be put on display at this exhibition. To look at the case and know its contents, to know that a little girl had obeyed her father's final instruction and had then never let this suitcase carrying her mother's notebooks, written in South Seas Blue ink (might this be the one?) out of her sight, heavy as it must have been.
Can an object ever have carried a greater actual and metaphorical emotional burden?
Would the sight of the suitcase, the only object that Irene Nemirovsky left behind as she was transported to Auschwitz

' attract unhealthy attention once elevated to a museum artefact'.

Even museum directors have blogs these days and here David Marwell mentions the day the exhibits arrived in New York, the first time they had ever left France. Museum of Jewish Heritage presents a cogent and reasoned explanation of why they have put on this exhibition (and put it on it would seem in the face of some very unpleasant criticism of both Irene herself and the family which quite shocked me,) considering Irene Nemirovsky's story to be undisputably a Holocaust one, whilst admitting,

'Nemirovsky's sense of herself as a Jew and the way she behaved under exceptional circumstances may have had ambiguous elements, but there was no ambiguity in the way she was perceived by her enemies or in the nature of her ultimate fate.'

Reading Suite Francaise, post-hype, I have achieved the respect that I knew was waiting in the wings to happen for me, both for Irene Nemirovksy's life and her writing. Denise Epstein is right when she states in her interview that

'I have the impression that each country has interpreted Suite Francaise according to its own real-life experiences.'

If anyone feels compelled to pass critical judgement on Irene herself, and her perceived loyalty or not to her Jewish heritage, it would be useful to read the Chronology of the Life of Irene Nemirovsky by Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Leinhardt included in this book before you do.
I did and with a growing sense of Irene's fear and dis-ease, bordering on panic and barely suppressed terror and then had to ask myself with complete honesty, what exactly would I have done in that terrifying situation and with two small daughters to protect?
You will all have to decide for yourselves, and as for Irene?

'But as for me, I'm working on burning hot lava. Right or wrong I believe that this is what must distinguish the art of our time from the rest, we are sculpting what is happening at this very moment, we are working on burning issues.'

Resistance by Agnes Humbert

I did stop and consider seriously whether all this French Occupation and Russian reading could add to my January doldrums, but on reflection I think not.
Irene Nemirovksy does something strangely uplifting on the page and to read Resistance by Agnes Humbert alongside can only add to the sense of courage and resilience of the human spirit that I am extracting from all this. But I would say approach Resistance with caution if you are feeling fragile.There must be a hundred different ways to read a book and everyone will be receptive to different themes depending on there own emotions at any given time. Enter those gates feeling low and you may just be drawn to focus on the harrowing tragedy, terror and debasing hardship of Resistance, emerging feeling doomed and thwarted by life and the nightmares of history.
In that case don't go there now, don't forget it either but wait until the sun shines again, and no matter how good I was feeling I doubt I would ever read this book last thing at night. Agnes Humbert does her level best to avoid that focus but with the material she has to deal with it is inevitably and relentlessly there. I reached the end by tapping into Agnes's sheer bloody-minded optimism quite quickly and managed to stay the course.
That said the detail of her life as a member of the French Resistance, subsequent capture, imprisonment, trial and then sentence of several years of forced labour makes for grim enough reading but there is an indomitable spirit in there which leaves much unsaid.
In much the same way that Primo Levi in Moments of Reprieve said the unsayable by not saying it, leaving it for the reader to fill in the gaps and silences, so Agnes Humbert often does likewise.
Who can know the real deprivation and stomach-churning terror of that stay in prison whilst all around are being interrogated by the Gestapo and sentenced to death? Yet listen and you hear much more about the singing, the signalling, the whispered conversations, the invisible but intense and palpable love for each other which flowed from cell to cell.
Agnes often doesn't elaborate, she didn't need to, I did it as I read, and when I couldn't quite face it elaboration of detail was off my agenda whilst humbly acknowledging that for Agnes that choice was never an option.
Resistance is a powerful, earth-shattering testimony, a bearing of witness to events much as Irene Nemirovksy offers under the guise of fiction. Agnes Humbert wrote some as a diary but much of this book is her account written from memory immediately after liberation. Memory became Agnes's staunchest ally throughout her incarceration with the constant need to recall and hone every single last detail of the fabricated story that must stand up to interrogation, without letting in a hint of a chink of a slip that might incriminate others.
I think an exploration of the actual word 'resistance' came up when I read the other Resistance by Owen Sheers and the broader meaning of the word asserts itself again throughout Agnes's story embracing every facet of the word's definition from,

'underground: a secret group organized to overthrow a government or occupation force'

and

'the action of opposing something that you disapprove or disagree with'

Nothing Agnes was forced to make in any factory is likely to have worked, she discreetly sabotaged every single thing she could.

to

'the capacity of an organism to defend itself against harmful environmental agents'

and

'an unwillingness to bring repressed feelings into conscious awareness'

In many ways it was this final definition that became Agnes's source of salvation as she somehow entered into a pact with her subconscious to deny feeling and fear in order to survive.
Clinging to Descartes maxim

'...to accustom myself to the belief that we hold nothing entirely within our power except our thoughts'

this became a means of self-empowerment and regaining a semblance of control in a completely disempowering situation.
Agnes even briefly become outraged at her lack of feeling but knows in her heart that to deny feeling is the only  mechanism that can engender any hope, anything else uses up precious mental energy all required to keep body and soul alive. A resiliant optimism and the seeking of friendship wherever she found herself, which was invariably in a position of extreme hardship (and it comes no more extreme than the months spent working with vats of acid in the rayon factory) pervade this book and I could barely begin to imagine what a mixture of trauma and therapy it must have been for Agnes to revisit and recount it all after the war. I suspect Agnes Humbert, by all accounts 'reckless and impetuous by nature', decided to get it done and over with, short-sharp-shock approach, before the emotions took full rein and flooded back in.
Silences and enigmas do persist, how was the incriminating diary preserved and concealed from the clutches of the Gestapo ?
The original manuscript has subsequently vanished without trace, did Agnes Humbert edit or modify it in anyway, rearrange the detail?
In the end I didn't really care, let the historians and critics argue that one out, because reading this alongside Suite Francaise (at last, my final thoughts on that tomorrow) has been quite the best and most humbling of reading experiences.
As always I am indebted to the translators; for Irene Nemirovksy, Sandra Smith and in the case of Agnes Humbert, Barbara Mellor. I never cease to remember that without them all this reading would be floundering in the the abyss of Miss Deadman's vain attempts to improve my schoolgirl French.
Next on this little reading trail which shows no sign of petering out, I think a return to Bad Faith by Carmen Callil is called for.
Now I want to know what was really happening on the 'other side'.

Confessions of a wool shop owner

Spin-a-Yarn at Bovey Tracey have fessed up, the lovely woolaholic owner has e mailed.
I knew it.
They were 'pretending' to stock-take but it wasn't an Oscar-winning performance even I could see that.
Actually it was a lock-in and I was right, they were all sitting on the floor stroking the wool, which would explain the glazed eyes and ethereal smiles.
Can you just imagine being locked in there overnight?
I'd have at least ten things on the go by morning to be completed by about 2012.
Monday opening starts officially tomorrow, so I'm delighted we've got that sorted for all us knitters and don't forget to add a Bovey detour if you are travelling West anytime soon.

Time to find my Thermals

25th January, Virginia Woolf's birthday.
I would hope that plenty of people, Virginia included, felt happy in the month of their birthday. Bookhound is a Capricorn and loves January, I'm a Libran and love September. I know it's not always the case for everyone and for a multitude of reasons, but I love that affinity I feel for the time of year I made my entrance.
But it's January and I have no affinity with January.
Possibly all those past associations of family sadness and loss which all happened between January and March and for some reason my normally reasonably sturdy immune system always takes a nosedive. Usually limited but this year so far two lots of antibiotics, having spent the equivalent of a mortgage on over-the-counter stuff to save me a trip to the doctor's where I'd likely be told that I should know better than to be seeking antibiotics for viral infections, when all along of course it wasn't viral. Nurses really are the worst.
Then another mortgage on wrong prescriptions at £7.10 a time (for something that cost about £2) until you find the right one.
Then all the sequelae of taking antibiotics and more things to sort all that out.
Then the Echinacea that you think might do you some good, and perhaps a course of vitamins bound to help, oh yes and don't forget the probiotics. The lady in Boots and I are really good friends now.
Yes indeed, January doth not suit me.
However I've learnt how to deal with the January doldrums over the years and this year is no exception, it's time to find my Thermals and fly.
Not the Damart vest type, I've been wearing those since October, no these Thermals are those currents of warm air in my life that I know never fail to keep me aloft and afloat, gliding along until spring arrives, because that's another thing; by now I'm fed up with winter, it's never going to snow, just rain; the garden is muddy and flattened by howling gales and things keep breaking...even though the sun might be shining, somehow it's all too easy to miss in January.
I expect everyone has Thermals of their own which like mine are varied and available for selection.
The Book Thermal of course never lets me down and I have some fabulous reading trails on the go, and the Knitting Thermal likewise, but I do have a few other Thermals to choose from and I quite shocked myself with the first one that came to mind, but it's always wise to honour the first glimmer so I did.
I woke up and just knew this was the day to ride it.
The Domestic Goddess Thermal.
Flung open the windows to let in fresh air, stripped beds, cleared up great piles of newpaper, stuffed the left-over chicken carcass in the ancient enormous Le Creuset and into the bottom oven overnight to make recession-beating stock, remembered to get the stock out of the bottom oven today rather than late February, didn't watch the news to hear how terrible things are going to be (I think they can stop telling us now, we've got the message), didn't think once about the fact the my NHS pension still hasn't arrived, thought how brilliant all the Obama-rama has been this week, strode back and forth to the washing machine, gave my new Henry a run around and showed him all the new corners for which he is solely responsible when I point him there, got out my feather duster, cobwebs to chase away (and my thanks to Mary Azarian for that picture)
So by this time the Domestic Goddess Thermal is losing its lift and it's at this point that I have to eke a bit more out if it because having stripped beds, they've now got to be made again; having made gallons of stock something nourishing has to be done with it, but I can usually complete and finish whilst pondering which Thermal I shall move onto next and that's easy because now I'm flying.
Then I reflect back on Virginia Woolf and think what her life must have been like for those periods when she was cut adrift from her Thermals, depressed and taking the rest cure, unthinkable.
So next up for me it's the Bernina Thermal.

The Bernina Thermal could last for weeks.
I'd love to know about your thermals...if you get my drift.

National Twitching Day

January 24th Notes From Walnut Tree Farm and Roger Deakin proceeds as follows,

'In the early sunshine, I strip to the waist, sit outside on the kitchen doorstep before a mirror propped up in a cane chair and cut my hair.'

Now for good reason, one of them being that I don't wish to frighten the horses, you'll be glad to know that I have decided against doing either of those things this morning.
But it's something else today that Roger would surely have appreciated and I'm all organised.
Firstly I have the book to hand, Garden Birds and Wildlife; packed with fascinating facts it says on the cover and they're not wrong. This one has been roaming around in the kitchen and readily to hand since the day it arrived last year. It's full of all the things I thought I knew but didn't and should have known but didn't either, like the difference between a Dunnock and a Sparrow, something which is a constant source of disagreement here as I'm sure it is in your house too.
It's easy really, a Dunnock (Prunella modularis) weighs 21g whilst a Sparrow (Passer domesticus) weighs 34g.

Now I'll agree this might not look a lot like a conventional bird table, but it's of my own invention, a piece of wood which sits on the hedge outside the kitchen window, because now I do have time to stand and stare and twitch.The hedge is high enough to be safe from feline marauders and just to give you an idea, that's the lane on the other side and if someone rides by on a horse we just glimpse a head bobbing up and down.
If they ride by this morning thankfully they won't see me deshabille or cutting my own hair either.
We've been thinking the birds might enjoy a roof and there has been some talk of that possibility, but this is the Tamar Valley, an area of outstanding natural beauty, we'd need planning permission for sure.

But I am worried I might have set up a Buzzard Take-Away because the Buteo buteo are always hovering. If you can forgive the angle of this picture, which does indicate quite how precariously I was hanging out of the bedroom window yesterday , I think you might just spot him up there, there were several but sorry, they kept moving.
That's Cornwall over yonder for anyone who wanted to get their compass bearings.

From the kitchen window I have a perfect view of my bird table and in front of the window a strategically placed piece of granite specially installed by Bookhound for me to er...roll out pastry on whilst drinking in the beauty of my surroundings. We do a lot of leaning and staring from this spot with teapot to hand, but not I must confess a great deal of pastry rolling now we don't have three growing children to feed.
Guffawing ensued about my innovative bird table from those who really should have known better, and frankly groundless moans about the hedge dying underneath when we really couldn't kill that hedge if we tried. It came with the house, a beech hedge would have been so right but instead we inherited many tens of feet of Escallonia Nightmarious which reminds me it will soon be time for the Escallonia Cutting argument.
Bookhound insists it needs doing just as my 'carefully managed' herbaceous border in front is approaching its pinnacle of supreme loveliness, a misty haze of wild geraniums and 'other things'. He always wins and wades in for the shearing, submerging my herbaceous extravaganza in evergreen clippings which never ever die. Left to grow Escallonia Nightmarious does assume regional superiority, becoming impossibly thick and high, thus requiring precarious trimming by ladder, whilst the hedge trimmer will cough and splutter and die (the Black & Decker thing, not Bookhound we hope) and I know all that really, but the argument has become an annual tradition which is seems a real shame to miss out on.
But anyway it's all gone quiet on the bird-table-guffawing front, now supplanted by a constant commentary as to what's just come in to land from whoever happens to be doing the standing, leaning and staring.

So what's this all in aid of ?
Well, it's that time again we must all spend an hour on the RSPB Big Garden Bird Watch
A splendid endeavour that has been happening on this weekend for the last thirty years here in the UK (I'm really sorry, you'd better hang fire in the US, I think you might skew the data with reports of Bald Eagles Haliaeetus leucocephalus) and has thus gathered in a vast amount of data about our wildbird population. As always I'm mildly confused, which probably means I haven't read the instructions properly, but I must only count each bird once apparently and not the same bird twice or ten times.
So how will I know whether it's the same Blue-Tit (Cyanistes caeruleus) ten times or ten different ones? We have a colony of Wrens...wait for it, Troglodytes troglodytes,and I can't tell them apart either.
Anyway I'm going to have a go and now that my dovegrey ( Streptopelia decaocto, which sounds more like a throat infection with productive cough, I'm quite upset) bird table has been in place for several weeks it is generating traffic. Things got off to a slow start but have looked up since the Gamekeeper, brought in as Chief Advisor, added some seed to my leftovers of loaf.
This little Erithacus rubecula (family Turdidae)  is a regular, very territorial and often won't let anything else come into land so there's a lot of circling going on.
 

I'm hoping it's not cheating to run round to the back garden within the given hour and find our friendly Mistle Thrushes (Turdus viscivorus) and am I allowed to count Buzzards perched on the hedge?
Just hoping I don't witness The Great Buteo buteo Take-Away Massacre of all time.

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken

I can't help it, it's not that funny but I'd better just get this thought out of the way before I start because I hear the word Willoughby and am instantly reminded of a lovely Australian secretary, Joanie, who worked in the clinic with us years ago. She was utterly hilarious, completely anarchic and brought a real touch of something subversively bold and different to a little working medical community here in Devon. We were her very own whingeing poms and she let us know it but she lived in a road called Willowby Park which she had renamed Wallaby Park to remind her of home. I can't hear the word without remembering Joanie wherever she is now.
But back to The Wolves of Wallaby Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken and a book I most definitely remember reading as a child and I think as part of one of those library reading contests that were supposed to last through the entire six weeks of the summer holidays. I being eager-beaver little dovegreyreader had usually whistled through it in a couple and I must have been a complete and utter pain dashing back into the library on a daily basis to harangue a librarian into asking me the questions on my books, get my card stamped and dash off with the next lot. I used to take these things very seriously.
Orphaned Sylvia must leave her beloved but ailing and impoverished guardian Aunt Jane in London and go and live with her wealthy cousin, only child Bonnie, at Willougby Chase, it's all agreed. Bonnie's parents are off on a long trip abroad and Bonnie needs a companion, there will be servants and unaccustomed luxury and comfort for Sylvia, possets and pipkins of nourishing soup, lemon-mint baths, all-enveloping fur capes and a governess has been engaged for the duration.
I knew exactly where I was from the very first sentence of the book,

'It was dusk - winter dusk. Snow lay white and shining over the pleated hills, and icicles hung from the  forest trees. Snow lay piled on the dark road across Wallaby Willoughby Wold, but from dawn men had been clearing it with brooms and shovels. There were hundreds of them at work, wrapped in sacking because of the bitter cold, and keeping together in groups for fear of the wolves, grown savage and reckless from hunger'.

Because this is Joan Aiken's England in 1832, there is a channel tunnel from Dover to Calais (that seemed just as amazing as the wolves in the early 1960s when I read this) and a great many wolves have migrated from Russia to Europe through the tunnel and are now an everyday threat in the English countryside. Trains rush into stations at full pelt and screech to a halt to confuse the wolves waiting for a quick human snack when the passengers alight, wolves readily crash in through train windows and doubtless none of this would have astonished my childhood imagination quite as much as it did my adult one.
It's also perhaps a lesser known fact that really I wanted to be an ice skater not a nurse, and so I know for a fact I would have been completely impressed with Sir Willoughby who, lovely Papa that he was, in readiness for the fact that Bonnie will immediately want to take her friend skating on the frozen rivers, has ordered six pairs of white kid skating boots, all different sizes.
Six pairs, imagine that and at this point I'd probably have drifted  off into my Sonja Henie - Noel Streatfeild - White Boots reverie because on many occasions I was Sonja of course, or failing that I'd settle for being Doreen Denny.
I was equally perturbed this time round when Sylvia's strange carriage companion on her long overnight journey alone to Willoughby Chase suddenly produces a shotgun and takes out rabbits from the train window for some target practice.To say nothing of the moment the wolf leapt in, is summarily dispatched (stabbed with glass from the broken window) and Sylvia and the strange man crawl along on the outside of the train carriage to the next compartment rather than sit paddling around in wolfish remains.
Heavens to betsy what's going on here, and we moan about Great Western. I certainly don't remember this book coming with any " Do not try this at home" caveats but it probably would now, nor was I disturbed by any of it.
No good can come from anyone called Miss Slighcarp, least of all if she's a governess and I remember loving all the subterfuge and especially the fact that these two girls, Bonnie and Sylvia hit it off right from the start. There was none of the usual social class division between the two of them as they pool resources to outwit the dastardly plan to strip Bonnie of her inheritance.
I've been dipping into Marcus Crouch's book The Nesbit Tradition : The Children's Novel 1945-1970 for my sins, just out of interest and to see what the received opinion is on some of these writers now being closely analysed, and I was quite surprised to read this written about about Joan Aiken in 1972,

'Gratitude for Joan Aiken's high spirits and the gusto of her story-telling may make the reader value her rather beyond her worth. These are precious qualities, but they are not enough. What Miss Aiken lacks most grievously is self-discipline. Her stories gallop recklessly in all directions at once with never a touch of rein from the author. Grand yarns, they are too casual, even perhaps too full of self-mockery to be taken entirely seriously."

Not by the nine-year old dovegreyreader they weren't, I loved this one and I have just loved it all over again.

Joseph Boyden

Flying the Canadian flag again today and that means it's also a good moment to announce that KevinFromCanada, a frequent flyer around the blogs has finally set down some roots with a blog of his own here. I knew if I prattled on about Canadian literature for long enough he'd have to surrender, someone's got to add in the checks and balances to all my wildly off-the-wall assumptions about it from Devon. Pay a visit, there are bound to be blog-warming mooseburgers and things happening and he's also got a great contest going.
Often my discovery of an author will be a completely chance event and thus it was with Canadian writer Joseph Boyden.
I'd met up with a friend who worked for a publisher in London, in those pre-dovegreyreader days, and knowing better than to a pitch up empty-handed she'd brought along a few proof copies for me. My envy at the luck of someone who works for a publisher and is drowning in books is second only to that of people who work in bookshops, rapidly followed by acute jealousy about librarians, especially when my own job meant all I ever drowned in was free samples of nappy rash cream with the occasional pack of post-it notes thrown in.
My joy still knows no bounds at ARCs or ERCs or whatever they are called in the trade and 'twas ever thus but I waited until I was in a Great War reading phase before opening Three Day Road and I was astounded and astonished by what I read.
To think I'd left this book lying around for months before opening it.
Two Ojibwa snipers Xavier and Elijah off to fight in the trenches in France but lying beneath the powerful  Ojibwa myth of the Windigo, the evil spirit that possesses anyone who turns to cannibalism. It's true, I read bits of this book with my eyes shut, but it's one I will most certainly read again. Whilst Joseph Boyden, despite his Metis roots via his mother's family, lays no claim to being  the definitive voice of the Canadian Aboriginal population, he does take great care to ensure it's a voice that is heard and one that he projects with a well-researched accuracy
The story of Through Black Spruce, Joseph Boyden's second novel is here, (and the book's journey from Vancouver to Devon in amongst a load of sopping wet kayaking gear) and as a result of that I was delighted when Canadian publisher NeWest Press then made contact with me. They had read my thoughts on Through Black Spruce and were wondering whether perhaps, bearing in mind my love of all things Joseph, might I like a copy of his very recent inaugural Henry Kreisel Lecture given at the University of Alberta?
How quickly do you think it is possible to transmit ''yes please' from Devon to Canada?
I'm always at fever-pitch waiting for Postman Jim to arrive, always grateful that Royal Mail still feel it is worth the bother to drive all the way out to us, and on the day of the Canadian parcel Jim met with a particularly effusive greeting.
I settled down to read From Mushkegowuk to New Orleans : A Mixed Blood Highway  within the day.
Henry Kreisel was a teacher of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta and 'beloved for his capacity to change hearts and minds', introducing the first course in Canadian Literature to the University. At the heart of the lecture the fostering of 'a critical attitude that understands literature as a necessary participant in contemporary public debate.'
Anyone who has read Joseph Boyden's novels will know they could not have made a better choice for this the inaugural lecture, and I can only begin to imagine how powerful this event must have been to have heard 'live', because even on the page the written word becomes equally passionate here in rural, snowless, Devon UK. 
Interweaving some heart-stopping personal anecdotes and some great paddling moments (the Kwetabohigan Rapids..long rolling water dotted with submerged boulders...tricky enough to keep your heart beating fast) which we know all about here, Joseph Boyden takes as his theme the Aboriginal people in Canada and cleverly relates them to poor African Americans, Whites and Hispanics in post-Katrina New Orleans finding many and various similarities in their respective plights, for example,

'Both the native population of Canada and the population of South Louisiana sit upon vast resources from which they don't benefit.'

As someone who lives in both Canada and New Orleans this is a highway that Joseph Boyden travels frequently and the connections he makes are both prescient and applicable on a much wider level.
On reflection Canada rarely hits the headlines here in the UK so in talking about sense of place I will be the first to admit that I only know what I know of Canada and its people from the books I read and the tales my wandering children return home with. Two of them have spent time in Canada this year (yes there's the Kayaker ) and fallen in love with the country, I've never been there, so how else can I know?
How can I reach an understanding of the issues other than through the pages of a book?
Well I have learnt plenty through the books I've read, both to reshape my thinking and inform new ideas and I fully expect to learn plenty more via KevinFromCanada's blog too, but as I read Joseph Boyden's courageous manifesto for both these disenfranchised peoples I realised I had just learnt a whole lot more about inequality and human rights as well.

On the radar

Sometimes a writer drifts onto the dovegrey radar with an intermittent signal, little mentions here and there, snippets half-read in review supplements, perhaps a book arrives but then suddenly it all accumulates into one big important bleep on the screen shaping up to an encounter that can't be ignored a moment longer, and that's happened with a couple of writers in recent weeks.
Firstly Lori Moore.
I've had Lorrie Moore's The Collected Stories in the dayglo orange cover sitting on the bedside table since last July. I know so exactly because whenever I embark on a short story collection I jot the down the date I've read the story alongside the title. No it's no good asking, I don't know why either, other than at times like this it's useful to be able to tell you that I read the first story in July and then for some reason the collection was sidelined and sat there gathering dust. Eventually, just this week I decided the dayglo orange was clashing horribly with the soothing decor of the bedroom and it might as well come downstairs and go back on the shelf for a second attempt another year. Then I read Scott Pack's interview with Robert McCrum and most specifically a message obviously aimed at me

SP: You have interviewed many great names of literature - Vidal, Roth, Mailer - but which contemporary authors do you feel will stand the test of time well enough for the McCrums of the future to want to interview them?

RMcC: Tricky one. In no special order, here are my contemporary future greats: Kazuo Ishiguro, Alan Hollinghurst, Colm Toibin... The obvious point is that the development of literary greatness is very hard to predict. But these are all serious - and very good. America is even trickier, but I'd tip two women: Lorrie Moore and Marilynne Robinson, who are both exceptional

STOP...DO NOT MOVE THAT BOOK  we already know about Marilynne Robinson and so I have now left Lorrie Moore, clashing away like crazy on the bedside table,(and now it occurs to me, I could just take the dust jacket off) and am back to a story a day from the collection, it's all looking very promising so there will doubtless be more to report soon.
But also on the bedside table, and in an altogether more soothing cover, Notes From Walnut Tree Farm by Roger Deakin.
Various people had been urging me to read Waterlog, Roger Deakin's swimathon journal and Wildwood A Journey Through Trees and I really had meant to. Then another mention of Notes From Walnut Tree Farm from a friend just days after I had read this excellent piece on Roger Deakin in the Hamish Hamilton online literary journal Five Dials and that was me tipped over the edge and tracking down the books.
It's all very well reading all-things Irene Nemirovsky then troika-laden Russian angst and now Agnes Humbert's Resistance, but these are certainly not good night time reading choices.
If ever there was a soothing book most suited to pre-slumber reading and one of which I think Clifton Fadiman might approve, then Notes From Walnut Tree Farm is it. Extracts from the record Roger Deakin kept of his daily life, work, thoughts and memories in the last six years of his life living in his much-loved house in Suffolk and also travelling around. It's edited into just a single chronological year perfect for reading short extracts in keeping with the seasons and I'd quite thought I'd read it that way and make it last the year.
Stupid idea, I'm up to March already and will probably arrive at December before January is out, but the perfect thing about a book like this is to be able to turn to the beginning and start again and I will, because Roger Deakin's eye for nature is the perfect accompaniment to life out here in the backwoods. His observations will blend seamlessly but meaningfully into the view from the window and life out along the lane.
Just wondering whether either of these are on anyone else's radar?

The Post Office Girl by Stefan Zweig

The arrival of a book by Stefan Zweig is always a time for celebration chez dovegrey ever since I first discovered his writing the day I decided to explore some of the authors whose books had been banned in Nazi Germany. I think this in turn was a trail that had opened up after I had read Stones From the River by Ursula Hegi. It sounds like an odd reading trail to follow but I was intrigued, what had been so controversial about these books and their authors, I wanted to know.
I had unwittingly already read books by a few but I had never heard of Stefan Zweig and so began that little addiction and Pushkin Press to the rescue with The Royal Game, Twilight, Moonbeam Alley and Fantastic Night & other stories read in quick succession.
The Post Office Girl, translated by Joel Rotenberg, arrived from Sort Of Books, one chapter and I was instantly in it for the home run. The setting is perhaps classic Stefan Zweig, mittel Europe between the wars and Christina the Post Office girl of the title living a dull, miserable existence in rural Austria. Working in the Post Office by day and caring for her invalid mother the rest of the time Christina Hoflehner's life is a grey and joyless relentless grind until a letter from her mother's sister, who has fared altogether better in the marriage and wealth stakes, invites Christina to share a fortnight's holiday with them. Klara has suffered sudden onset pangs of guilt at her serial neglect of her sister over the years and this gesture towards her neice will surely make amends as she and gruff husband Anthony van Boolen travel from the US for a relaxing high society sojourn at a luxury hotel in the Swiss Alps.
Christina's is the generation in Europe that stood to lose the most from the Great War and the sense of resentment and dissatisfaction is profound in this book,

'Surrounded by this coarse and lustful postwar generation she feels ancient, tired, useless, and overwhelmed, unwilling and unable to compete...the war stole her decade of youth. She has no courage, no strength left even for happiness.'

By the age of twenty-six Christina has already prepared to hunker down and accept her lot, until of course she samples life at the glittering Palace Hotel. Exposed to the silken smooth world of money and luxury, where the furniture gleams and the carpet suspires Christina steps in to sample a way of life that she eventually realises will change her forever.
It was always going to be a moment of extreme cruelty when the clock struck midnight and this Cinderella is catapulted back into the harsh reality of life at home, the cramped, musty little box-like garret flat smelling of vinegar and a lifetime of the dull day job and caring for her dropsical mother with the bloated feet.
The happily ever after bit will surely rely on the entrance of a cheekily handsome prince on a white charger galloping in stage left, so when the only man on the horizon is Ferdinand, a thin, bitter and angry down-at-heel survivor of the Russian front, wearing not a gold encrusted doublet and a pair of natty hose but a worn-out inverness coat, you start to worry for poor Christina and wonder quite what the rescue plan might be.
Right that's it, no more plot, enough is plenty, not a word more.
Stefan Zweig was a great friend of Freud so expect plenty of 'who am I really' deliberations and some wonderful character development in Christina but I also came away with a very clear idea of the despair, blame, anger and hatred that fuelled and propelled a generation towards another war. The portents couldn't be outlined with more precision as Stefan Zweig focuses on the inequalities and injustices that pervaded people's lives. If you know anything about Stefan Zweig's personal life also be prepared to identify other more sinister portents about which I will say no more either.
This was the archetypal page-turner of a book, the best I have read by Stefan Zweig to date even, people I cared about and just had to know how they fared, which leads me onto my only single solitary disappointment which I will share.
Despite high quality production values, a perfectly judged cover and good weight paper,  I'm wondering whether I had a rogue copy, did mine just miss the glue machine?
I'm reasonably gentle with books as I read them but I do always crack spines and this is the first book to do this in a long time. It started to fall apart in my hands halfway through and thereafter I was done for, just about every page fell out as I turned.
The publishers will hate me for this and booksellers will definitely want to shoot me on sight, but if you plan to buy this edition I'd give that spine a little workout before you do.

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The arrival of a new edition of The Yellow Wallpaper and Selected Writings by Charlotte Perkins Gilman before Christmas had me eager to read that familiar story once more and plenty more of interest in this volume too.
I lose count of the number of times I have read The Yellow Wallpaper but every time the effect is the same, it's magnificent, it's utterly tragic and I am left inwardly crying with rage.
For those who may not have read it, and if you haven't it's very short, twenty pages is all it takes to get you to boiling point. The nameless young wife accompanied by her doctor husband John, arrives at a house in the country  for some rest and recuperation from what is clearly a case of post-natal depression and minus the baby who is being cared for elsewhere,
This time round I thought I'd try and read with a difference, suppress the rage and look at the actual condition of Wife of John because post-natal depression is in the news again this week
Nowadays the NICE guidelines require that all women are asked specific questions post-natally in the hope of identifying post-natal depression and  we'd then usually ask anyone who expressed an inkling to complete the Edinburgh Post - Natal Depression scale.
The EPDS is one of those helpful tools made available which, as well as offering a means of quantifiable assessment, also enabled professionals to bring the whole subject of post-natal depression out into the open, permission to express feelings without fear of being judged to have somehow failed at motherhood. Ten questions, three possible answers to each and a maximum score of three for each question, a score higher than thirteen indicating depression and the higher the score out of thirty the more profound that depression.
It has had its critics and needs to be used with care.
There's no point in offering the EPDS without support systems in place to take referrals...a score of 30/30 and you need to move very fast, scores in the twenties and you need to be ensuring adequate services are available as necessary. If you are asking staff to provide regular counselling support then you must provide supervision for them and so it goes on.
Years ago we never really knew what to say or how best to treat post-natal depression and many women suffered in silence thinking they were alone. Today we should be identifying and talking about it openly and honestly and with appropriate follow-up assessment and carefully managed treatment, outcomes are very good. To have a measurable means of initial assessment is invaluable as a starting point and I have used it effectively in the workplace for many years.
I wondered if it was possible to score Wife of John on the EPDS.
If you can bear to do it try reading The Yellow Wallpaper as I did with a copy of the EPDS questions and answers alongside and see for yourself how Wife of John scores even in those first few pages of the story.
I've read the story through very very slowly at least six times now and have been very careful not to take quotes out of context to try and make them fit the questions. It's still a textbook case, Charlotte Perkins Gilman unwittingly answers all the questions and even amid the confusion of John's controlling influence over his wife's thinking it's still possible to pick out the evidence,

1. I have been able to laugh and see the funny side of things
"It does weigh on me so not to do my duty in any way!"

2. I have looked forward with enjoyment to things
" We have been here two weeks, and I haven't felt like writing before, since that first day."

3. I have blamed myself unnecessarily when things went wrong
" I meant to be such a help to John, such a real rest and comfort, and here I am a comparitive burden already"

4.I have been anxious or worried for no good reason
" You see he does not believe I am sick!
And what can one do?"

5. I have felt scared or panicky for no very good reason
"I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes. I'm sure I never used to be so sensitive. I think it is due to this nervous condition"

6. Things have been getting on top of me
"I don't feel as if it was worth my while to turn my hand over for anything, and I am getting dreadfully fretful and querulous"

7.I have been so unhappy, I have had difficulty sleeping
"He thought I was asleep first but I wasn't, and I lay there for hours"

8. I have felt sad and miserable
"These nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing"

9. I have been so unhappy that I have been crying
"I cry at nothing and cry most of the time"

10. The thought of harming myself has occurred to me
"I am getting angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out of the window would be admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong even to try."

Separated from her baby and effectively imprisoned by the constraints of the ghastly rest cure, in the end  Wife of John's condition can only get worse, it's that old battle with the wallpaper because that's all there is to look at. Lonely and isolated from virtually all human contact in an attic room as she yearns for the pretty little chintzy room downstairs, the inconsolable madness is inevitable and utterly tragic to read.
I suspect Wife of John moves from an initial score of 23/30 towards 30/30 in the space of about six pages.
This new reading of The Yellow Wallpaper did however have one interesting outcome.
Feminist readings condition a harsh response to John but I think I have managed to read him slightly differently, not a lot but I've given a bit of ground this time round. Whilst acknowledging that his treatment of his wife undoubtedly made her far worse and many's the time I have wished much evil to befall him, we do only have Wife of John's side to the story...reliable narrator?
Unreliable narrator?
Reliable unreliable narrator?
Whilst the Woman in the Attic has been given a voice how can we possibly interpret that voice accurately?
Wife of John is very unwell, eventually psychotic, at which point I did have to acknowledge that for husbands and partners the whole post-natal depression scenario can be very frightening and very difficult to handle.
But in the end it was only a partial attack of sympathy, my rage over The Yellow Wallpaper still burns strong especially given the very personal context within which Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote it.
To make comparisons with how we aim to handle post-natal depression these days, a non-stigmatised non-judgemental approach, with compassion, empathy, reassurance, drug treatments as necessary, listening and supportive therapies, a containment of anxiety and above all else keeping and building that essential bond between mother and baby, whatever it takes, and  The Yellow Wallpaper then becomes a book that you realise must never be allowed to go out of print.
Just in case we ever need reminding, heaven forbid but just in case.
(If reading this has raised any issues surrounding post-natal depression or you want any further information start here)

and the winners are...

Sorry, I was dreaming along throught 2009 and quite forgot The Scent of Cinnamon prize draw, good job that hunk of a feline reminded me, and congratulations to the two winners donnafugata and Nancy, if you could e mail me with your addresses we'll do the necessary.

Sunday Salon - The Button Miracle

So, even better, what happened next a complete miracle of its own.
We walked to the Antiques Market down on Topsham Quay, Bookhound goes right to look at bookshelves and I go left to the vintage haberdashery corner.
This corner is a real little snuggly, cosy bit of heaven.
Old knitting and embroidery patterns, brightly coloured knitting needles, old zips, threads, cotton on wooden reels and things you'd long forgotten existed like bodkins and knicker elastic, suspender clips and darning mushrooms. Then there's a vast array of beautifully starched vintage embroidered tableclothes, table runners, those old dressing table mats, napkins, Christening gowns, you name it, it's in there and of course buttons.
Boxes and boxes of them, and somehow I just knew they'd be in there, five petrel blue buttons with my name on them. So it was absolutely no surprise whatsoever when I eventually found them stitched to a card and all for £1.
So the wool shop was closed and the Wool Angel might have been trying to tell me something along the lines of complete-finish-complete-finish whilst the Button Angel was definitely on my side, and so I finally have something to show for that Colinette Prism, frogged to within an inch of its life over the last ten years.
It was Girl's Night In here this week and as it was January we had decided on a jolly New Year gathering to watch the sing-along version of Mamma Mia while we stitched. Everyone has to drive, and some even have to go to work the next day, so we don't do alcohol, but we've been gathering for nigh on ten years now, we all know each other well enough to do very daft. Honestly, there are good reasons not to have neighbours so, with surround sound and the house evacuated by the men, we did justice to the whole bloomin' lot. I'd reached the sleeve cast-off just as that brilliant Dancing Queen sequence came on and was stitching seams just as Meryl and Pearce were doing their clifftop rendition of Winner Takes It All, so that's why those are a bit rough because we really threw ourselves into that. The buttons didn't stand a chance because by this time Julie Walters was dancing on the tables for her rendition of Take a Chance on Me and we were singing in hysterics.
The pattern is Design 29 from the Noro Mini Knits book and gasp...if you follow that link, just look, another wool shop in Devon that I didn't know about, it's Honiton the very next Saturday/Monday we have.
Oh no it's closed on a Monday...at least I checked.
I knitted this on 5mm and 6mm needles with ease, short is the new long apparently and so a lovely quick thing to knit and just look at those buttons, quite wonkily perfect.
Bless the Button Angel and why not sing along with us, that's me in the silver boots... go on, no one's watching.

Saturday on a Monday

Monday's have become the new Saturday chez dovegrey, which is different for us and brings a whole new meaning to Sundays. A big black work cloud used to hover round about Songs of Praise time on a Sunday and that was it, Monday and work would surely follow. But for plenty of other people Monday is still Monday which means everywhere is very quiet. Bookhound has a day off and so we trundle out and about and have cafes and shops to ourselves.
Nothing too innovative, it is January after all,
'Let's go to Spin-a-Yarn at Bovey Tracey'
was my immediate suggestion,
'they're open on a Monday from January I read it in the newsletter',
and the suggestion wasn't rejected because there would be lunch in the lovely Devon Guild of Craftsmen cafe first. So this week, with a few knitting projects in mind, an urgent need for five petrel blue buttons and some unexpected money in my hand off we went.
Then perhaps we'd drive on to Topsham because I've got the bit between my teeth for finding old Puffin Classics in charity shops now and the population of Topsham are very upmarket in their donating.
Well I could hardly contain myself as I strode towards the wool shop after a leisurely lunch, papers etc.The anticipation was enormous, I'd get this, this and this, to make that, that and that, some more of those lovely Brittany wooden needles, oh throw in some of the new Noro sock wool why not, have a stroke and a feel of all the skeins, inhale the inspiration deeply.
Mmm delumpcious hour ahead.
As it is I saved an absolute fortune...because the shop was closed.
Monday opening at the END of January.
Now I had just emerged from my Inner Child reading weekend and I'll own up it was all I could do not to burst into tears, have a tantrum and bang my head on the pavement.
Wool deprivation is not nice and I signalled frantically to the ladies inside asking why the door was locked.
Stock taking that's why, and I can't even bring myself to confess how overcome I was with thoughts of storming, invasion, and occupation as a lady, who if you ask me looked as if she was just sitting on the floor stroking the wool more than stock taking, opened the door a mere chink to tell me I hadn't read the newsletter properly. I'd been too busy reading Five Children and It by E. Nesbit (glorious) and if I'd had a Psammead to hand my wish would have had extraordinary results, forget all that 'beautiful as the day' stuff, just ' move this woolshop to my house' would have sufficed.
I could smell the wool and spy the treasures you see, and Bookhound, sensitive man that he is, also astutely sensed the danger and correctly assessed that this might not be the moment to utter a single word of even the mildest and kindest reproach, so he stuck with the very tactful,
'never mind we can come back'.
I was strangely placated by these soothing words and so big tantrum in the street averted.
Thanks to this sensitive handling of a difficult situation I'd made a good recovery by the time we reached Topsham and there was little chance of a relapse when I spyed a box of old Puffin books in the very first charity shop, 30p each and I immediately picked out six, and even better when we got to the counter they'd actually come from a box marked Half Price so they were only 15p each.
What is it about charity shops that makes you feel a real heel for finding such a bargain?
We did strike a sort of half-way deal which they were thrilled with and thanked us for our generosity, but that somehow makes you feel even worse, because down the road in the second-hand bookshop these are at least £2 each. I was fair skipping around the street when we came out because I had long-forgotten Magnolia Buildings by Elizabeth Stucley until I found this very same edition and a flood of memories followed, all compounded by a very early edition of Worzel Gummidge by Barbara Euphan Todd and a Noel Streatfeild that sounds right up my street, The House in Cornwall.
Bookhound sensibly put me back on the reins and off we went (me not stepping on any pavement lines at all) down to the antiques centre on Topsham Quay where I had something of a Button Miracle which I'll tell you about tomorrow...if you're good, and start the voice exercises now because it will involve singing.

Last call for wimbledoves...

I knew it, we're all glued to our armchairs, who really wants to bounce a tennis ball.
If you can be persuaded into your plimsolls do come and join the three of us warming up on court with little Rafa Nadal (bless), if we can get three more by Sunday we can challenge the Big Mouths, otherwise we'll just let them win the Australian Open and we'll stay in the warm and read books.

Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kastner

The Inner Child reading weekend was a huge success here chez dovegreyreader and I'm now going to schedule it in as a regular slot, first weekend each month if anyone wants to join me. So many books from my childhood that I've wanted to re-read but never quite manage to slip them in amongst everything else, so it's clear I need to create some dedicated time. Of course you don't have to read the books that I do so why not choose one of your own if you want to, and then I'll let you join my Inner Child Gang, there'll probably be a badge and a secret sign and a special password too.
I put aside all my seriously grown-up reading on the Friday, made my four-book selection as if standing in the library on a Saturday morning in the early 1960s and suddenly had that strange buzz of a excitement that I used to have looking at a pile of new unread library books. I was very strict about it and n'er a grown-up book did I open for the whole weekend.
I have no idea how old I was when I first read Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kastner but I suspect I read most of the books I'm revisiting at the moment between the ages of about six and eleven, so 1959 to 1965 or so.
When did I suddenly feel too old to read Malcolm Saville?
Reading again, with the eyes of an adult and trying to refract back to those eyes of a child, has been pure pleasure and I have gleaned a real sense of just why I loved these books so much.
In my mind's eye I could see the actual cover of the copy I'd read as a child and I'm sure it was this one.
Emil and his widowed hairdresser mother live in Neustadt and it is whilst travelling alone by train for a week's stay with his grandmother in Berlin that Emil's adventure begins, and I say no more about that beyond telling anyone who has never read it, or has and has forgotten, there is a thief to be brought to book and as Erich Kastner established for countless future writers of children's fiction, children make the very best detectives.
The book was first published in Germany in 1929 and here in the UK in 1931 and that makes a good deal of the action all the more surprising as Erich Kastner invests his children with untold freedoms to be everything that children are exceptionally good at given the opportunity. Given a sort of well-organised democracy of their own children thrive in the hands of Erich Kastner.
Immediately assimilated into his Berlin 'gang' with no questions asked beyond the prospect of a jolly good adventure and in the rough world of a busy city, Emil rapidly belongs as if he's known them all forever and every enviable childlike quality emerges. Spontaneity, self-organisation, sharing, pooling resources, making sacrifices for  the good of the others, complete loyalty and commitment to each other and the cause, self-discipline, a touch of well-placed rebellion. Worrisome parents are sidelined and just don't feature as this esprit de corps carries the boys along with the addition a token girl in the shape of Emil's cousin Pony Hutchen, (who at least has the advantage of the brand new bicycle) on the trail of the thief and wonderfully imaginative innovations abound.
All that would have passed me by as a child for sure and I'd have been reading this for the complete adventure that it is, but I couldn't put it down this time round either.

Storm, Louisa and the Nuns

As always, the start of a new year and my mind is teeming with reading ideas; books and writers I've been meaning to read for ages but somehow haven't managed to. You could call this Forth-Bridge-reading  because it does just go round and round in a never-ending circle, as long as there are books there never seems to be a dearth of new reading trails.
I have a delicious looking proof copy of the forthcoming biography Margaret Storm Jameson A Life by Jennifer Birkett at my right hand, and a stack of unread Storm Jameson's novels and autobiography to my left, all quite enough to propel me helplessly to tipping point over Storm. Except I can't decide which to read first, the biography looks very enticing, and as I dip in and out I have to make myself put it down because I really should read some of Storm Jameson's novels first, shouldn't I, just to get a feel for her writing. I know very little about her but you know me by now, I'll get stuck in that old pattern of knowing exactly what Storm ate for breakfast before I know the first thing about her writing style.
 It's a habit I'm trying to shift this year though I will of course want to know it all eventually.
Apropos of no known connection to date with Storm ( though I bet I'll find one) I had also pledged to myself a proper-job (as we says down y'ere) look at Louisa May Alcott.
Little Women will surely come into my Inner Child selections very soon but I have always known there was far more to Louisa than that one book. I have had Martha Saxton's biography and a book of Louisa May Alcott's letters languishing around here unread for far too long. Then there's March by Geraldine Brooks which I never did read. The catalyst is often the arrival of a new book and this week that was Eden's Outcasts The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father by John Matteson and published by Norton, all I needed to start a gathering in of all things Louisa May. This is a dual biography of Louisa and her father Bronson, two complex characters and I can't wait to make a start.
There I go again.
Then as if this Forth-Bridge-thinking be any more diverse, I think I fancy some Convent reading because all of a sudden a lot of Nun books seem to be stacking up here. Then I wandered around the shelves and pulled off plenty more, enough to make a decent reading project in its own right.
What's the fascination, because I've never wanted to be one but perhaps I want to know why women do, and why they have down the ages, a crucial aspect of the history of women and I suspect it's all going to be very revealing.
So I have The She-Apostle The Extraordinary Life and Death of Luisa de Carjaval by Glyn Redworth. Luisa secreted into London in 1605, the year of the Gunpowder Plot, setting up an unofficial nunnery, importing banned books, helping persecuted Catholics to flee abroad, all very new territory for my non-fiction reading alongside Nuns A History of Convent Life by Silvia Evangelisti. Then I've added in Virgins of Venice Enclosed Lives and Broken Vows in the Renaissance Convent by Mary Laven and I think that might lead me off on a little Venetian reading trail while I'm there.
I've read In This House of Brede and Black Narcissus by Rumer Godden in recent years so I've left them out this time round but it's year since I Leap Over the Wall by Monica Baldwin has been off the shelf in the old 3/6 Pan edition, so I've added that to the pile. and also The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner. First time round I think I read as far as the chapel collapsing and no further, the book wasn't holding me. I'd read Lolly Willowes and gone on a complete all-out Sylvia Townsend Warner frolic only to be disappointed with what followed. Strange how that can work with some authors and not others
Anyway, that shoud all be enough to keep me going for now and all further suggestions very welcome on Storm, Louisa and the Nuns.

How Fiction Works by James Wood

One of the books I decided it was high time I read and so I did was How Fiction Works by James Wood.
We almost had too many of these books to cope with last year as everyone suddenly felt the need to instruct us in exactly how to read a book. John Mullan's How Novels Work arrived at about the same time and we were all to be suitably instructed in the art of getting this reading thing right.
Except what's right? The temptation is to say 'are we bothered' and just carry on enjoying what we read, in the way that we read it, but never say never I always say. First and foremost I want to read a good book without giving too much thought to how it works, but then I probably am interested in how that has happened beyond my initial emotional response. Then there's always the chance I'll discover some great revelatory eureka reading insight that could change the way I read forever.
In the end I'm not sure I'm reading any differently, but How Fiction Works was an interesting and enjoyable guide through the minefield especially as there were some very helpful hints about To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf which I happened to be reading at the time.
Though at this point, dovegreyreaders I'm honour-bound to say that nothing was actually more helpful than the collective advice I received from all of you about that little moment in my reading life.
Returning to How Fiction Works and James Wood who is actually a staff writer at the New Yorker. Particularly helpful for me were the references about unreliable narrators because when I open a novel I'm generally of a trusting nature, will often jump right in there and believe whatever I'm told, fundamentally wanting to think well of people in the first instance and not that they could be stringing me along. I think that could easily be called gullible but what James Wood politely calls sewing myself into the text, though I think we could equally use knitting.
This is in direct and inverse proportions to the healthy questioning that I often had to apply in my day to day working life, where only listening to one side of a story and trusting that I was hearing the given truth could be quite dangerous. In certain situations I was always having to question my assumptions, add in checks and balances, be a suspicious person and, as it's not in my nature to be so, it became something to leave behind at work at the end of the day and not bring home as an initial response to my fiction reading.
So innocent abroad that I am when I open a novel, I was grateful to James Wood and took heart at his suggestion that

'Even the apparently unreliable narrator is more often than not reliably unreliable.'

Have you got that? The manipulation is reliable which I assume means I'm likely to clock it,

' the novel teaches us how to read its narrator'

Yes, I think I've grasped that now.
I also liked the suggestion that I must read with a third ear and I think mine's growing nicely with some more deliberate reads of late,

'finding the precision and rhythm of a sentence, listening for the almost inaudible rustle of historical association clinging to the hem of modern words, attending to patterns, repetitions, echoes...'

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson according to James Wood, reveals a familiar American simplicity,

'puritan and colloquial in origin... achieves an almost holy simplicity',

and I realised a very good book for my third ear to practice on. Likewise To the Lighthouse put my third ear through its paces.
The I read this and decided perhaps I don't really want an actual third ear after all.
So James Wood took me on a good yomp through the writers from 1605 ( Miguel de Cervantes) to 2006 (John Updike). Ninety-three books in all, but here's the thing, only nine women writers in amongst them and only eleven books by women.
Ninety-three books?
Nine women writers?
Eleven books by women?
Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Beatrix Potter, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Muriel Spark and Marilynne Robinson...and that's it.
Should I have been as surprised as I was?
Should I have been as profoundly disappointed as I was?

The Courilof Affair by Irene Nemirovsky

I have some rather quirky vintage information gathering systems here, systems that go above and beyond the realms of the internet and most of it lives here, in a drawer to my right. I love the internet for instant research and doubtless I could ditch the entire contents of this paper archive and find it all online, plenty of it printed off from there anyway, but I just can't manage without it. Paper information all the result of frequent snippeteering since before I started dovegreyreader.
If a writer catches my attention their name goes on a folder and I gather forever more. Somehow I seem to know exactly who has a folder and every so often (as if I didn't have enough to do) I'll go through a stack of review supplements and have a leisurely snip and file for that rainy-information-needing day. Many's the time I have cause to bless this drawer and no more so than recently when I pulled out the Irene Nemirovsky file containing a piece from the Guardian in 2007 titled 'Truth,lies anti-semitism,' an investigation by Stuart Jeffries, into allegations surrounding Irene. I knew there was a huge amount of rumbling controversy when Suite Francaise was first published and this was some of it, the piece is still online but I would have forgotten all about it but for my paper record. I've added to Irene's file since then and it will be useful in a final analysis but not now, I'm reading Irene Nemirovsky having finally shelved all the hyper-baggage and allowed the dust to settle and I knew I'd love her writing if I could just do that.
I read David Golder in the meantime which confirmed that Irene was certainly my sort of writer and then I left Irene on the shelf until very recently.
Weaving The Courilof Affair into my current Russian reading was a good move because this book offers a golden opportunity to see the last years of Tsarist rule from an entirely different angle, and it's an angle Irene Nemirovsky would have been well-informed about given her birth into an upper-class Jewish community in Kiev, and one which thanks to her father's role as an 'important banker' ensured a move to Saint-Petersburg in 1913.
Terrorist Leon M is assigned to the task of taking out the Russian Minister of Education Valerian Alexandrovitch Courilof, an infamously cold-blooded Tsarist apparatchik. Leon is also ordered to perfom his task as publically as possible and so, masquerading as a personal physician, he moves in with the Courilof family to await his final orders. Nurturing the strangely implicit trust of his target however plays havoc with Leon's hatred and the more he discovers clearly the more difficult his mission becomes.
Irene Nemirovksy lays bare and exposes to public view all that there is to reveal  about trust, loyalty, treachery and betrayal as she tiptoes finely in and around both sides of the dilemma in a country about to be rocked by the upheaval of revolution. The tyranny and power of the Tsar over his ministers is reflected in Courilof's miserable existence, whilst the rising power of the people which is slowly tipping the balance is charted through Leon's, yet all is not as straightforward as it might seem and it is this 'insider' knowledge that Irene Nemirovsky brings to bear so keenly in this perceptive and astute little novel.
Now I see those same themes of trust, loyalty, treachery and betrayal emerging in Suite Francaise and I am reaching a much clearer understanding of Irene's stance and all untainted by the hype, the speculation and the fierce rows that broke out back in 2007. I have a feeling the Appendix to Suite Francaise will make very revealing reading but I have resisted all temptations to stray there or elsewhere before I finish the book even though other huge temptations are also to hand.
First time around I had also bought, Irene Nemirovsky : Her Life and Works by Jonathan Weiss

'Although she was Jewish, she frequented authors and politicians on the extreme right, some of whom were openly anti-Semitic. She was sure that these friends would protect her from deportation after the Nazis invaded France. But instead, they abandoned her. Yet she never lost faith in France, even after she was refused French nationality. In this fascinating biography, Jonathan Weiss analyzes the discrepancy between Nemirovsky's real and imagined identities, and explores a literary work that revisits in a unique way Jewish identity, exile, betrayal, and the solidarity of a persecuted people.'

Sounds brilliant but I do it all the time, surrender to my incorrigible need-to-knowness, focus far too much on the life over the writing, much more Irene for me but for now that suitcase stays tight shut, this time the writing takes precedence.

The Tortoise and the Hare by Elizabeth Jenkins

Love the old Virago covers as we all do and judge a book by its cover as I do ( and far too often) it serves me well to remember that actually and obviously it's the words that matter, and so I now look on all Virago books as the treasures that I have always known them to be.
The Tortoise and the Hare by Elizabeth Jenkins arrived sporting  a very 'of the moment cover' but lorks, I'd never knowingly heard of Elizabeth Jenkins, not even in the old Virago Modern Classics edition.
But Elizabeth Jenkins has written twenty-three books, was a close friend of Elizabeth Bowen, knew Rosamond Lehmann, Rose Macauley and Rebecca West, won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for her novel Harriet in 1934 and lives in Hampstead, London.
A fascinating article written at the time of her hundredth birthday reveals this about a visit the young Elizabeth paid to the home of Virginia and Leonard Woolf,

"On several occasions she would walk from her furnished room in Doughty Street to their flat in Tavistock Square to sit at the feet of the great Mrs Woolf, breathless then at the privilege, but uncompromising today in her condemnation.
She recalls: “She was cruel, appalling. Beautiful, yes – but odd. Leonard was an angel, but it was partly his fault that she was so odious. He spoilt her. I remember one occasion when a young artist dared to correct Virginia about the name of a plant. Leonard took him to one side and said, ‘Don’t contradict Virginia – she can’t take it.’”
The visits ended in tears. At the last tea-party Virginia mocked the young Elizabeth, mercilessly and with contempt.
She never went back, but cherishes the memory of Leonard Woolf, infinitely kind, taking her arm and escorting her downstairs, the gentle antidote to his wife’s cruelty."

Dashing to my shelf of Virginia's diaries, there I find two mentions of Elizabeth, one on the 16th March 1931. Betty Jenkins had indeed visited during the afternoon of March 13th after the Woolf's had partaken of lunch at the Ivy Restaurant with Julian Bell and another friend.
Poor Elizabeth, perhaps we could argue that Virginia had a bad bout of acid indigestion or trapped wind to explain her churlish behaviour ?
Perhaps the lunch-Elizabeth-dyspepsia associations lingered, here's another entry for June 12th 1935,

' I am so glad I am not lunching with Rebecca West to meet Miss E.Jenkins.'

The Tortoise and the Hare is ostensibly a book about a marriage and a family in the 1950s, but as Hilary Mantel artfully suggests in her introduction (and isn't any book worth buying for the Hilary introduction alone, and in this case the added bonus of a Carmen Callil Afterword)

'Apart from a war, what could be more interesting than a marriage...a long campaign, a grand game of strategy involving setbacks, bluff and regroupings - a campaign pursued, sometimes until the parties have forgotten the value of the territory they are are fighting over...'

Poor poor young, self-effacing, subservient Imogen Grisham. Constantly subjected to the critical scrutiny of her older barrister husband Evelyn and rarely seeming to scrub up well in his eyes despite her evident physical attributes,

'Unhappiness and lack of self-confidence would reduce her charms to the condition of some fragile garland, meant to float in the mid-air over a festive scene, blown down and lying rain-soaked on the pavement.'

Then there's Grisham junior, the ghastly Gavin, an Evelyn in the making, whose treatment of his mother ranks almost as harshly as his father's,

'Imogen felt that the emotional condition between them was like nothing so much as an overturned beehive.'

And then there's the wealthy neighbour.
Country woman, knows one end of a shotgun from the other, can take a squirrel out and yes, probably have it casseroled by teatime, tail used to make her own fishing flies, spinster, stout and stern, surely there can be no contest between Blanche Silcox and the slender and radiant Imogen for Evelyn's attentions?

'... her figure with its bloated waist, in contrast to which her small legs and her feet in pointed shoes, looked like the slender forelegs that unexpectedly support a bull..'

Hmm, well you'll have to read to find out but you know men like Evelyn and their cars, and Blanche does drive a purring Rolls Royce whilst he's only got a Bentley.
Books maketh the man and Elizabeth Jenkins scatters literary references throughout as a means of cleverly making astute character assessments.
The robust and domineering Evelyn can't quite grasp how Imogen dislikes reading Conrad, Melville or Disraeli's political novels whilst gentle family friend Paul, a doctor, utilises Imogen's knowledge of the 'densely populated novels' of Charlotte Yonge in his paper on literary evidences for the incidence of tuberculosis in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Nobody does TB better than Charlotte Yonge apparently and the contrast between Evelyn and Paul couldn't be more obvious.
So which books might we expect to find on Blanche's shelves?
That's easy, a complete set of The Shooter's Magazine for 1884, The Head Hunters of Borneo and The Jack Russell in Health and Sickness.
Elizabeth Jenkins herself describes this novel as one that was autobiographical 'not in fact but in feeling' and in her afterword Carmen Callil suggests that actually initial assumptions about who exactly is the Tortoise of the title and who is the Hare become increasingly blurred. I spent ages trying to decide once I'd closed the book and found in the end the jury was out for me, I'd be interested to know what anyone else thinks, but a book not to miss.

Sunday Salon - Inner child comfort reading

Did I predict that the washing machine would go on strike on Christmas Eve?
Wrong, it was the central heating in one half of the house, and we can now confirm that every boiler-repair man in the West jets off to the Caribbean for two weeks over Christmas.
Then when they come back they are not really happy to be back because they are inundated with cold people like us dressed as if auditioning for Nanook of the North. They are also prone to drawing in their breath sharply through tanned but pessimistically clenched jaws, there are no spare parts, the water in the outside pipes is frozen anyway and all in all we are only just warming up again and even that is involving some jiggery - pokery - bashery - bangery of the boiler while we await the bits.
Woodburners will only throw out heat so far and no further, so the Hudson's Bay blanket has been my best friend and I have mastered the three-way fold cocoon-like enwrapment which has all kept me warm enough to sink into the oblivion of a good book.
I seem to have been tackling some seriously grown-up reading of late, intense and emotional subject matter, but if I want to touch base, settle down a bit and comfort read there's really no better place to go than the shelves of children's books. I put together a little pile of books that I clearly remember reading years ago to suit a weekend that might connect to my inner child, preferably without that doll which the school photographer made me hold, but those are the very self-same reading eyes.
That is suddenly a very strange thought.
For several months I've been dipping into John Sutherland's very enjoyable memoir Magic Moments : Life-Changing Encounters with Books, Films, Music... published by Profile Books, in which he links childhood memories, mostly literary, to significant experiences which shaped his life. Though John Sutherland is fifteen years older than me I have related keenly to so much that he writes about. Books like this are the perfect prompt to memories of your own offering as they do a scaffolding on which to build up your own version.
Take the title for a start, Magic Moments.
That Perry Como song is etched in my memory because we were a radio home, it was always on ( a great big wooden wireless thing with glowing valves inside of course), and my mum was a great one for singing while she houseworked then stopping for coffee to listen to Mrs Dale's Diary, and so I used to sing along and listen too. Magic Moments and Doris Day singing Que Sera Sera were our absolute favourites. Incidentally my own version of a book like this would have a radio chapter which included the following equations,
Billy Cotton's Bandshow + Wakey Waaaakey = Sunday = roast dinner ,
Sparky's Magic Piano + Nelly the Elephant = Saturday morning = Children's Favourites
Sing Something Simple + Just you and I = Sunday evening = school next day.
Faure's Berceuse + Are you sitting comfortably = Listen With Mother
How about yours?
John and I were also kindred spirits over libraries and comics and I suspect his experiences mirror those of many of us. John could hardly sleep the night before his weekly comic would be arriving and this could have been me, expecially if there was a free gift involved. Then my Saturday trip to the library with the Tinker was a ritual only postponed for the most serious of reasons and I was as keen as mustard to get there. I can only apologise if you were the child elbowed out of the way in Mitcham library back in 1960 by a pint-sized thing in a smocked frock, ankle socks and sandals just as you were going to reach for that Malcolm Saville Lone Pine Mystery book off the shelf.
Sorry, you probably didn't realise those were meant for me.
So as I stood in front of the children's bookshelves this week I was catapulted back forty eight years or so and picked up four books that I suddenly really wanted to read again.
Five Children and It by E.Nesbit
Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kastner
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aitken
and finally, let's go Lone Pine,
Mystery at Witchend by Malcolm Saville
I could easily have brought these four home from the library one Saturday in the 1950s or early 1960s and so I decided to do what I always used to do and read one after another, and leave Irene et al to one side for a day or two. I might do this regularly through the coming year because I am enjoying it immensely.
 I haven't done all the other things I might have done as well, curled up in my bedroom for hours, gone out on my roller skates, dashed round to my friend Anne's house to swap my copy of Judy for her copy of Bunty and then gone out on her brother's go-kart or sneaked a quick go on the pogo stick. Nor have I gone off to spend my 3d pocket money on four shrimps, four fruit salads and some sherbet-filled flying saucers, but I am loving reading all these books again and getting that real sense of childish excitement as I turn the pages.
Emil and the Detectives kept me awake until 1.30am (no need for a torch under the blankets or anything) and it was all I could do to put Mystery at Witchend down to sort out the kitchen, get the fire lit, fling the hoover round and pay homage to the washing machine before I picked it up again. In fact I've got to dash now because Miss Slighcarp is up to no good at Willoughby Chase and Bonnie and Sylvia are on the case.
Who'd have thought it all those years ago.

The Garden Centre

I'm given to understand that all 'retired' people go to Garden Centres and I can now confirm that this is an entirely true fact.
'Retired' I must add is not quite 100% me anymore as I was actually offered a new job about a week after I had finished being a real health visitor and now I'm a sort of virtual one for the next few months.
It was agreed that I would just 'be' until January to recharge the batteries and then get started, so this week my head is very full of technocomputerwizardry but I am loving the commute of about five feet and twelve flexible working hours dressed in my pyjamas, which sadly the NHS never really encouraged. It all uses the experience and keeps the wolf from the door which is also handy because the NHS have yet to stump up a penny of the pension applied for back in September.
I suppose I'm on a waiting list.
It's not as if it's a great deal of money either and it can't be earning them any interest, but quite soon they are going to have to close down a ward for ten minutes or cancel an in-growing toenail operation or something (really so sorry if it's yours) and let me have it.
But what's this about gardening?
Surely not me gardening?
No I don't think this counts as full-on gardening because I can't even pretend to be a hands-on gardener, I'm a Sit & Watch Someone Else Do It gardener preferably from a reclining chair with a book and a cool drink, but I had gone to the Garden Centre before Christmas on a mission, as had about four Age Concern coach-loads of other 'retired' people.
Avoiding Santa's Christmas Grotto and acres of tinsel I headed for coffee first.
Big mistake because over in Cornwall at the Garden Centre on this particular day of the week everyone has 'self-allocated' tables. The fight was not  pretty and it was clear I had not gone properly equipped and was most definitely disadvantaged by not having any walking appliances to wield. I was hustled into a draughty corner by the door and spent a happy hour reading to the background buzz and burr of rural Devon pensioner conversation and all in the name of this bit of garden.

It's difficult to give the impression of a lovely sloping, amphitheatre-shaped grassy bank which I look out onto  from my Book Room and thence over an open field, which it is and I do, but I think you'll agree it lacks winter inspiration, and that grill off the back of the Land Rover has been tripping me up as I come around that corner for about two years now.
In the summer on the other hand it looks stunningly beautiful displaying the very helpful, labour-unintensive, laissez-faire wild-meadow tendencies that our garden has taught us it much prefers.
But I have decided that we must risk the transforming power of the bulb in the hope that the garden would look benevolently on an attempt at spring jollity, and this time it would not be in our usual batch of five here and ten there.
Nope,this needed the bulk-buying approach.
The fight for a trolley was something else, we won't go there.
I'm wondering whether twenty kilos of daffs, a hundred crocuses and some fritillaries will be enough to achieve the look I'm after ?
I doubt it, perhaps just a tentative start and we'll add year on year (which we've been saying we'll do, but haven't, for the last fifteen years) and thankfully we managed to plant them just before the start of our frostiest winter for years. They had actually started to sprout in the corner of the boot room, which is an indoor muck heap of sorts again already, but where I did not actually want to wander lonely as a cloud and encounter a host of golden daffodils.
The dogs should have stayed in the kennels, I can see that now and I suspect we'll confirm that very soon. No sooner had Bookhound dug the hole and I had followed up with the bulb than a gleeful dog had snatched it out and run off with it, heaven knows where they'll grow. I'm thinking there may be little of the stretching of the never-ending line, more likely to be tossing their heads individually in a sprightly solo dance.
 

I keep going out to look and there are definitely some signs of hatching so I'll let you know in the fullness of time, but wouldn't it be nice if it looked like this and we caught ten thousand in a single glance.

Calling the Wimbledoves

Oh heck, he's thrown down the racquet again and so firstly I suggest you all head to Me and My Big Mouth for a lucid explanation from Scott of how the Dream Team Online tennis tournament works, this saves me the bother of trying to tell you. But the important bits to remember are that it's easy, it's free, it's fun and anyone's welcome to join the Wimbledoves team. Some Australian wimbledoves would be very handy to have on board and to offer local advice about spa facilities, nice beaches, customising our umpire's chair for luxury etc.
Then we have to decide whether at least six of us want to regroup and get back into training for the Australian Open.
After our stunning display in the US Open do we want to get the wooden Dunlops out of the loft?
Gut a cat for some new strings?
Wedge back into the frilly frocks after all that Christmas food?
Let me know and if we have at least six people willing to attend the first training session I've organised with our sweet little mascot Rafael Nadal, (Rafa is going to show us which way up to hold the racquet etc)  for the ladies, and Virginia Wade has kindly agreed to give the chaps some training tips which I think will be more useful than asking Maria Sharapova, then just post your name in comments and I'll go and sort it all out.
If you decide to join Me and My Big Serve, well on your own head be it, they are keen so there is an awful lot of lycra, and early morning twenty-five mile runs over there, whilst Wimbledoves discuss frill and frock strategy over a pot of tea.

PS I've sorted it all, just head to Tennis For Free, register, choose your teams and save them (I'm plimsolldove as usual and my team's a bit ad hoc pending advice) and cut and paste the following password to join Wimbledoves 10fd27c3b46e75da9743ef222c39a5ce

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

I seem to be on a reading roll at the moment, a determined tackling of some of the books that have defeated me for reasons various in recent years.
My Gilead failure has invariably been received with anguished cries and furrowed brows in that 'But how could you not see it?' mode of shock and horror, almost on a par with the Suite Francaise disaster.
I had initially had my eye on the book long before it appeared here in the UK and was so covetous that I did a Chicago to Devon book exchange with Bluestalking, possibly in pre-blog - online reading group days, who kindly sent me her copy the minute she'd finished it.
I can't begin to describe my disappointment when I went for first summit attempt, full of excited anticipation and failed miserably, second attempt not much better, and in the end I'm flailing around in that old trying-too-hard abyss and the book just has to go back on the shelf and sit forgotten until its moment comes around again. These are the books I don't give up on, somehow I just know there is something in there for me but the reading planet alignment needs to be very exact.
First Booking of the year, as opposed to First Footing, offers a wonderful opportunity for some thoughtful reading, my mind is perfectly attuned and my soul conditioned to something quietly reflective and before I knew it I'd settled very positively on Gilead.
There is of course a balm therein and this time I think I came as close to it as I think is possible on a first read of a book which I suspect requires several readings to secure all the revelations and wisdom. It's a book that does just wash over you and I frequently felt surrounded by words I hadn't quite taken in, so there was a good deal of reversing  and back-tracking to fully grasp the thread. Some of it invested with such an intensity that a few pages at a time was a rich enough feast.
There is an excellent book called When a Doctor Hates a Patient by Richard Peschel which deals with those less-acknowledged moments in the caring professions which happen to us all and amongst them, what happens when you really don't like the person you are supposed to be caring for. It's a book which addresses anxieties and limitations in abundance, gives permission to acknowledge imperfections and relates those incidents to moments in literature as a means of exploring them less painfully and explaining them more fully. It's a good book to have on the shelf regardless of profession because it's littered with valuable and relevant psychological insights on life and people per se and I suppose you could call Gilead the Pastor's equivalent.
Ageing and dying father and preacher John Ames more than faces up to his own inadequacies and anxieties when confronted by demons from his past which seep into the present, and look likely to impact on the future he won't be seeing, as he struggles with one person in particular.
The first person narrative is written by John to his young son, and in a series of advances and retreats his life story slowly unfolds. Sometimes pitched several generations back and laced with overtly religious sentiment which surprisingly didn't cloy, whilst frequently all melting into one single existence, those might have been the moments when, if my concentration lapsed, I lost my bearings and had to retrace my steps and listen more carefully to the words on the page.
The moment of resolution for good or ill, and I won't give that away because if you are one of those who haven't read Gilead, nothing is certain, but it is one of the most profoundly moving scenes I have read since I last mentioned a profoundly moving scene I have read, because you know what I am like about those.
They don't need to be hugely dramatic but they can be the defining moment of a book for me, that moment of complete emotional engagement when the words gently radiate the book's success and the world around you recedes as you are drawn in, and this was certainly the case with Gilead.
In the end it proved itself a very worthy First Booking of 2009 and Ruth at CraftyPeople thought so too, and I love her thought that we were both stumbling along that Gilead reading road at the same time.

The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood

Geoff Hancock : What do you think your strengths are as a writer?

Margaret Atwood : I used to say in the usual Canadian way, "Well, aw shucks, I don't know." We're trained to be modest. But now that I'm middle-aged I'm going to allow myself to say, "Well, maybe I'm good." Not all the time, but enough times, I can get the words to stretch and do something together that they don't do alone. Expand the possibilities of the language.

Geoff Hancock : And your weaknesses?

Margaret Atwood : Weaknesses? We can't afford to think about those kinds of things. Most writers are tightrope-walking over Niagara Falls all the time. Look down and you've had it.

Margaret Atwood talking in 1983 and all recorded along with many other enlightening interviews she gave in Conversations edited by Earl G Ingersoll, one of those books that sits neglected on the shelf and suddenly yields gold.
My complete read of every single Margaret Atwood novel bar one three years ago, start to finish, in the order they were written, now the stuff of legend here and I'm wondering just how I managed it. One after another, it was a complete addiction and Conversation arrived in the midst of that addiction when I bought an unwanted post-phD box full of books by and about Margaret Atwood on eBay for a mere £16.
But until the last few weeks I hadn't read The Robber Bride.
Love Peggy as I did, and hallowed though the earth she walked on became, suddenly the gorging at the feast had left me feeling slightly sated and a bit on the literary bilious side and I decided to save just one book for a rainy-must-read-Peggy day.
Bit like those days as a child (or this might just have been me) when you went to a friend's house where there was a swing. We didn't have a swing and so I would sit and swing for hours and hours, have to be prised off it for someone else to have a go and then I'd be back on it, but suddenly, and I never knew the moment because it was instant, that was it, I was swung out and never wanted to look at a swing again (well for about a week or so).
So swings aside it was time for The Robber Bride about a month ago.
Things got off to a slowish start and I wasn't in my usual un-putdownable Peggy mode, I could take or leave this book and mostly I left it, took it to London for train reading, read the newspaper instead. But I knew better than to give up and so I soldiered on slowly but quite happily until suddenly it happened, I was on the Peggy swing and nothing but nothing was going to get me off until I had turned the final page.
Zenia, the friend from hell returns, supposedly from the grave, to haunt her student friends, Tony, Ros and Charis in true gothic fashion. Lives she has left precariously in shreds once are threatened yet again and this particular house of fiction is one of those clever constructs where the roof goes on first and then the rest of the house is built from the eaves down as the story stretches further and further back in time, filling in more and more of the cracks and crevices of finer detail as events unfold. Zenia the rather resilient mortar, the common denominator that binds it all together and who had me wondering with a hundred or so pages to go quite what was going to be left of all this by the time we reached the foundations.
Nothing disappointed.
I'm probably one of the few on the planet who hasn't read this one and there can't be much of an original thought left to express about it, but if you are one of the few we'll just have a little conflab amongst ourselves and I'll tell you that it's magnificent Margaret Atwood at her best and also her wittiest with the added bonus of that piercingly searing hot-brand insight for which we hold Peggy up as the exemplar.
Supremely clever writing had me wondering whether this just flows effortlessly off Margaret Atwood's pen or does she sweat and toil to get it just right?
I almost think too much toil and it would never work as well as it does, then I read in Conversations that most of it goes through at least six drafts.
There is not a shred of doubt in my mind, Peggy's right, she's good at this.

Mitfordmania

I suppose if there's a Mitford sister we are all conditioned to dislike it has to be Diana.
Married first to Bryan Guiness (breweries) and then to Oswald Mosley at that secret 1936 wedding attended by both Goebbels and Hitler, the name Diana (Mitford) Mosley is inextricably tangled up with my own thoughts about Nazi atrocities.
My uncertainty was further compounded by that incredible BBC TV programme earlier this week about the young Polish girl, Rutka Laskier whose diary, written as a thirteen year old in the Polish ghettos, has been published. We caught the programme quite by chance late on Monday evening and both Bookhound and I were reduced to a sickened silence at the end. Living just twenty miles from Auschwitz Rutka's ending was inevitable making the original film footage unbearably heart-rending, and though I will often avoid programmes like this because I know I will be left in bits, this one was utterly compelling.
All I knew of Diana had engendered a form of antipathy by osmosis which now I see, given husband number two, is quite an appropriate word to use. But actually on closer analysis Nazi sympathies was about all I knew of Diana and so the arrival of The Pursuit of Laughter : Diana Mosley Essays, Articles, Reviews & a Diary of The Most Glamorous Mitford Sister edited by Martin Rynja and published by Gibson Square offered the chance to try and balance the prejudices and look at the writing. In fact I'd been lucky enough to get a glimpse of an early photocopy manuscript of the final book and knew, even as I flew through the A4 sheets, that this was going to be my favourite sort of book.
Conglomeration might sound slightly derogatory but it's not meant to. I covet literary conglomerations and a book that incorporates such a wide variety of writing as this one earns a place at my right hand and I shall be dipping into it for ever more. My finished copy arrived on Christmas Eve and alongside Irene, Marilynne and Mikhail with some Peggy, Henry (James) and George ( Eliot) thrown in The Pursuit of Laughter has added a rich element to the seasonal reading feast.
Diana herself was something of a stickler for getting the facts right (Don't know, so won't say) and nothing seemed to annoy her more than a report about herself, a family member or a friend that was riddled with inaccuracies, so it seems wise to have offered the introduction to this volume to her sister Debo Devonshire. Debo sets the scene to Diana's life and times perfectly in context and one assumes with an accuracy that would have pleased Diana; personal and public scandals and a strictly enforced family moratorium forbidding contact meant that these two sisters didn't really get to know each other well until after the war.
Personal qualities emerge even before you have turned the first page which created for me a 'new' Diana.
'An aura of beauty surrounded her...she was beautiful when she was born in 1910 and remained beautiful till her death aged 93...'
Unfailingly loyal to those she loved, and each reader will have to decide this for themselves, but suddenly as I read I had to ask myself, can you blame someone for being compassionate and possessing such valid and enviable personal human qualities for which Diana certainly suffered, and all in the interests of being true to herself. Yet you get the impression it would not have occurred to Diana to be otherwise, denouncing was never an option and reading back over Letters Between Six Sisters it's possible to see where much of this had its origins.
If Diana was your friend then expect her to leap to your defence, she must have been one of the very few trying (though failing) to see the Duchess of Windsor in the last lonely years of her life. In many ways the pages of this book achieve exactly the same as, according to Debo, Diana achieved in life,

'It was interesting to see her with people who were prejudiced against her politically or in any other way. You could watch the hackles go down as the person slowly succumbed to the charm and intelligence he met so unexpectedly.
Her honesty floored her critics. They did not expect it and did not know how to deal with it.''

Likewise suitably disarmed of many of my pre-conceived judgements, and incidentally how amazing that a book can achieve something so spirit-gifting , what became clear as I read The Pursuit of Laughter was Diana's huge and wide-ranging intellect, her towering sense of humour matched with a gentle yet razor-sharp and incisive way of telling it like it was. Numbering among her circle some of the great names both political and literary of the twentieth century, Diana knew her world intimately and shares endless anecdotes and literary asides about the lot of them. Debo points out for example that Diana was the only person to know both Hitler and Winston Churchill well.
Page after page of fascinating reading so I think this is in the end another book to add to the essential Family Mitford shelf and I for one am glad of it.
Long may this publishing of Mitfordmania continue.

dovegreyreader asks...

I did one or two dovegreyreader asks... interviews on here a while ago and  may do more now that I have more time because they do take a fair bit of planning. But it helps if someone else plans it for you and so my thanks to Salt Publishing who have paid all Charles Lambert's expenses for him to stop over on his Scent of Cinnamon Something Rich and Strange blog tour and take a seat in the virtual dovegreyreader armchair (yes Adele Geras and Ralph McTell have sat there before him) enjoy a virtual pot of tea and answer a few questions, which were inevitably of that nosey dovegreyreader variety rather than the deep and meaningful literary variety.
I was completely enamoured with Charles's novel Little Monsters and have likewise enjoyed  The Scent of Cinnamon immensely. The first story in the collection rates as one of most startlingly clever short stories I have read in a long time and I was lured from one to the next with great ease. So in between sips of tea and Devon scones with lashings of clotted cream Charles did manage to answer my questions  and has now sensibly left to go and have his cholesterol tested, but he has also very kindly offered a signed prize-draw copy of The Scent of Cinnamon and Salt will send another copy out so two winners, names in comments.

Elements of grief and loss surface frequently in the stories I've read. Can you elaborate on that?

 Well, you’ll probably be surprised to discover that, before you asked me this question, I hadn’t even noticed that the fact of death crops up in the first four stories in The Scent of Cinnamon. I certainly was! So much for self-awareness… What’s more, to my further surprise, of the sixteen stories in the book, over a third are directly involved with death, while another third deal with emotional loss of one kind or another – relations breaking up, families falling apart, malicious theft. I’m not sure what to make of this. I see myself as a fairly cheerful glass-half-full sort of person. I’ve also led a blessedly unscathed life. Apart from losing a dearly loved aunt over ten years ago, my only personal occasion for grief was when my father died in 2006, a month away from his 101st birthday; I must also be one of the very few gay men of my generation not to have lost a close friend to AIDS. So I’m clearly missing something here.

Looking at the stories more closely from this angle, though, two things strike me. The first is that, although death plays such a central role, it isn’t always synonymous with loss, or grief. On at least one occasion, it’s a source of joy, on another of release, on another of remorse. Ironically, a few days after receiving these questions, I read a comment by Geoff Dyer, a writer I greatly admire, who says he avoids stories in which death is used instrumentally. I assume he’s referring to literary fiction here, because genre fiction without death is like apple pie without the cheese, as my father used to say. So the second thing is that the stories in which I use death all tend to have genre elements in them: horror, fantasy, murder mystery. So, yes, these imagined deaths are instrumental, and one of the things they might be helping me to do is test the ground, to see what it’s like, within the security of genre writing. Maybe I’m using the stories in the same way the little boy in Girlie uses the pillows in his bed, to make myself a cocoon against the reality of it.

Novel v Short Story? Is there a defining moment in the process when you know you have one or the other in front of you or do you set out with only one format in mind? In other words could you tell us a bit about the writing process and we do always like to know if it's a fountain pen (make, ink colour etc!) raven quills or a laptop involved, special slippers, Balzacian white robe and lots of coffee, must have been for a ten mile walk before can sit down to write,  etc etc.

With one exception, I think I always know what I’m doing when I start to write, if only in the sense of knowing that I’m starting a novel or short story – the rest of it is often a complete mystery until the piece is finished and a partial one long after that! I may only have a sentence, but at least I know what it’s the first sentence of! The exception was a short autobiographical piece that just growed and growed until I had a - non-autobiographical - novel on my hands (not Little Monsters – that was destined to be a novel from the first sentence). The actual writing process, though, is pretty much the same. I sit down in front of my computer, two fingers poised above the keyboard, and stare hopelessly at the handful of words on the otherwise blank screen until more words start to come, heroically resisting the temptation to play a quick game of Spider before I carry on. I’m a great one for buying new pens and slick black notebooks with the intention of recording ideas, plotting narrative developments, and so on, but the actual writing goes on at the computer. I tend to get it right – or what I think is right - before moving on, so that by the time I’ve done my thousand words – my daily limit - they’re pretty much the way I want them. I’ve tried to throw it all down and then revise but I just can’t do it; I feel as though I’m building on sand.

As far as routine goes, I would love to be able to devote, say, four hours each morning to writing, followed by a leisurely lunch and an afternoon of fine-honing the morning’s output, but I just don’t have the time. I teach and edit full-time, so the writing gets squeezed in where it will fit. I finished my last novel in early morning bursts of activity, getting up at five to write for a couple of hours before the normal day began. Right now, I’m working on the new one in fits and bursts between editing reports on camel management in Saudi Arabia and writing end-of-term exams. I would love not to have to do this.

The one thing I can’t do is write long-hand. I was given my first typewriter – a big black Olympia - when I was about eleven (by my much-loved aunt – see above), and I’ve been two-finger typing ever since. It broke my heart to give up my powder-blue Olivetti Lettera 22 for my first (Olivetti) computer, but I soon adapted. Seeing the words as though they were printed gives me the distance I need to judge them, or pretend to myself that’s what I’m doing, and I’m a great one for changing the format of a text to give myself a fresh idea of what I’ve produced. My hand-writing is just too me.

Oh yes, I often write in pyjamas, dressing gown and an old pair of Birkenstocks (as, indeed, I’m doing now), and I’m perfectly capable of getting up and working for hours without tea, coffee, or any other stimulant, either because I’m too lazy to make it myself (Giuseppe’s theory) or because I’m just too creative to care (mine).

As if you haven't guessed we are indeed very nosey here at dovegreyreader scribbles so we would love to know which writers inspire you and who MUST we read?

The writers I love and the writers who inspire me don’t always overlap. As a reader, I tend to discover a writer and read everything, then move on. In the past few years I’ve done this to William Maxwell, Lorrie Moore, Geoff Dyer, Penelope Fitzgerald, James Hamilton-Paterson, Sybille Bedford. I had an Anthony Powell period, and I’m still having an Annie Proulx one, and long may it last, and the same goes for Tobias Wolff. I’d recommend all these writers as must-reads. I also have a list of writers I can’t bear, but I’ll keep that to myself! As far as being influenced goes, I’m not sure how much any of these people has affected the way I write, although they’ve certainly changed the way I see the world, which is what inspiration is all about. In any case, inspiration and influence are different things…

My thanks to Charles Lambert for stopping by and don't forget, names in comments for those prize-draw copies of The Scent of Cinnamon.
In February we will be plumping up the cushions and inviting Elizabeth Baines to sit in the armchair beneath the illuminating, all-seeing spotlight of the dovegreyreader standard lamp and answer more penetrating questions on her book of short stories Balancing on the Edge of the World and her writing life.

A trip to Russia

In planning my Christmas reading I had written in a tentative trip to Russia. I always find when I yearn for snow on the ground and that yearn remains unrequited I must go and read snow instead.
Often Canada does very well as snow-reading territory but I felt in need of an even bigger challenge and I have been to Canada a great deal in recent reading so it was Russia for me.
Many's the time I've made the Dostoevksy blunder; set out across the extreme wastes with huge enthusiasm wearing the literary equivalent of a pair of flip-flops and found myself stranded half way and completely out of reading stamina, so this time I settled for a book with pictures to set me on my way and then I'd see where that led.
I do find this approach never lets me down and so the arrival of Moscow and St. Petersburg in Russia's Silver Age by John E. Bowlt published by Thames & Hudson was clearly fortuitous.
I had bought another in this series a few years ago at the suggestion of someone here I'm sure, Berlin in the 20s by Rainer Metzger. This was to pave the way for all that mittel-European reading melancholy that lures me in from time to time ( I feel it calling again)

'In the brief period between the twentieth century's two cataclysmic world wars the modern city was invented in Berlin. It was a vibrant metropolis of night-people, visionaries, thinkers and bohemians - a place filled with intrigue and decadence, where vice and virtue abounded in equal measure. Like one huge salon, it became the comparable centre of European intellectual life where the arts and sciences met and flourished.'

I couldn't get enough of it all. Beautiful illustrations alongside an accessible, highly readable and informative commentary and I read it cover to cover emerging energised and informed for more Joseph Roth et al . Not a book to read once and never open again, I pick it up and dip in frequently so I was intrigued to see if this new arrival would have the same effect.

'This book focuses on the visual and material culture of St Petersburg and Moscow at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.The twilight of Imperial Russia witnessed a sudden renaissance that left a profound imprint on the visual, literary and performing arts : here was a Silver Age as luminous perhaps as the Golden Age of Russian literature many decades before.'

This sounded like a good knowledge gap to fill, always easy to get stuck on the whole Romanov bandwagon and ignore the rest and it was several years since I'd read Natasha's Dance by Orlando Figes (one of those must-have books on Russia).
These are weighty, sumptuously illustrated books, 400 glossy pages and it only took about twenty before I could feel that old reading trail unfurling ahead of me because this truly is a

'dazzling array of artists, writers, composers, actors, singers, dancers and designers...presented in context'

Some were familiar names Tolstoy, Pasternak, Rachmaninov, Akhmatova, others I knew of but not much about, Nijinsky, Scriabin, Diaghilev and others I'd never heard of, but blessed as this book is with such a rich array of illustrations it all mattered not once I got my teeth around the Russian names. I was rapidly gripped and glorying in the visual references to the whole Russian World of Art movement which in some ways mirrored our own Arts and Crafts movement alongside French Art Nouveau, and quite fascinating to see the essence of those filtered through the lens of Russian artistic interpretation.
It all had me galloping round the shelves gathering in some inspired Russian reading.
Then that strange thing happened, completely unplanned and in that way books have of arcing across to each other quite unexpectedly, because no sooner had I made a flying start on White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov when Father Christmas gave me The Courilof Affair by Irene Nemirovsky.
Now I'd also had in mind a serious return to Irene with a second attempt at Suite Francaise given that all the fuss has died down, and I'd got over my tantrum about the cover, but I had somehow pigeon-holed her up in occupied France quite forgetting Irene's Russian origins. So it was all a bit of a pleasant eureka-like surprise to find myself reading Mikhail's account of the fall of Kiev in 1918 alongside Kiev-born Irene's account of the planned assassination of a government minister by Russian revolutionaries during the last years of the Tsar.
More on all that reading as soon as it's all settled in my mind (especially my dramatic and long-awaited, born-again Suite Francaise conversion) and the dovegreyreader-like flotsam has drifted into view. But all that reading about Russia's Silver Age was enough to light the blue touch paper and has also reminded me that I have a book on my shelves by one of the classiest of Silver Age writers, Andrei Belyi , The Silver Dove...so suitably clad as I am now in my literary furs and snowshoes, well I have to tackle that don't I?

The Devon Guild of Craftsmen

Ages ago now, in fact it was the very exact same Saturday of the Western Morning News - Bovey woolshop excitement because we found 'that' newspaper in the cafe...

...and the cafe was in The Devon Guild of Craftsmen, also at Bovey Tracey and a place of inspiration if ever you find yourself nearby. The gallery was plumped up to bursting with goods and potential chattels ready for a busy Christmas season and in amongst it all my most favourite pottery of all time, Penny Simpson's divinely beautiful deep and indescribable blue. I have three treasured pieces, the fish bowl, the little jug and a dragonfly tile and given the means I'd buy the whole lot and probably decorate the house to match.There is a depth to this colour that mesmerises the eye.

The gallery was looking its best, quite a few changes since our last visit and an excellent cafe too...with really good newspapers like the Western Morning News of course.

The hare is made by Blandine Anderson and there was a stunning display of her work, ceramic animal sculpture with a twist, quite unique.
Then every which way you turned vibrant colours and wantable things, Bookhound had to steer me round fast because we'd already bought that delectable baby llama wool (in Penny Simpson blue now I think about it) which is now starting to look like a jumper I'm pleased to report...well once it has sleeves it will.

and then back home across Dartmoor, a beautiful exhibit all of its own.

Come on Argyle.

Since I have known Ernest Hecht of Souvenir Press we have had this ongoing football banter. Ernest is an Arsenal fan and never misses a match, sitting in a very comfortable seat and watching his team win everything going, while the nearest we have down here is Plymouth Argyle...say no more.
The joke has been that if ever Argyle played Arsenal at the Emirates stadium Ernest would offer us his guest seat (also very comfortable).
Well all extremely unlikely until today when half of the city of Plymouth, the Green Army, has migrated to the Emirates stadium for the unlikely FA Cup tie between Arsenal and Argyle, the Gunners versus the Pilgrims.
A man of his word and true to it, Ernest made contact weeks ago and it was all organised.
Quite coincidentally Bookhound's birthday weekend and so many thanks to Ernest who has saved us having to wrap up more gifts.
We sent Bookhound off to London yesterday to allow plenty of time to get to the stadium, partake of a champagne lunch with his host and watch the match as his birthday treat.
He's just phoned so that I could hear the singing and now I'm listening to the match on the radio and knitting furiously to stave off the tension because we quite thought it would be 12-0 to the Gunners at half time (Argyle's current form decidedly of the defeat variety)  and...well I hate to jinx the whole thing, but half time and so far it's a miraculous 0-0.

A Time of Gifts

So I might have failed on the well-fed Christmas cake, the hand-made cards and the crackers but never let it be said that I neglect the homemade gifts. An essential component of the stockings and a few of these I did manage...just, except for Bookhound who can never decide what he wants me to make and ended up with a thing for cleaning the blinds instead and the Gamekeeper who asked for long shooting socks or hose as they call them in the catalogues. These come up to the knee and he's got great long legs, I'll make a start and would probably aim to finish those sometime during the 2012 Olympics.
Firstly the Tinker had been enviously eyeing my homemade, customised Sony e reader cover so I made him one of his own in bookish-themed fabric. The Tinker now very attached to his e reader and uses it all the time. So far he's notched up several books on it including The Count of Monte Cristo and Frankenstein.

For Offspringette I'd wrapped up the Colinette Jitterbug socks and also resurrected a scarf that I'd started when that fluffy, nightmare to knit, stretchy wool first came out. This is where I glance across to Yarn Harlot who knocks up a scarf in an afternoon to give as a gift that same evening, not five years later.
No matter, things were progressing quite well if a little behind the times fashion-wise. I just hoped this lack of attention to detail would all be buried and forgotten in the loving care lavished on the homemade element.

It's awful stuff to knit because you can't see if you've dropped a stitch or not so you just have to crack on in sure and certain hope that if you have it will unravel and you might notice, which I did until Offspringette, unknowing of this impending fashion disaster, announced that she'd really like a hot water bottle with a knitted cover.
Much better idea.
It's now official, you can turn a scarf into a hotwater bottle cover quite easily. Just keep knitting and do a bit of decreasing, knit some more, stitch it all up, make the top bit fold over, drop a few stitches to make it look like you've made a clever buttonhole,stretch it a bit, add a button and abracadabra,

The Kayaker is another whole fussy, fashion-conscious, don't-make-me-look-stupid department to himself. You could waste weeks of your life knitting the very wrong thing so I wrapped this up for him and loved the look on his face when he opened it,

then said if you want the hat I'll knit it for you, if not that wool can go back in the stash.
He wanted the hat and we settled on the simple Stitch 'n Bitch pattern which I then adapted for a circular needle and it was done through a long evening (one of those that starts at about 4pm) .
Quite astonishingly this hasn't left his head for a week.
Result.

Adding a picture

Quite a few of you asking me how to get a picture of your own onto the blog comments as Kevin has done and I think it goes something like this.
Click as if to comment at the foot of a post and then scroll to the last comment and click on Sign or Sign Up. Once you have a profile (which only needs to contain minimal info if you prefer) you can go back in and edit it. Then change the picture to one of your own by clicking on browse and then selecting and opening something from your own picture files which will then upload into your profile.
It probably helps if you've already edited it down from cinema screen size and I often do this and put it on my desktop temporarily so I can find it, but that might just be me and the half a zillion photo-morass that is my laptop.
We'll look forward to seeing them all.

The Tamar One

I know other people's dream are boring and often when I reach that point in any novel, should the author have deemed it essential to the whole, I might glaze over a bit, but I'm sorry I need to share my latest dream with you and be assured, it's very brief.
I had no idea that it is all of 800 years since beavers roamed wild in the English countryside. I'm not sure I ever really knew they'd been here at all, I just assumed they preferred the US and Canada. But hunted to extinction in England and Wales in the 12th century someone's obviously identified a 21st century need, and the cunning plan is to reintroduce them to Scotland, where first time round they survived another 400 years.
Clearly we are not to be trusted to keep our hands off the critters south of the border in these tough economic times especially if there's a Hudson's Bay blanket involved in the deal. In the Middle Ages a dead beaver was worth three years' wages after all and I'm sure there's a recipe here somewhere for Beaver Bourguignon and if not it's probably just a case of adapting the Squirrel Fricassee and upping the quantities, plus frankly in these parts we'll crimp anything unusual into a Cornish Pasty.
But there's still money in them critters and an enterprising farmer a few miles up the road here in Devon has been sensibly breeding them in readiness, except there's been a breakout and we now have the case of the Tamar One. A little solitary chap is gnawing his was through the river bank, though we are told reassuringly that he won't be able to dam the Tamar on his own because it's too wide. Fur-raising facts abound on the local news, transparent eyelids which act like goggles, front teeth which never stop growing, a family of beavers can fell 300 trees in a single winter, beavers could be eaten on Fridays by monks because the tail was sufficiently fish-like to fit the menu.
Now, having suffered frequent ferret breakouts of our own this year I can truly sympathise and so we've been following developments with interest, in fact, yes, I may have developed a little bout of Beaver Fever. So out of interest, and in that 'feed a cold to starve a fever' approach, I typed 'books about beavers' into google and I discovered Grey Owl.
I don't think I'd ever really paid much attention to Grey Owl aka Archibald Belaney born in Hastings, Sussex in 1888 who emigrated to Canada, became a legendary fur trapper, lived at Beaver Lodge, adopted First Nation identity and wrote books like King of the Beaver People. Things fell fractionally apart after his death when exposed as the man from Hastings, but there's even been a Pierce Brosnan Grey Owl film, all intriguing and I'm on the trail.
And I'm hoping you will all be able to tell me much more.
So what of our own little Grey Owl beaver moment here in Devon and my dream?
Well at six stone the Tamar One is hardly little which all goes nowhere near explaining my dream, because the beaver was here, yes really in the kitchen, and he shot out through the cat flap. I told you it was brief, it was all over in a flash but it really happened, honestly.
I woke up in a hot sweat and with a crashing headache worried sick about this beaver in my kitchen and whether it might have chewed my nice maple units (I'll bet they love maple, reminders of home and all that) and if we claimed on the insurance would it be Act of God, or third party beaver damage?
And would the insurance man believe us?
It was bad enough trying to convince him that there really had been a greenhouse in the vacant space left behind the day the whole thing dessicated itself and took off for Plymouth in the teeth of a south-westerly gale.
I could just imagine it...yeh right...a beaver.
Could you reassure me this happens to you too because I fear it's happening to me, the thin veil between dream and reality is getting more gauze-like and indistinct with age and every time I even glance at the cat flap I can see this six stone beaver flying through it clear as day.

 

The Last and the First

It always takes me ages to decide but finally I managed it.
My last completed read of 2008

and awesome it was in the end too. I've been a long time getting there but now have to nominate this as my favourite Virginia book and I'm going to elevate To the Lighthouse to annual read status, so much to miss first and probably second and third time round, but still plenty of moments to savour,

'It was necessary now to carry everything a step further. With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta's arm and left the room it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past.'

And my first read of 2009?
Well I'm having great success with previously miserable reading failures at the moment, books that have captured everyone else's imagination except mine (wait 'til you hear about Suite Francaise this time around) and I've sat like a wallflower at the dance wondering what all the fuss was about.
So a third and final attempt is boding well, a hundred pages in, which is about seventy more than before, and I'm hopeful of a quietly triumphant victory with
 

Why couldn't I see it before?
Aren't books the strangest things?
Here's to a year of magnificent reading everyone.