dovegreyreader scribbles

An excursion...

I'm not sure we've been on a blog trip lately but it was up over high Dartmoor on Friday for some sunshine on the eyes, then lunch and an exhibition entitled Paper Works at the Devon Guild of Craftsman at Bovey Tracey. The whole exhibition full of surprises but I just have to show you these...
 

Claire Brewster's exquisite birds flying 'the world on paper wings which show traces of oceans and continents on the recycled atlas pages and maps from which they were made'  whilst carefully placed lighting revealed those shadows and the delicate painstaking work involved, somehow these were a perfect fit with the journey we'd just made.

Sometimes the scenery so magnificent that you feel as if you have a bird's eye view.
Moody old Dartmoor rushing by from the car window on the way home, brilliant sunshine one minute, lowering pewter winter skies the next.

On the Law of Threes...

It's always in batches of three isn't it, so when the next thing goes wrong we'll just start on another three and wait for two more.
In fact the tumble dryer did catch fire a few weeks ago but I'm discounting that because it was user error and everyone thinking that everyone else was emptying the lint filter in the door, which they hadn't and for some time. Bookhound happened to be passing and noticed the smoke, opened the door and very observantly noted flames but after some smooth talking and a bit of a clean up, it's all fine.
There but for the grace of etc and disaster was averted because since the blocked filter-flooding of the washing machine that afternoon two years ago, when we all had flu and were all semi-conscious and coughing our way mindlessly through Deal or No Deal (as you do), and we agreed that under no circumstances would we ever go out and leave appliances running because that could have been a whole lot worse than just the floating hall carpet.
The more I think about it the more I see this house as one great big digestive system, fine when it all works, a sort of noisy, noticeable distraction when it doesn't.
The triumvirate (because these things do rule our lives whether we like it or not) of expense-bearing disaster started with the water supply which coped magnificently through the cold weather, happily kept pumping up from the bore hole, too cold to touch coming out of the tap, but it did come out of the tap for which we were very grateful. We are understandably sensitive to every nuance of the water supply because without it, well it's like Armageddon here, so when it started to come out of the tap in instalments, a sort of pulsed approach to delivery, projectile water followed by a trickle, we sent for  the 'water' man very quickly and he sorted it (constipation out in the pressure vessel.)
We paid the bill and settled down to wait for Things Two and Three, sort of looking over our shoulders and wondering what it might be.
Thing Two wasn't long in happening and in fact this was quite exciting because for a moment it seemed we had V2 rockets powering the central heating and were prone to something called 'kettling'.
If you haven't 'kettled' lately it really is something to behold, forgive the digestive allusion but akin to trapped wind in your central heating system and the water boiling in the pipes.
Simple we thought, you just find the key and bleed the radiators, job done.
Except no amount of Bookhound assisted gaseous release from the system seemed to alleviate the symptoms and there was an ongoing debate about whether we could fry an egg on the radiators or not, whilst indeed a moon landing did seem in the offing for the whole house.
So we sent for the 'heating' man and he fixed it (valve trouble) and we paid the bill and sat back because Thing Three was inevitable, just a matter of time.
If the water supply going awry is Armageddon then really the washing machine going off its legs is like having the four horseman of the apocalypse all riding in together and panic sets in fast.
This panic is all a little uncontrollable remnant of post traumatic stress disorder induced years ago by a new Hoover (yes, let's name and shame) washing machine that broke down eighteen times in its first two years of life, and usually full of half-washed towelling nappies.
A saga it gives me palpitations even to think about let alone recount.
In fact last week the machine (now a Miele) got stuck on rinse and for all our persuasive endeavours was having none of it and carried on quietly digesting the load of towels that were in there (it's always a ton weight of something isn't it) not an ounce of movement could we persuade out of it, not a spin in sight, and no amount of rehabilitation seemed to work.
Now Mieles are lovely when they work but horribly expensive when they go wrong, which they don't for many years. We reckoned ours had done at least fifteen years very hard work in the last ten and when it became clear that the electronictrickery in the circuit board had gone and doubtless the motor would go a week later it was decision time.
I find washing machine decisions can be made very quickly here as the staircases (we have two to fill) start to disappear under the weight of the great unwashed garments, and when it's the Gamekeeper's laundry you really don't want to hang about.
Then I start hyperventilating and that's it, decision made.
So off we trotted into Plymouth and came home with a new washing machine, it was that easy if a little more than we usually spend on a shopping trip to Plymouth. The man quickly gave up trying to sell us another expensive Miele and we've gone Bosch (if you have a Friday afternoon Bosch that has been nothing but trouble, please don't share) which will spin at 1400 and probably shred our clothes to tatters, but they'll be dry tatters.
The thing was that since the Miele went into the far end of the utility room considerable works have been done around it, including installing a new toilet. It slowly became clear that the toilet was no way going to allow the machine back out of the room without it needing an up and over style removal and likewise the new one up and over in.
Have you lifted a washing machine lately?
No me neither,
'I've just got to go and look at my blog' I said...

dovegreyreading...

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


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

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

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

Even the Dogs by Jon McGregor

I'm not quite sure how I feel now I've turned the final page of Jon McGregor's latest novel, Even the Dogs published by Bloomsbury because 'enjoy' is the wrong word but 'appreciate' doesn't come close either, so this is a rather long post because I have to show you my 'working out' to get to my conclusion.
Firstly, I love this floppy-hardback format and now want all books to arrive like this; a book that's been a pleasure to pick up and what joy, no battle with cracking spines or fighting with self-closing pages.
Books like Even the Dogs fall into a category of their own and I think they might be quite rare. Books where the subject matter is so challenging and so excruciatingly painful to read that you need regular respite, yet somehow you don't want it to end; so much so that I set the book aside with twenty pages to go and looked at it for two days before I finally finished it. I wanted to savour every second of this reading experience because I think it's been a unique and special one.
The first thing to know about Even the Dogs is more about that challenging subject matter.

Between Christmas and New Year, Robert's body is discovered in his derelict and virtually uninhabitable flat and this is how the book opens.

'They break down the door at the end of December and carry the body away.

The air is cold and vice-like, the sky a scouring steel-eyed blue, the trees bleached bone-white in the frosted light of the sun...'

Robert is an alcoholic and has been dead for some time so when the police discover his body it's not going to make for easy reading, but what strikes with immediate impact is the narrative voice.
Who is telling me all this?
It's clear these are friends of Robert's and though I expect other reviews may speculate, I have no plans to because if you read this I must let Jon McGregor slowly reveal it to you as he did to me, and every reader must then draw their own gradual and perhaps differing conclusions.
The story is told from a unique perspective with gaps and silences, sometimes abrupt endings to sentences when the voice wanders off track and leaves the reader to fill in the words, which I did...it's pure innovation and soon uncertainty melds into comfort with this style. I think I felt that Jon McGregor was trusting me as a reader, which in turn made me trust him as a writer because it was clear that subject matter like this needs a safe pair of hands.
Indeed, this might be a world you would prefer to know nothing of and a sense of place that you'd really rather not experience, because Robert's flat is disgustingly filthy, his life when revealed a mess. His home has been the meeting place for all the local drug addicts, alcoholics and vagrants, all those homeless people governments readily label marginalised and disenfranchised without perhaps really considering the how and why. So prepare yourself if you plan to read Even the Dogs because Jon McGregor takes the reader deep into the world and the mind of the drug user, the underbelly of society is going to be exposed as the story nips back and forth in time and it's inevitably grim.
Jon McGregor has chosen to write about a group from whom society more usually withholds its sympathies.
Health care is rationed enough as it is without forking out the £65,000 it costs (at least that's what it was about a year or so ago and the last time I had any face to face professional contact with this world) to put a drug using couple through rehab, when perhaps the general opinion might be that surely it's all their fault for ending up where they have.
I've worked with plenty over the years.
It actually takes real commitment to be a drug addict.
They are resourceful though mostly illegally unless on Methadone replacement and maintenance, surprisingly clear-thinking and organized about supply for all that we label them 'chaotic', and in my experience often very eager to please professionals and therefore very plausible. The danger is omnipresent and I've fallen into the trap many-a time; when your instinct is always to think well of someone you need your wits about you with drug users and much as you want to trust them, sadly you can't trust an addict, you often can't believe what they tell you.
It's a fine and difficult balance because if therapeutic relationships are built on trust where in heaven's name do you start and that innate unreliability was constantly in my mind as I read.
Who to believe?
How much I wanted to trust the voices but I constantly asked myself whether I could, and for reasons I won't divulge for more fear of spoiling, I did.
We often used to double up for home visits, not for safety of person and purse as much as safety of process, one to talk one to observe (and keep a stranglehold on the dog, there was always an eager dog that wanted to sit on your lap or 'love' your leg), because these are the cases that can end up in court, with children the subject of care proceedings or sadly, on several occasions, with parents found dead.
You have to be very sure of what you may be missing because good outcomes were sadly rare in my own experience.
Jon McGregor gets right inside the mind of a drug user with his narrative, which predominantly flows as stream of consciousness with jumbled, garbled interrupted thoughts, the confused and delayed responses you might expect from a drug-damaged mind...and still you wonder who's telling the story...who's watching Robert's corpse on its final journey through post mortem and cremation?
Think of every 'D' word you can, I made a list as I read and perhaps this gives you a clue, this book does not fit the happy reading remit of Tuesday, herein despair, desolation, decay, desperation, degradation, distress, delusions, denial, dishonesty, deceit and dreaming...all addicts dream of better times, better places and it's all in here.
Slowly Even the Dogs gathers a fierce unstuttering coherence as it moves towards moments of clarity, then the narrative becomes unstoppable, barely punctuated. At one point a most revealing section tracing the poppies from the fields of Afghanistan to the streets of London as heroin.
Jon McGregor ventures to the edge and over the abyss and I can only imagine where his research may have taken him.
Remember Emile Zola and Therese Raquin and those mortuary scenes?
I think Jon McGregor may have been there too and a lot of other places besides and I can only begin to imagine how harrowing and emotionally demanding it might all have been.The research feels painstakingly accurate but doesn't overburden the whole, it's important to get the right words and he does...script, harm minimisation, risk behaviours, rehab, Methadone, facilitate, assessment they're all there but in just the right context and quantity.
I actually think this is a really important book, not only for the content but for the sheer beauty and originality of the writing and I sincerely hope prize judges everywhere are looking at it very carefully indeed.
If they are in the least blinkered or squeamish we're in trouble, but if they are genuinely looking for literary books that reflect all aspects of society...not just the nice bits...or only the nasty bits from 400 years ago (much as I loved them) ...or the violence and poverty on the other side of the world because then that's not really our problem...or, heaven forfend, movie chimps as the joke inclusion, then this one has to be a serious contender. 
Even the Dogs is a book that will inform, will challenge assumptions and perhaps redistribute rationed sympathies, to ignore it is to ignore a painful but fundamental failing and perhaps to understand that a little more clearly is a step nearer to ... well to I don't know what, because I'm not stupid enough to think the solutions are there for the sorting, but someone needed to tell the story of those who live and die in this underworld and tell it as it really is, and Jon McGregor most courageously and brilliantly has.

Reuben Sachs by Amy Levy

It's Persephone tea with Cornflower today, my turn to choose the book and I'll confess to allowing my hand to stray towards rather a slender tome and one I had read in that first Flush (sorry couldn't resist) of Persephone enthusiasm back in 2003.
The tale now legendary, Bookhound had seen an article about the shop in a national paper, hid it from me and then rang Nicola Beauman and asked her to choose six books that I would enjoy and there they were, gift wrapped on my desk on Christmas Day 2002.
Like a lemon I didn't go near my desk until after lunch and nor did Bookhound give me the first clue, so I quite thought my only gift had been a thing for washing the windows and I'd feigned gratitude...as you try to, whilst inwardly thinking huh...great.
Rereading Reuben Sachs first published in 1888, and possibly reading it more carefully than last time, has been pure pleasure because in the interim Amy Levy has been on my radar, so I've picked up those references to a writer I had previously never heard of. When Lily Tobias author of Eunice Fleet was declared to be responding consciously to the Anglo-Jewish literary tradition of the nineteenth century novels of  Amy Levy I was able to nod sagely, if with little recall of what that might be.
Judith Quixano's elite Sephardi family, 'the vieille noblesse of the Jewish community', have fallen on hard times and Judith has been welcomed into the arms of her mother's extended family, the Leunigers and their Bayswater home. As the Quixanos had grown poorer so the Leunigers have prospered and all offers from rich uncles to adopt impoverished neices were to be gratefully accepted. Judith has in fact been happily settled with the family since the age of fifteen but it becomes clear that her double descent ( via birth and poverty) from the upper echelons of Jewish society will all be insufficient to secure her a 'good' marriage.
Slowly it becomes clear to Judith, who reads the poetry of Swinburne, that her long-term friendship with Reuben Sachs has turned to a deep love

' The twin halves of a perfect heart, made fast
Soul to soul while the years fell past.'

But Reuben's career as a lawyer is in the ascent and when he is then considered as a Parliamentary candidate it is evident he will need to seek a wife concomitant with his social standing, Judith won't do at all.
Apparently written as a 'riposte to George Eliot's Daniel Deronda' this and other useful information about Reuben Sachs is revealed in Julia Neuberger's preface to the Persephone edition. More valuable insights into Amy Levy's life and her writing, and something else of which I had been slightly unaware; namely the hierarchy that existed within the Jewish community, in the words of Amy Levy

'Jews belonging to varying shades of caste and clique in that socially sensitive community.'

Not an unusual characteristic of any community but not one I had given much thought to in this context, nor had I realised how exercised those of Amy Levy's more established English background were about the vast influx of poor eastern European Jews following the Tsarist pogroms of 1881. In a country where the Jewish community's security was often fragile and shaky, anything likely to tip the balance was unwelcome in their midst.
Searching online for more detail about Amy Levy, because by now I want to know everything, I stumbled across the Orlando site and you only have to imagine how many bones I was spitting on discovering that it is subscription only and I can't read any further. Of course they have to make money from it, I know that, but just how tantalizing are all those links.
Never mind, there's more here and I'm interested to read this by Linda Hunt Beckman about the reception of Reuben Sachs.

"Reuben Sachs was mistakenly perceived by the Jewish press as an attack on Jewish life, and this cannot have pleased its author, but Levy may have been more uncomfortable with its reception by gentile reviewers, who mostly read it as a corroboration of longstanding stereotypes about Jews. Few, if any, readers recognized its experimentation with methods that departed from realism or understood that the narrative voices making unpleasant generalizations about Jewish character and life are unreliable; and few noted the longing Judith feels for the warmth and family love of the Jewish community when she is removed from it at the end. Nor did the public grasp that while Jewish life in this novel is materialistic and competitive, Levy’s many allusions to the “gentile” plot in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda suggest that in regard to its worldly values the Anglo-Jewish community is a microcosm of the larger society."

Sadly Amy Levy took her own life at the age of  twenty-seven at her Bloomsbury family home, perhaps in a fit of depression about the book's reception, but Julia Neuberger suggests perhaps also because of problems of increasing deafness. Perhaps no coincidence that her home was in Endsleigh Gardens in Bloomsbury either, much of the wealth of the Bedford family evident  both here in our corner of Devon and that area of London too, witness Russell and Tavistock Square.
It's all added to a really rounded appreciation of Reuben Sachs for me, this a book to recommend and a book of current relevance with Jewish Book Week happening in London from February 27th.
And now that Karen and I are in our stride with our regular Persephone tea venture, we thought it might be good to let you know about the next book each time so that you can read along with us if you want to.
Our next gathering will be on Wednesday March 31st when we'll be reading and eating our way through The New House by Lettice Cooper, and I've now put Persephone reads to date, with links, in a list over here somewhere >>>>>>>>.
On the subject of housekeeping you may also see that I've threaded the comments from today. When you reply to someone's comment, it should now leave that reply below theirs.
Meanwhile it's time for a calming visit to Cornflower for tea and perhaps consider yourselves fortunate we're not calling in on the Leunigers where it might be stewed fish ... I happen to know that Karen has baked us a much more sumptuous treat and I just hope there's some left when I get there.

On Happy Reading...

I wonder is it too much to ask for a book to come along wherein no one dies?
I'd kill to read a book where no one dies right now and it was RevCheryl asking for some happy reading that set me thinking, where are all the current, well-written, 'happy' books?
The inference from 'happy' is that the books might be a bit slight and light but surely they needn't be?
This is also perhaps slightly different to hot water bottle comfort reading and that settling down with old favourites, much more about finding out if there is anything happy out there at the moment.
If you can think of any please could you flood comments with your suggestions like a brilliant beam of happyhappyjoyjoy reading light as we all suddenly discover we are passing through these various dates that everyone tells us are the most miserable of the year.. National Being Depressed Day etc.
I've even dug out a nice sunbeamy picture of Plymouth Sound to go with it all.
I've been reading some sharp end contemporary fiction through January and February and have to confess, if 'enjoy' is the right word, then I have been. People dropping like flies, turning to glass, or meeting a sticky end, or living sadly deprived lives, or dying in disasters or wars, there are few original ways left to shuffle off this mortal coil after those I've read of in recent weeks. I'm intentionally holding off my thoughts about Even the Dogs by Jon McGregor until later this week to spare you even more of the same, but it is the best book I've read this year and I'm afraid I will have to say the word Booker when I do share my thoughts on it.
So oddly this has all been great reading and sometimes it just seems I'm wearing enough layers of skin to cope, and perhaps this is is empirically linked to the number of layers of clothes I'm wearing (four) through this real winter we're having.
I know plenty of people might be fed up with ice and snow but I'm loving it for the realness of the season, the light bright brilliant blue skies and the fact the spring will earn its keep this year and I will really appreciate it for the difference.
But I had a browse through my shelves, just to see and there were several happy candidates so I'm going to share one today and others soon, I hope little rays of undepressing reading.
I've made a start on another short story collection, a story a day from Super Girl by Ruth Thomas, according to the blurb from Faber (& Faber),

'Poignant as well as funny, Ruth Thomas’s new collection charts the difficulties people have when faced with the need to change. Delicately poised on the cusp of melancholy, fragility and folly, her stories offer a fresh take on the contradictions of human nature.'

So I can't know about forthcoming deceasements (seems like a word that should exist) but the ones I've read so far are perfect, gentle but important moments magnified and examined, and I do know that I really enjoyed Ruth Thomas's novel Things to Make and Mend .
 

You know I'm a hopeless case for a bit of a nostalge as I read and here's what I wrote at the time...

"School needlework a la 1960s was like well thought out torture because you knew exactly what you'd like to knock up, perhaps a mini skirt or heaven forfend some hotpants, thus a whole term spent smocking a piece of gingham and then making it into an apron was a bit of a disappointment.
Strangely though we were all wildly into knitting during break times (that and playing cards and swapping Jean Plaidy books), a very long scarf and mini-jumpers from a Paton's pattern modelled by Twiggy that took exactly 8ozs of Fiona wool were compulsory. At 2s 6d per oz.your jumper cost you £1.
Ruth Thomas has distilled and bottled the essence of it all perfectly in this book.
A really enjoyable read."

Scroll on down for a happy cat dispensing two lots of gifts today.

Prize draw copies of Things to Make and Mend by Ruth Thomas

Names in comments for one of four prize draw copies of Things to Make and Mend by Ruth Thomas.
Rocky will reluctantly heave himself out of the wool basket to choose the winners for this one.

Prize draw copies of Super Girl by Ruth Thomas

Names in comments for one of four prize draw copies of Super Girl by Ruth Thomas and Rocky will drag himself away from his own super girl to choose the winners for this one.

The Bradshaw Variations by Rachel Cusk

It's Thinking Day today isn't it?
That day when all good Brownies and Cubs wore their uniform to school and thought about all the other Brownies and Cubs around the world wearing their uniform to school.

Here's me in mine just to make you smile on a Monday morning, I still don't suit a beret and that's the end of any further Baden Powell connection as far as I can see with the rest of today's post and with apologies to Rachel Cusk for the digression.
With the emphasis in the title laid fairly and squarely at the door of my self-taught musical know-how, it was going to be a challenge, three weeks after I had finished the book, to see if the melody of The Bradshaw Variations by Rachel Cusk (published by Faber & Faber) had lingered long in my mind. I had made plenty of notes but it's checking out that permanence which seems like the ultimate test of a good read.
Easing back into the book very gently I started with Bach-Goldberg and set off to find a definitive musical meaning for 'variations' and came across this which seemed to fit very comfortably with what I feel sure had been Rachel Cusk's intention with the book,

'Variation - The manipulation of a theme by the use of melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic changes.'

The Goldberg Variations I discover written by Bach as a favour for a sleepless count who wanted clavier pieces to cheer him up through those desolate hours of night waking.
Thomas Bradshaw, his partner Antonia Swan and their daughter Alexa live a comfortable life recently turned on its head when Antonia, offered a head of department post at the local university becomes the higher wage earner. It seems to make sense for Thomas to take on the role of house-husband, the role reversal effectively leaving Toni playing first violin and Thomas rattling away over in percussion, but in reality taking piano lessons.
The problem with this slight score change is who is doing the conducting?
The music analogies flow gently through the book and even for an amateur like me it wasn't difficult to draw them into play as I read, and as the extended Family Bradshaw and some Family Swan are brought into the mix, Rachel Cusk brings in those notes of dissonance and disharmony that had me rising to the musical task. I was reading and marvelling at the whole idea of hanging a novel around such a fruitful metaphor and apologies if I may have made it all seem a bit too trite and obvious, but you know me and words.
Rachel Cusk pulls it off with a poised and controlled elegance, there is subtlety and grace to her writing, light and shade, changes in rhythm, pauses, interludes and the occasional reminder in case I hadn't cottoned on or had missed something,

'...Claudia's part, like the melody from another section of the orchestra...'

I almost wish those prompts hadn't been in the book because I had spotted the allusions long before and was off on a frolic fuelled by my own seemingly brilliant and original thoughts...thinking 'ah yes disonnance brewing here' and then turned the page to find,

'...she is filled with sound: she is a composer creating a dissonant symphony..'

which left my brilliance well and truly pricked to the point of writing 'Lo! It is so! ' in my copy and giving Rachel Cusk full credit for it once I'd got over my sulk.
Even cleaning the house becomes a symphony...or is it a concerto?
Which ever, the hoover is in harmony with the tap dripping and the dishwasher churning and the squeaking window cloth syncopates in with it all. There's astute attention to detail here too, the smallest and most insignificant grace notes, those imperceptible life moments invested with a heightened and acutely perceived awareness.
Moments I could strangely identify with, buying something in a shop and wearing it home and the wrong feel of that old garment folded neatly by the shop assistant and carried out of the shop in the new bag because you've already fallen out of love with it.
Young Alexa's moment of distraction in the classroom so vivid it had me right back in Green Class with Miss Glasscock (yes really) or was it Blue Class with Miss Butteriss (Miss Butterdish) and my ongoing feud with the boy I shared a table with, always so accomplished at dropping me right in it ... now a consultant paediatrician so I'd best not name.
The three generational Bradshaw family who when playing their single line sound slightly out of tune, put them all together and if you can get them all in the same key then perhaps, just perhaps, a degree of harmony will prevail and I warmed to them all, with their habits and their eccentricities, their traditional roles, the efforts at emancipation, and the grand finale about which of course my lips are sealed.
Kate Kellaway argues in The Guardian that

"This novel could not have been written if Virginia Woolf had never put pen to paper. In a sense, it is a modern Mrs Dalloway..."

and on reflection I can see that and how I wish I'd known so before I read; the melody has faded a fraction too much now for me to create that Mrs Dalloway harmony with any accuracy, but I can see it's there.

NTTVBG - The Girl with Glass Feet by Ali Shaw

The daffs are still going strong this morning,

and it's over to Savidge Reads today for the NTTVBG discussion about The Girl with Glass Feet by Ali Shaw.
 

I'm dashing over now to nab a comfy seat on the sofa with some elbow room because I'm really hoping no one will mind if I take my knitting along, it helps me think.

Just don't laugh, in it's ruinous post-felting reincarnation who knows what princess of a bag this skirt for an elephant will turn into.

Those Cornish daffs...

These have been beautiful through the week, on the table in the book room and I haven't moved them, just come in and taken a picture each day, a beautiful gentle scent of Spring which all makes me wish I could do a scratch and sniff blog for you...I'm sure if you try hard enough you can smell them.

dovegreyreading...

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Message for the Atwood winners...

Just to let any of the Margaret Atwood winners know that there has been a delay with these books arriving in the warehouse, many apologies from Virago and me, copies will be with you as soon as possible. Meanwhile here are those fabrics to remind you of the delicious colours and how lovely they will be when they arrive.
 

Rupture by Simon Lelic

It's weeks since I finished reading Simon Lelic's debut novel Rupture along with several other good reads that seemed to bridge 2009 reading and lead me into 2010 and as we were talking about In Cold Blood and the 'should I' or 'shouldn't I' yesterday, today seems like a good day to write about Rupture and get it all over with in one go.

'In the depths of a sweltering summer, teacher Samuel Szajkowski walks into his school assembly and opens fire. He kills three pupils and a colleague before turning the gun on himself.'

This much I knew as I turned the first page of Rupture and I was expecting the usual sort of things, troubled lives caught up in sad massacre, perpetrator to be reviled and of course ringing around my head We Need to Talk About Kevin, (surely now the definitive modern-day 'shooting massacre' novel) and all the feelings that book aroused as it covered the taboo subject of a mother not loving her child.
Policewoman Lucia May is assigned to the case and proceeds to question witnesses and here comes the very clever narrative device; much of the story progressed by those anonymous witness statements which only reveal one side of the interview. Lucia's questions have to be guessed at from the answers that are given, as does the identity of each witness.
Sometimes it's clear who is speaking sometimes less so but Simon Lelic has hit on a really innovative approach. 
It's such an astute way of developing characters and personalities too, each unwittingly revealing so much about themselves and others, their fears and prejudices, speculating on what they think happened, slotting in their bit of the jigsaw, not unlike building a sort of three dimensional identikit picture of a personality. Each person and their circumstances settled clearly into my mind as I read and to Simon Lelic's credit, here I am, a few moments on from the start of this post and already the entire book has flooded back into my mind.
Some memorable characters too, why is the PE teacher always flash and Mr Very Confident?
Sorry, if you are a PE Teacher, I'm sure you're the exception, but Simon Lelic has nailed all this really astutely.
Less apparent from my schooldays it has to be said, Miss Dormer and her knee-length pleated games' skirt and aertex blouse plus veins and bunions etc, ...heck I hope she's not reading this, I already have the Latin teacher following here:-) But how well I remember our own trips to parents' evenings, and why do they have to appear in shorts all the time, at 8pm on a bitterly cold February night?
I really was hoping whatisname would trip over his trainers and fall flat on his face in a muddy puddle.
Samuel Szajkowski meanwhile remains a tantalisingly remote character and I spent much time picking up the 'why' clues about him.
Wondering quite what the taboo subject might be for Simon Lelic, I think I found it in the way that my sympathies were distributed and where eventually that sense of empathy finally rested, and I don't want to give that away because I think it might be slightly different for everyone. That manipulation of reader emotions and attitudes felt like an integral part of the reading experience for me.
Rupture is a book which embraces all those themes of bullying, harassment and corruption and how many ways there are to respond to them, alongside issues of violence and it is not only to be found in the school, victims abound in the police force too.
To my chagrin I can't now remember whether the time setting for the book is made clear or not really alluded to, because I'd like to believe that in a twenty-first century setting we might have seen the Chief Constable out on his ear for failing to halt the progress of such blatant and disgraceful sexual harassment in his Force. But having followed around the edges of the slightly different case in the news here last week, well who knew.
And this is fiction after all, but good fiction....I really enjoyed this, if I'm allowed to enjoy a book where bad things happen to ordinary people.
Does this bode well for Truman Capote?

On Unreading...

Interestingly David Robinson is already challenging some of my more dubiously held prejudices with his book of literary editor essays and interviews, In Cold Ink - On the Writers' Tracks.
An exceptionally well-read and very sensible, down-to-earth friend, who is also a Quaker, told me several years ago that if there was a single book in her life she wished she could un-read it would be In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. We were actually standing in the library and I was sufficiently disturbed on her behalf to make a mental note to self not to read it either...she had been genuinely distressed by it,
Sufficiently emphatic was she, that whenever I see the book I have a bit of a shudder and something has always stopped me from finding all this out for myself. I had enough trouble after recommending  Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner to someone who came back to me declaring that she hated it, found it every disturbing and wished she could un-read it that minute. That's quite a powerful statement to make about a book and I felt terrible for recommending it, but neither could I see the problem with the book. As I recall it was a really good read for me.
So listening to Wuthering Heights on his car stereo in order to fill in a Bronte lacuna,

' one of my deepest most shaming pools of ignorance',

David Robinson sets off to drive west across Kansas towards Garden City in search of one of his literary heroes, Truman Capote, and the lingering shadows of one of his favourite books, In Cold Blood.
I had my customary little shudder at the mention of the title and read on...but can this be so

'...the last one I ever read to my son as a bedtime story.'

Admittedly his son was by this time fourteen (and I love the idea of reading aloud to teenagers) and David Robinson proceeds to set out his stall and debate this book with me very cleverly as he explores the nuances of the narrative. Closely observed detail, like the way the killers are swept past the crowd on the courthouse steps with no description of them whatsoever,

'He's smuggled them past our moral attentiveness: he doesn't want us to judge them just yet.'

Then there are the brief background details about Truman Capote's life and work, the friendship since childhood with Harper Lee, the full-length fur coat and feather boa and the high-pitched voice that led many to assume he was a 'rather strange-looking woman.'
How exactly did Truman Capote persuade Marlon Brando to tell all in an interview?
I'm not sure whether Marlon succumbed to the boa, but apparently Capote's very clever use of conversation drew out details of his life that Brandon, who rarely gave interviews, had always been reluctant to disclose.
And I'm thinking how strange, because if I'd met David Robinson instead of my friend at the library that day I'd have been rushing off to the C shelf (rural Devon, therefore shelf singular) and hoping to find In Cold Blood waiting for me.
I'm starting to be even more convinced that I should give it a go when I learn that David Robinson and I are kindred spirits on the subject of literary tourism, we love it.

'If you see what an author saw - above all if you meet the people an author met - the decades between you and the writer's work can shrink away. You can see, from looking at what remains, what might have been there'

Then I turn to the Paris Review Interviews, and there it is in Volume One, an interview with Truman Capote

'...Writing has laws of perspectives, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself. Even Joyce, our most extreme disregarder, was a superb craftsman, he could write Ulysses because he could write Dubliners. Too many writers seem to consider the writing of short stories as a kind of finger exercise. Well in such cases it is only their fingers they are exercising.'

Truman's been reading dovegreyreader this week, I'm warming to him and I'm almost convinced, but it all leaves me wondering, do you have books you wish you had never read and should I read In Cold Blood?

Team Ulysses - Camp Lost Count but think it might be Eight?

I've chosen us a different mountain today...

...not in the least connected to Ulysses to my knowledge, but I am very taken with this picture of Buachaille Etive Mor up near Glencoe since mentioning Susan Fletcher's forthcoming book Corrag earlier this week and the discovery that this is the peak that features on the cover.
Next month, this month and last, which I will have spent taking a leisurely stroll around Circe, have felt like a bit of time to rest up and gather some energy for those final three chapters of Ulysses which will take us from March to April to May to June and Bloomsday. Time to enjoy the scenery and breath in deeply and I must say I'm starting to get a little twinge of pride when I gaze upon my well-thumbed copy of Ulysses now because until Team Ulysses banded together I really never thought I'd do this.
The book has become a constant friend, it's always on a table somewhere, and I must confess it's also been an occasional foe when I've felt slightly defeated, but at times like that I think of Mr Kiberd senior, father of Declan Kiberd author of Ulysses and Us and his assertion that the bits he didn't understand were best left to those who did.
I knew there was a reason I had wanted to remember February 2nd, Candlemas, and it's because it was James Joyce's birthday. As it is I forgot, but I have been doing a bit of reading about Joyce himself and learn that much of Ulysses was written whilst reclining on a bed wearing a white suit and life happening around him which seems to make it even more of an achievement. Declan Kiberd makes the point that whilst novels deal with ready-made societies, 'Ireland in 1904 was still a society in the making' and Ulysses somehow fits this metamorphosis, 'more than a collection of stories...not quite unified enough to be a novel.'
I think I've gathered all that quite clearly now, this far in and on the home run I'm still trying to work out what it is I have read and am reading, and how I might feel when I turn that final page on Molly's exultant and I think probably very happy 'yes' now that I've discovered what she's doing.

I was delighted to read Frank Delaney describing Circe as a psychedelic hallucination because this second instalment has felt exactly like that and I'm wondering if Ulysses achieved any sort of resurgence in popularity in the 1960s as a result. It's like taking a seat at a farcical play or a circus and not quite knowing the cast, the plot or anything about it whatsoever, endless surprises on every page, some that trigger memories from elsewhere in the book, plenty that seem to make no sense at all. If I was really watching this happening I'd be jumping out of my seat with shock and surprise and having heart attacks every twenty seconds, I think I'm just experiencing the literary equivalent.
The Cheat's Guide to Ulysses which I discovered on the BBC website of all places, and written to mark the centenary in 2004, has this as the entry for Circe

"Reader
(horrorstruck) Blimey, this looks like heavy going.

Stephen's Dead Mother
No kidding! There's over 100 pages of this stuff, all written in the style of a play script. But all you need to know is that Bloom follows Stephen to a brothel where they have lots of freaky hallucinations. "

The banter which follows is hilarious including "Man goes for walk around Dublin, nothing happens" from someone in Newport Pagnall, until in steps Stephen Fry with this retort

"Ulysses is the greatest novel of the twentieth century. It is is wise, warm, witty, affirmative and beautiful. it is less pretentious than a baked bean. Read it. read it out loud to yourself. It won't bite. It wasn't written either to shock or to impress. Only pretentious barbarians believe artists set out shock: and how these philistines delight in revealing how unshocked they are. Those who attack it are afraid of it and rather than look foolish they prefer to heckle what they don't understand. Ignore all this childish, fear-filled criticism, Ulysses will be read when everything you see and touch around you has crumbled into dust."

It seems to be a book that polarises opinion and generates assumptions, mostly perhaps among those who haven't read it and perhaps something to do with a sort of 'holier than though' attitude amongst those who have.
I'm promising myself that I won't become a Ulysses brag-and-boast bore... well until it gets to the Endsleigh Salon theme in October that is... 'The Book You Must Read Before You Die'.
But even then I'm still not sure Ulysses will be my choice.
I think the pendulum of public opinion will forever swing uncontrollably on this book but here's an interesting little quote from Susan Hill writing recently,

'Nor can I read Ulysses, though Stephen Fry, cleverer and better read than anyone I know swears by it. He told me that it was just a case of diving in and swimming fast. Not for me it wasn't, I drowned. But I will go to gallows to uphold the right of Ulysses to be called a classic.'

Even better, here's George Orwell writing a letter to Brenda Salkeld in 1934

'I managed to get my copy of Ulysses safely through this time. I rather wish I had never read it. It gives me an inferiority complex. When I read a book like that and then come back to my own work, I feel like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice production and can pass himself off fairly well as a bass or baritone, but if you listen closely you can hear the good old squeak just the same as ever.'

I wonder does anyone else have a clear picture emerging yet, have you been feeling, perhaps a bit like me, that you've been on a glorious word-fest with moments of acute clarity... 'events as they occur in life and not as they occur in fiction,' according to George Orwell.
But now I find that as the mist (poetic license, I think we'll call it a Scotch mist today) is clearing and the nearer I get to the end, I have a feeling I'm about to become a lifelong fan.

February by Lisa Moore

"Valentine's Day, 1982: a terrible storm rages off the coast of Newfoundland. On the Grand Banks, the Ocean Ranger, the world's mightiest drilling rig, is pounded by waves more than 20 metres high. At the height of the storm, the "indestructible" rig begins to tip over, then capsizes. All 84 men on board — 56 of them from Newfoundland — perish. It is Canada's worst tragedy at sea since the Second World War."

It is twenty-eight years ago today, February 15th 1982, since the Ocean Ranger sank with the loss of all lives, and thoughts must surely be with the families of those who were lost who will doubtless be reliving much of the trauma of that night throughout this day.
With my mind firmly transported to Canada slightly more than usual right now for the Winter Olympics, when we all suddenly become experts on curling and bobsleighing, Lisa Moore's latest novel February published by Chatto & Windus seems like a doubly appropriate book to mention today.
Helen O'Mara has lost her husband Cal in 1982, at the age of thirty, in the Ocean Ranger tragedy. With three small children and pregnant with her fourth, Helen is forced into the combined minefield of widowhood and single-parenthood.
The novel begins a quarter of a century later when Helen receives a phone call from her son John, travelling home from Australia, who breaks the news to Helen that after a brief one week fling he has made a girl pregnant. Thus follows John's own complex reflections on fatherhood and all its inherent responsibilities to be considered in the light of his own childhood grief , whilst Helen is also forced to reflect on her own loss in order to work out how best to help John.
The novel weaves back and forth in time slowly revealing the full extent of the tragedy and the profound implications it has had on the family over the years. Occasionally obvious, frequently subtle and Lisa Moore doesn't spell it all out, plenty here for a reader to work out for themselves.
A book I would recommend to anyone cast adrift in the territory Helen was, A Parent's Guide to Raising Grieving Children by Silverman and Kelly...

'It is tremendously disorienting to return to the life you once had, minus your partner, because in many ways that life does not exist any longer. You are now living between a tomorrow that will not happen and one that you could never have anticipated.'

Phyllis Silverman and Madelyn Kelly go on to suggest that

' After the death of a spouse, the structure of your family life cracks in some ways and crumbles in others. You won't even know where to begin to reassemble some order..'

It is this cracking and crumbling and reassembling that Lisa Moore focuses on so astutely in February as Helen mourns her loss. Frequently, amongst other things, reliving how she imagines Cal's final moments to have been whilst simultaneously agonising over the outcomes of the official enquiry and damning safety report. But Helen consistently focuses on her children too as John, Cathy, Lulu and Gabrielle become the 'fully-fledged mourners' that Silverman and Kelly outline, but still within the family setting,

'...the place that children learn how to deal with others, develop relationships, discover a sense of who they are..'

It is in some ways this learning that is put to the test and perhaps John's adult dilemma becomes the ultimate test of how well Helen has achieved a future, created that 'tomorrow' for herself and her children.
Only many years after the tragedy is Helen able to see that

'a blow had been struck bull's-eye, without warning, and it had scarred ...'

No matter what else is happening children need the reassurance that, in the words of Silverman and Kelly,

'this family that has taken a blow, but is not broken,'

and watching Helen hold her family together makes for incredible and very moving reading.
February is a book about the excruciating pain of grief and loss, about tragedy and its long-term impact, about family and love, solitude and loneliness, memory and so much more, yet for all its inherent sadness it's also full of moments of hope and happiness. There can be no easy way to end a book like this, in fact it could all have gone horribly wrong, but to my mind Lisa Moore achieved something quite beautiful and completely perfect in the final pages, the significance of which will not be lost on anyone who decides to read this one.
You might want to cry for Helen...well I did.
I had heard of Lisa Moore, a Canadian author who lives in St John's Newfoundland and perhaps grew up within a community that will never have forgotten the depths of sorrow associated with the Ocean Ranger tragedy. Much like anyone who lives in and around Cornwall who will never forget the night of the Penlee Lifeboat disaster and the tragic loss of the Solomon Browne just a few weeks earlier on 19th December 1981. Each year the harbour lights in Mousehole (Mouzell) are switched off for an hour in memory of the crewmen who lost their lives, all were from the village.
I'd finished February, and scribbled my little pencil thoughts in the book as usual.
Reflecting on the book afterwards, and thinking as I am about Virginia Woolf again at the moment for various reasons, into my mind came the basic ideas from an essay I wrote years ago about Virginia Woolf's painterly writing style.
As I read I'd had the sense that Lisa Moore was brushing in the detail as if this book was a finely executed watercolour. No blobs of oil paint here, these are delicate strokes of careful observation that gave me the sounds and the smells and the emotions of the book, the real feel of it. Often those seemingly obsolete moments in life, frequently glossed over but added in here to bring the novel to life, so perhaps it was no surprise to find that Lisa Moore had studied at the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design and had been intent on a career in the visual arts before becoming a full time writer.
Now, without wishing to cast a single aspersion on anything artistic Lisa Moore might have produced, which would probably have been brilliant, I have to say excellent career move and I'm going to backtrack now and find her first novel Alligator.
Does February qualify for the Orange Prize longlist?
If so I really would love to see it there.

Quiet Sunday...

After all that NTTVBG excitement last Sunday, and with a week full of great bookish conversations coming up, I think you deserve a rest day from the words here, besides which I'm settling down to read the selection for next week, The Girl With Glass Feet by Ali Shaw. Meanwhile I expect Simon over at Savidge Reads is busy plumping cushions and heaven knows what else in readiness for the invasion.
Talking of invasions, we crossed the border yesterday and were out and about around Cornwall. I forced a screeching handbrake turn and pull-in (perhaps a slight exaggeration) out of Bookhound when I spotted these in a lay-by... the first of the new decade.

My vase full still waiting to unfurl but The Candelmas Bells are peeking out everywhere along the lane now

and though I know they look better and last much longer out in the hedgerow, I couldn't resist a little picking for the kitchen shelf.

Fiddlesticks

My mind had been so full of books and online reading groups and singing recently that I had quite forgotten there was a wool shop in Honiton.
Honestly, I really had, so it was a nice surprise to remember and dispatch Bookhound off on his rounds for a long thirty minutes while I browsed in Fiddlesticks.
Ages ago I had bought two skeins of recycled sari silk yarn in Totnes and couldn't really think what to make with it. Just as it says on the tin it's spun from saris, comes in beautifully vibrant colours and is surprisingly reasonably priced for silk. So I was very interested to see someone in the wool shop knitting it up doubled with a chunky wool for a felted bag.


Now I've never really got felting but always wanted to try, has anyone had a go?
Rev Cheryl and I watched someone doing something with soap and water and fleecy bits when she and I visited Cowslip Workshops last summer, but I think I'm going to start with knitting and felting.
It's the actual process that has always stopped me because firstly you have to knit something far bigger than you want, and then you have to intentionally ruin it in the washing machine and it comes out half the size.
I've done a lot of unintentional felting in my time so this can't be too hard but what's the betting mine won't ruin properly?
I also needed some bigger circular needles and this someone in the shop was using the Knit Pro ones for her bag, so I bit the bullet and made a start on my collection.

For anyone who isn't familiar with them these are the interchangeable needles; you buy the cables in varying lengths and the needles in varying sizes separately and fix together accordingly. The joy is that you can store half-knitted things (as if I ever have any of those!) on the cables and use the needles for something else by attaching another cable.
I won't deny the look of the things helped my decision-making process enormously.

To make up for the fact that I'd only bought four balls of cheap as chips chunky wool for the ruining of, I also added in a skein of 'less cheap' gorgeously soft pure silk and merino (Scrumptious DK by Fyberspates) in a delectable shade of blue, because I can never leave anything behind in a shop if it's this colour, and at the moment I'm thinking neck cowl for that, but who knows.

Meanwhile it's gone freezing again here so I have installed a high-tech heating system on the Tinker's footstool beneath my desk, because no matter the number of sock layers my feet have been freezing.

As you can see I've had to fight for it with Muffy, who said thank you very much for thinking of me. Sixteen-year old senior girl-cat to Rocky by a year, the Sue Ellen of the feline world and the resident Keeper of the Footstool and any associated and unexpected luxuries.

Postal confessions...

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

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

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

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

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

The Heart Specialist by Claire Holden Rothman

Back along as we say down in the West Country, I was the very fortunate winner of KevinfromCanada's very generous competition on the 2009 Booker Forum.
It involved selecting the shortlist and then the winner and I had the most ticks in the right boxes and of course had my winner sorted very early on. The prize which was a selection of Canadian literature and I think in the end I left it to Kevin to choose for me whilst hinting loudly that I'd love to read The Heart Specialist by Claire Holden Rothman which had been nominated for the Giller Prize longlist in 2009.
Set in the late nineteenth century, Agnes White is an unusual child. Fascinated by science, microscopes, dissection, all very ungirly pursuits for a little child of the Victorian era with a governess, and blessed with a cast-iron stomach. It's clear Agnes will go far in the world of medicine if she can only persuade the patriarchal establishment of McGill University to take the risk of educating and employing a woman in a male-dominated world.
Set against that chilly Canadian background Agnes needs every ounce of grit and determination if she is to take on the prejudice, shake off the gender expectations and fight the inequality of opportunity for women.
Eventually the men kindly allow Agnes through the doors but only as far as the hospital museum where Agnes, specialising in all things cardiac, takes charge of the pickled remains housed there.
I've been in a few hospital museums, those that house all the ancient preserved organs and are not usually open to the public. Doubtless new rules govern these now but we had access as student nurses and they are the eeriest of places, just imagine the awe and wonder as we crept around the one attached to the London Hospital in Whitechapel.
Hovering over Agnes White the dubious legacy of her father's shadowy presence, himself a doctor and pathologist of some renown but a man disgraced and banished after some ill-proven scandal.
Whilst Agnes deals in the meaty matter of cardiac anatomy and physiology and is up to her elbows in formaldehyde and indeterminate grey lumps of ancient flesh, the book is also a good record of the early days of medical research when so little was known about the complexity of cardiac anomalies. Auscultation with a stethoscope was the limit of a doctor's diagnostic tools and very good they were at it too, but the post mortem pathology was becoming increasingly accepted as a legitimate and essential means of furthering that knowledge.

Yet for all her cardiac expertise Agnes's own skill in matters of the heart seem to falter, her own heart seems to beat separately from her soul, immature infatuations and obsessions replace meaningful relationships, even those with her immediate family feel distant and remote and whether intentionally or otherwise this seems to be reflected in Claire Holden Rothman's writing style.
The novel is inspired by the life of Dr Maude Elizabeth Seymour Abbott, one of Montreal's first female physicians and though all characters and events are fictional, I can't quite pin it down but there is an almost mechanical detachment in the narrative voice that stopped me from becoming little more than clinically involved in Agnes' life, what I call arm's length reading.
I just couldn't warm to Agnes and her struggles no matter how hard I tried and perhaps I wasn't supposed to.  With her energies utterly focused on her career, Agnes seems a poor judge of both character and situation offering plenty of scope for me to jump right in and be egging her on, but somehow I wasn't. It was more like reading about a life and perhaps it was that need to know how that life pans out for Agnes, given those perceived failings, that kept me reading.

It was interesting then to see what KevinfromCanada wrote about The Heart Specialist in his Giller reading last year and his thoughts have certainly allowed me to see a different perspective...

'The other thing that I very much appreciated in The Heart Specialist is that Holden Rothman never lets her prose style get in the way of her purpose. Again with Byatt and Mantel, I often found that soaring and inflated language served only to muddy an incomplete story. Straightforward prose may seem to be damning with faint praise, but in a complicated historical novel it is a definite asset.'

In the end perhaps it boils down to what we each need to extract from a reading experience. I'm a complete sucker for that 'soaring and inflated language' to carry me off over the rooftops of my imagination with my reading but equally, less is more can enthrall me too. The Heart Specialist seemed to fall a fraction short somewhere along the way, making it a good read for me, but perhaps not a great one.
If you read it I'd love to know your thoughts.

Endsleigh Salon update

Endsleigh Salon last night and thankfully the snow-blighted January theme of School or Campus had been held over until February, the log fire in our salon room crackled away nicely and I'll report back on everyone else's choices soon.
My own reading plan was simply spiffingly top hole....as they say.
I was an Enid Blyton Malory Towers girl, no question. Darrell and I would have been best friends, we'd have shared tuck boxes and got stuck into the pillow fights at the midnight feast, scored the winning goal as a one-two-one-two bit of passing down the hockey pitch and generally I'd have been a jolly good all-round egg.
I can't imagine quite how offended my parents must have been at my insistent wish to be sent to boarding school but I can tell you it would have made my day.
Imagine the thrill of being taken to the shop and kitted out with the uniform and being put on a train on my own with my tuck box and sent away with a load of strangers?
How on earth did Enid Blyton convince me that this would be preferable to the warmth and happiness of my lovely family, Saturdays out on my roller skates and home in time for the wrestling, the footie results and crumpets for tea, yes really, every Saturday without fail.
But could a lifelong loyalty to Malory Towers by ousted in my later years by a defection to Elinor Brent-Dyer's Chalet School?
Could I be a traitor and a turncoat and go and play for them instead?
No other school had ever wriggled its way into my affections as a child and now I wonder whether that was because anything written in the 1920s and 30s felt very old-fashioned to us in the 1950s and 60s. It was too recent, the era of our mums and it just wouldn't quite do, which is why I now see how Offpsringette was very half-hearted about joining my team at Malory Towers and got stuck into Point Horror instead.
I have several of the Chalet School books in the very collectable Girls Gone By editions which I'll admit might have been half the attraction this time around.

Doubtless I could have been tempted who knows where with a nice book, but I plumped for the first in the series The School at the Chalet and settled down to enrol.
My edition has a fascinating preamble of biography, history, and bibliography, maps and geographical locations cited in the series, old illustrations and dust jacket pictures, fan clubs to join and doubtless coach tours to book and all stretching to seventy pages which with great self-discipline I read first. A bit like knowing the school rules and the traditions before I pitched up with my trunk and all incredibly informative, because the fan base is huge and dedicated and they have done a vast amount of research into the books, sixty titles written between 1925 and 1970.
I had no idea having always classed them as books of the past, but not so.
So I conducted my experiment and I'll tell you where it's left me in a minute, but having drawn my conclusions I headed for the Children's Literature shelf.
I had picked up a few transcripts of papers given at children's literature conferences including one from 1998 entitled School Stories From Bunter to Buckeridge edited by Nicholas Tucker. An idle flick through the speakers and who do I find but Adele Geras, good friend of us here at dovegreyreader scribbles, writing about school stories and would you believe it, Adele was a Malory Towers girl too and had been analysing what made her love the books,

'...the problems were always solveable: the kind of thing that we could envisage ourselves doing. They had to do with personal relationships. This or that person had got too big for her boots; was cheating; was sucking up to teachers; was letting down her best friend ...all good gossipy stuff which girls love.'

Likening the reading to

'a rather guilty pleasure - of having no roughage to chew on in a book ...it's just like eating meringues all day long and comforting...because even then at the age of eight... we realised that we were well able to deal with tougher stuff than this...in other words the books made us feel a teeny bit superior.'

Adele also nursed the boarding school dream and hers became a reality which, as was to be expected, bore little resemblance to Enid Blyton's nirvana.
Before settling down to write her own school series The Tower Room,  Watching the Roses and Picture of the Night, Adele revisited Malory Towers

'I started it and gave up after ten chapters. This is the ghastly truth...I found it almost unreadable. The language was impoverished in the extreme, there were more exclamation marks than I could tolerate, the characters whom I remembered so vividly were cardboard cutouts...the whole thing was the most disillusioning experience.'

I can't tell you how relieved I am because the Chalet School ended in disaster after fifty pages and I was ringing home for someone to come and fetch me immediately and wait until you hear about one of the Endsleigh Salonistas who went off to the Abbey School with Elsie Oxenham ... poor girl ... Morris dancing.
Having demanded to be taken back to dear old Malory Towers immediately things sadly went from bad to truly awful for me too.
I'm with Adele on this one,

'I decided then and there to leave Enid Blyton well alone, and recall simply how much I used to love her works...Blyton is strictly for children, no grown-ups allowed.'

On habit and reading in public places...

For some reason, if it's February it means time for a trip to Honiton.
Odd how the time of year suggests a visit somewhere, and we probably don't go at any other time of year because it involves driving past Exeter and that means holiday traffic, and we get fed up with that.
Before you know it it'll be April and time for St Ives.
Is this a sign of encroaching age when these things become habit?
We'd better start mixing it all up a bit.
Anyway off to Honiton for a mooch around the antique shops and the bookshops and first things first, a walk up the hill to our favoured eatery and brunch, because by the time we get there I'm gasping for scrambled eggs on toast... which I always eat in Honiton.
As usual I had stuffed a book in my bag because who knows when I might get bored and need to read. The choice needs to be slim and portable, imperceptible weight-wise, so while Bookhound ordered food and beverage I opened my book of choice and made a start. In fact that day I had picked up They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell because I have been meaning to read him forever and had bought this one recently.
Bookhound returned with a paper and we settled down at our usual table to wait for my scrambled eggs and Bookhound's standard poached eggs with smoked salmon. When they arrive we do our normal halfy-halfy swap, sliding things across from one plate to the other, I gain a poached egg, he gains some scrambled and half my toast but in the meantime we read.
On his way back to the table Bookhound had picked up a 'red-top' tabloid that he wouldn't usually 'take' but it was all that was left, and we had a brief debate about how different the same news can be when you read it in a tabloid. In fact you learn all the bits that you really want to know but feel slightly ashamed that you want to know them (...er...John Terry etc) and we settled quietly like the pair of long-married fifty-somethings that we are.
Well I could have foregone the rest of Honiton and just sat there all day because I was completely oblivious to everything else around me, missed the waitress shouting ninety-seven ... scrambled eggs and next thing I knew there was the food under my nose.
It occurred to me at that point what a variable thing reading in public can be.
Sometimes a book just fails miserably, my mind refuses to concentrate and prefers to listen to the conversation on the next table because sometimes it's so loud how can you but help it?
Well on this day brief excerpts were drifting in...

'saw you in the library but you looked busy...'

'yes, it gets like that..'

but not enough to distract me, my complete attention focused on They Came Like Swallows.
I often find it quite difficult to start a book 'out in public' too, a well-established read much easier because finding my plot and voice feet in the early chapters of a book often requires added concentration. But there I was immersed in my introduction to this little boy called Bunny, who looks most disgruntled on the cover of the book, and there's his mother ominously stitching diapers and the bully of an older brother about to ruin the day and then I discover why the older brother seems slightly over-indulged.
When I looked up I hardly knew where I was, surely I was in this house in 1917?
I have failed several times over with William Maxwell's The Chateau but think it might be almost impossible to fail with William Maxwell if you start with this one, and apropos of nothing but a remote connection to little boys on the covers of books as per They Came Like Swallows, this one's becoming a habit too, I've added another recent sighting to our collection.

If only they'd received some of the royalties.
Now, I can't believe a single one of you goes anywhere without at least one book secreted on your person, so we'll take that as a given, but are you a public reader, and do some books make for better public reading than others?
Any books you can recall that kept you oblivious to the world at large as you read?
Missed your station?
Missed your scrambled eggs?

The day after the day before...

'I prefer to write. When I sit down and write, words grow very docile; they come and feed out of my hand like small birds, and I can do almost what I will with them, whereas when I try to marshal them in the open air, they steal away.'

That's our Brodeck talking and wow, what a day that was!
It's the day after the day before and  Episode One of Not the TV Book Group discussing Brodeck's Report by Philippe Claudel.
I've never seen so many virtual wellies outside the door and you should see the state of the kitchen, but what a brilliant daylong discussion we had. An unexpected bonus for me was how good it felt to think so carefully about a single book for a whole day, not just the couple of hours of a book group gathering or even the fleeting moments of a TV or radio programme. It gave plenty of time for everyone to take their time and have their say, go off and watch the rugby and come back to find new ideas had surfaced and been shared, and for others to pick up on them and add more, and it's all there as a permanent record which I hope does the book and the first episode of NTTVBG proud.
I've belonged to lots of online reading groups in my time, but nothing as good as this...so good that I think any more words from me are a bit superfluous, so I'm going to let that post and, at the last count, its 106 discussion comments speak for themselves today and a great big thank you from all of us to everyone who took part.
I'm now very excited about reading the next book and moving on over to Savidge Reads on Sunday February 21st when we will be talking about The Girl with Glass Feet by Ali Shaw.
It's never too late to join us, everyone is welcome, just dip in and out of the series whenever you want to if that suits, we'll be there.

Not the TV Book Group - Brodeck's Report by Philippe Claudel

Stand by...three....two....one... *IN THE ETHER*

A very warm welcome to the first in the series of Not the TV Book Group.
I'm Lynne and I scribble here at dovegreyreader... sitting next to me here on the virtual sofa it's my pleasure to introduce Kirsty from Other Stories...then Kim who lives at Reading Matters and on the end Simon who resides at Savidge Reads.
And there you have it, four UK book bloggers who decided the blogosphere was the perfect place to have a book group of our own, and that's not just us, it's all of you too and we are certainly hoping you will join us over the next sixteen weeks as we read our selection.
First a few housekeeping arrangements.
Just because we're online doesn't mean we can't enjoy ourselves, so when in deepest rural Devonshire, and you are currently at that little white dot in the middle...

as regular visitors to dovegreyreader scribbles will know, you are offered virtual pots of  tea and will have scones and clotted cream forced upon you, and the sofas are far more comfortable if you kick off your wellies (preferably before you come in) and curl up.
 In the event of a fire, grab your wellies and run like crazy across the fields because we're in the middle of nowhere and the fire brigade will be three hours getting here.
Now for anyone who is new to the book blogosphere (we've missed you) and may be wondering how this works, we plan to meet on the hosting blog fortnightly with a few holiday exceptions and you can check the schedule here. The host blogger will introduce their book choice followed by discussion in comments.
We've all agreed on discussion that will do its utmost to respect each other's views whilst offering  honest opinions about our reading and we've also decided to make no spoiler allowances.
You know when you pitch up at the book group and someone hasn't read the book and is begging you not to reveal the ending...or the middle...or the beginning, so you all hobble around the edges terrified lest you give anything away?
Beans will be spilled here, so if you haven't read the book and this worries you, you might want to take the dog for a walk today instead and return to the discussion at a later date. One of the joys of a blog is that the discussion will still be there waiting for you, no seven day deadlines here. Bookmark it and please come back at your leisure with your thoughts because we'll know if you leave a comment, even if it's in July, and will be sure to reply.
So when you see this you'll know we're ready for the off...and I think we are.

** Warning... if you haven't read the book there may be spoilers ahead **

Brodeck's Report by Philippe Claudel, set somewhere post-war and European, undefined yet surely Mittel-European, isolated and mountainous, exuding a powerful sense of place and tradition; in some ways an idyllic setting but one laced with the potent mixture of a community riven and damaged by the atrocities of war.
A community with a strong sense of tradition is perhaps able to fall back on its past in order to survive and recover, but in this case a community with barely healing wounds which are about to be painfully reopened  when a traveller arrives in their midst. Known only as Anderer (the Other,) the enigmatic, eccentric stranger transmits a power that unsettles by his mere presence because he barely utters a word. Fear and suspicions escalate within this fragile community and when the Anderer is murdered it is Brodeck, himself once a child-stranger and an outsider arriving in the village some thirty years previously, who is commissioned by the village elders to write a report of events.
It is a given that the report will reflect well on a community that may just have been confronted and betrayed by its own corporate guilty conscience, all exposed so astutely by the Anderer.
Brodeck a victim of the recent unnamed war, incarcerated in a camp, treated like a dog by the guards but harboring guilt of his own that he will somehow need to assuage if he is to find peace within himself.

'I am not a storyteller. The present account, should anyone ever read it, will prove that I am not: I keep going back and forth, leaping over time like a hurdle, getting lost on digressions and maybe even, without wishing to, concealing what is essential.'

Brodeck may certainly feel this about his own official and unofficial account of events which are the sum total of Brodeck's Report, but the same could not be said of Philippe Claudel who I felt to be a consummate storyteller as he weaves this novel out of the warp and weft of recent history.
Yet it feels like timeless history and I wonder whether you were struck by this too?
Time seemed to fold in on itself, the present pleated into the past and felt fluid, occasionally it became perfectly possible to imagine that I was in the midst of any community, anywhere, recovering from any recent war and its associated sorrows and repercussions.
When someone threw a cobble that community could have as easily have been medieval, this felt like timeless and universal cause and effect. In fact as far as I recall wasn't the typewriter the only concession to modernity?
I sensed those shards of the holocaust but I felt that Philippe Claudel constantly evaded certainties. Versions of events like Kristallnacht that are echoed in Purische Nacht, the symbolism of the Star of David only hinted at in the star-shapes left by the broken glass, and the Nazi persecution of the Jews never clearly identified beyond the obvious associations of the cruelty of the train journey and the camp.
Philippe Claudel confirms in a revealing and informative interview with Boyd Tonkin of the Independent, that Brodeck's Report is much more about the aftermath and I certainly sensed his focus on the effects, on a community and the individual, of an invader; the corporate thinking that follows if a community is to flourish again, yet how a community also needs the courage of those lone voices prepared to say the unsayable.
Plenty of food for thought, in fact food seemed to be a very important thread too and it was all good, wholesome warming nourishing stuff, as if to exaggerate and throw into sharp relief how starved many of the villagers seemed to be of the other necessities of life... kindness, forgiveness and so much more.
Themes just oozed off every page as I read, trust, betrayal, hatred, fear, regret, guilt, suffering et al, and I have all sorts of ideas flying round in my head about fairy tales, oral storytelling and the language which I think will emerge in comments, but first I'm wondering what you all thought?
And you know how much I *don't like* those lists of reader questions to help get me started at the end of a book so I have no intention of throwing those at you all, but I am sitting here ready to bat it all about through the day and beyond...well I will be by about 10am GMT, so who's going to bowl the first ball?

and the winners are...

I think I mentioned attention-seeking behaviour from Rocky in the face of new puppy competition and it all culminated in a bold but ultimately ill-fated pose on the kitchen table.

The kitchen table forbidden feline territory but it seemed silly not to pick up the camera and catch the moment of defiance before I shooed him off, and of course he rose to the posing occasion as he always does when he sees the camera these days.

Meanwhile as penance Rocky has uncomplainingly done this week's prize draw for three copies of Beside the Sea by Veronique Olmi, and I'm so delighted for Peirene Press, because Nicholas Lezard has chosen Veronique Olmi's book  as his Paperback Choice in today's Guardian
I'm also very excited because Alison Flood has written nice things about the Not the TV Book Group here,
In case you've been out of the country this all kicks off here with Brodeck's Report by Philippe Claudel tomorrow.
The winners of a copy of Veronique Olmi's book are

24 Lizziemac

30 Emma Thomas

48 Sue C

Check it's really you on the comments here, send your address to me at dovegreyreader at gmaildotcom and if you could put *winner* or similar in the subject line that would help, and my thanks to Meike of Peirene Press who will post the book to you direct.

It was a Grand Night for Singing

It was, it really was and It's a Grand Night for Singing was our opening volley in last Saturday's concert, and my first performance with the seventy voice-strong ladies' choir that I joined last September.
Does anyone else sing?
I've long been convinced that singing gets to a happy bit of my brain and does it a power of good.
We had been invited to sing alongside the very distinguished Loveny Male Voice Choir who do exciting things like tour Italy, whilst we've only been as far as Liskeard.
Anyway it was off on a coach jolly down into deepest Cornwall and I can confirm that there was nowhere south of the Arctic colder than that parish church in a little Cornish village last Saturday evening.
It all felt decidedly Hardy-esque and I had been warned about the chill factor, but surely it was all an exaggeration?
And what if my dodgy thermostat suddenly declared itself unexpectedly turned onto full?
Concert rig has to be smart and black with a coloured scarf draped very particularly around the neck, nothing could be simpler but you can have no idea how many hours I spent compiling layers that I could slip off discreetly in case my core temperature went inadvertently volcanic?
I had hoped sufficient to stay warm whilst avoiding the Michelin look, but  knew I'd seriously underestimated as the die-hards gathered for the coach. It was like the Russian army setting off for the Gulags, all those usually svelte, colourful people waddling towards me like an encroaching sea of black and then having to be craned up the steps of the coach and lowered into their seats. It was threatening snow too and they were muttering ominous things like

'This is the warmest we'll be'.

The trousers with leggings beneath also now doing me no favours, enough static-electricity to power the National Grid for an hour or so.
Anyway, enough moaning, yes we froze, even the well-wrapped ones, and when the vicar walked to the front of the church to introduce everyone I think any one of us would have said 'Yes please' and ripped that cloak right off him in very unladylike fashion if he'd offered it, which he sensibly didn't.
But somehow voices soared to the rafters, and perhaps it is the combined effect of church acoustics and that performance moment working the magic as we trotted on through Adiemus by Karl Jenkins (we
were spot on with our ayacooahehs and counted the right number of yakama yamayakaya mema repeats...five) , then a couple of Spirituals followed by Howard Goodall's The Lord is My Shepherd, followed by Bobby Shafto, I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair, The Long and Winding Road and Amarillo (with audience participation) and The Skye Boat Song as our encore, which thankfully was requested.
There is something stirring about a male voice choir and when Loveny launched into An American Trilogy we knew it was to be something special as the sonorous harmonies of Glory, Glory Hallelujah bounced around the church. By the time they reached their finale, a medley from Oklahoma followed by Speed your Journey from Verdi's Nabucco as an encore, we'd all completely forgotten our hypothermia and rising frostbite and over £1000 had been raised for the Shelterbox Haiti appeal.
Tradition dictates supper for the singers so we all trekked through an icy dusting of snow up to the village institute afterwards, where a table stretching the length of the hall was groaning under the weight of the food. Between us we hoovered it up in harmony and kept the Cornish samovar (a tea urn) tunefully singing away in the background.
Then it was onto the coaches and a very slippery crawl the two miles back up out of the village and onto the main road and home and miraculously only three people got left behind, missed the coaches and for all I know might still be there.
I had worked out in my mind all the things that could possibly go wrong but hopefully in amongst the ranks my mistakes wouldn't show and in the end I only sang half a non-first soprano word when it was the second sopranos turn... saw the word 'Bonny', thought yep that's us and despite an obvious word to the contrary on my score out it came...

I managed damage limitation at 'Bon', and Bookhound and the Tinker sitting in the audience very kindly said they hadn't noticed.

dovegreyreading...

I thought it would be good to share what I'm actually reading this week as opposed to what it says I'm reading over there <<<< which I am, but, of that selection, several books have requested my undivided attention and I'd love to know what you have on the go at the moment too.
Sometimes I hear about a book and just have to get hold of a copy, or else a book arrives and it's so good I just can't hang about, I have to read a bit....and some more...and just a few more pages. I'm my own worst enemy and I hope you don't pick up reading habits like this from here.
That list of reads for the Not the TV Book Group was a prime example, here's our selection looking lovely thanks to kimbofo.

Once I'd been presented with the list I was onto it like a greyhound out of the trap and those have all arrived and we are good to go for Sunday with Philippe Claudel's  Brodeck's Report here. Excitement is mounting, we've had interest from all directions, the Facebook Group is here and thank heavens there are the twitter-savvy amongst our number who know what hashtags are...oh yes, let's have one of those I agreed, why ever not.
I'd been such a nervous wreck about laying hands on a copy of Brodeck's Report that I'd ordered one online and another from the library. When neither had shown up I panicked and went out and bought one, belt and braces etc.
As you already know I couldn't keep my hands off the proper versus proof edition of Lives Like Loaded Guns Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds by Lyndall Gordon


and I am just simmering away nicely with that on a daily basis and brewing all manner of interesting thoughts about Emily and it's all involved sitting at an 18" square table too.
Why you may ask?
Well because Emily did but there's a bit more to it than that, I'll explain more when I do a proper halfway post very soon.
That all seemed like enough to have on the go this week so I really shouldn't be dabbling in arsenic as well, except in the post came The Arsenic Century How Victorian Britain was Poisoned at Home, Work and Play by James C. Whorton and published by Oxford University Press.

I couldn't stop myself, just had to have a little look and that was my fate sealed.
We live within sniffing distance of the old Devon Great Consols Mine, which, at its peak in the nineteenth century, was the biggest producer of arsenic in the world...I didn't know that.
With a little bit of local online digging I discovered that in 1855 William Morris inherited thirteen shares in the mine generating an income of over £700 a year; at the time single shares changed hands for £800 which gives some clue as to the wealth of the local industry. His father and uncles had invested heavily and one of them, Thomas Morris, lived in Abbotsfield House built especially for him on the outskirts of Tavistock. Now surrounded by housing estates, but in the time that we have lived here, once a youth hostel and last I heard a nursing home, and how many times have I driven past with little clue of its history.
Perhaps this also explains the presence of the very beautiful William Morris window in the town's parish church?

Who knew? I certainly had no idea of that local connection.
The evidence of the mines is all around us so I shall be off on a scouting mission with the camera any day. The miner's cottages are still there, listed buildings now private homes; right out in the middle of nowhere you'll find Wheal Maria and Wheal Josiah and the waste heaps from the mines still piled up around. I love it when something on the doorstep that I've barely taken any notice of suddenly takes on some significance from my reading and a whole new trail beckons.
William Morris gets a brief mention in the book too because apparently he poured scorn on any suggestion that the green arsenic-based pigment used in his wallpaper had any associated health risks, and this despite knowing of the atrocious working conditions in the mines and the poor health of the miners. Surely quite a conflict of family and ethical interests there because the shares were instrumental in funding his business and eventually sold to raise capital for greater investment.
Meanwhile the story of arsenic makes surprising and fascinatingly readable social history, poisoning the big fear of the Victorians and apparently the Essex women had it down to a fine art.
So that's my current reading, as opposed to ongoing Stately Progress reading which is another story entirely wherein I keep the faith with Lesley Blanche's Journey Into the Mind's Eye and excel myself whilst watching the Antiques Roadshow.
I  spot the glass samovar cup and the decorated (but not Faberge) egg masquerading as the little incense burner,

'Oh that's to hang in front of your icon'

I say just a fraction before the expert utters the exact same words and Bookhound turns in disbelief at my expertise and asks

' Is this a repeat?'

So that's my reading week, how about yours?

Home by Marilynne Robinson

My first read of the new year, a book I always choose carefully and Home by Marilynne Robinson seemed right for 2010 given that I'd started 2009 with Gilead, and though Home had won the Orange prize nothing had induced me to read it to date.

I think I needed a rest from the intensity of Gilead and suspected Home might be more of the same, which it is but in a subtly different way and in the end I've perhaps done myself a disservice by waiting so long.
Home is after all the same story told from a different point of view, moving me across to the Boughton household to witness life there with the return of long lost son Jack who had caused Reverend John Ames so much anguish but which is nought compared to the anguish he has put his own family through.

Interestingly I could barely recall the gentle cut and thrust of Gilead and looking back over my thoughts at the time I think I can see why. It was one of those books that seemed to wash over me in a bit of a post-Christmas euphoric reading haze and I remember now having to constantly reread and backtrack because I kept losing my concentration, would reach the end of a page and not quite know what I'd read. I must have ended up reading the book twice and now I'm going to have to read it again...perhaps my first book of 2011 (dv etc). I'll just go on like this ad infinitum in a sort of circular read of Marilynne Robinson until I've grasped every nuance, because there are far more subtleties than one read of each book can possibly pin down.

In some ways Home was devastating for its honesty as Reverend Ames the Amenable seemed to transmogrify into Ames the Curmudgeon as Jack, returning home after an absence of twenty years, a spell in prison and a deceased illegitimate child to his name, seeks forgiveness at every turn only to seemingly find it denied.

The scenes that almost moved me to tears in Gilead have minimal effect when seen from the other side, those given scant regard in Gilead are lip-biting and chokingly emotional when read in Home.

How often do I read a book and think how much I'd love to know the other side of the story, now I've been presented with it I think it's all left me in a state of emotional turmoil far worse than Jack's or Glory's as I ponder who is the truest of these Christians?

Jack is no prodigal son celebrating a homecoming. He has hit rock bottom, his sense of self-punitive worthlessness is profound and moving. A man replete with regrets and sorrow, tired of himself, in need of constant reassurance and affirmation which he looks to receive from a sister who has a bucket-full of her own troubles and a father living out his last days in infirmity and confusion. Poor Jack seems to have a lifetime of thank yous to catch up on and he wastes no opportunity to say so, his gratitude often far in excess of that required of the moment. A lifetime of misunderstandings and transgressions to be assimilated and forgiven.

As I read more and came to know Jack as the reserved, enigmatic outsider who had grown up feeling on the periphery of this close and loving family I couldn't help but be reminded of Susan Hill's novella, The Beacon. The outsider child who may have a very different story to tell, a very different experience of this family. Without 'home' Jack has been rudderless and displaced, for whatever reason denied access to that supposed haven of comfort and forgiveness so there is much to be explored here and I feel as if I have barely scratched the surface.

There is the same compression and density to Marilynne Robinson's writing in Home as in Gilead, look aside for a moment, let my concentration lapse and so much was missed, no word wasted all making another intense reading experience and to be honest I'm not sure where it's left me.

A bit of me desperately wants to read both books again, the rest of me can't quite summon up the reading energy to do that just yet.

Contact by Jonathan Buckley

It's odd how sometimes when you've finished one book and you pick up another, there's a sentence in the second one that arcs back across to the first.
I had finished reading Contact by Jonathan Buckley (and published by Sort Of Books) when several days later I opened February by Lisa Moore. Just thirty pages in and still finding my plot-feet, the son of the main character has just heard from an ex-girlfriend that she is expecting his baby and it was these few words as John considers his dilemma...

'A stranger might call you to account, wreck your life...'

And there I was reflecting back yet again on Contact, because that is exactly what happens.
Childless couple Dominic Patterson and his wife Aileen, now in their fifties, have been happily married for thirty or so years. Dominic is a craftsman with carpentry skills inherited from his father, though not quite bespoke enough to put him in his father's master craftsman league, so he has settled for running his own upmarket furniture retail business and has several shops to his name. Dominic's life seems contented and comfortable, moneyed and privileged but perhaps with an unspoken tinge of disappointment.
Off the street and into Dominic's life walks the rough and ready Sam Williams who alleges he is Dominic's son, the result of a  a clandestine affair Dominic had in the early days of his marriage to Aileen, and thus the unravelling of Dominic's life begins.
Had the seemingly regretfully childless Dominic been able to choose a son, it would not have been Sam, that much is clear...but it all becomes much less clear cut for Dominic as Sam takes a sinister grip on his life.
I'm always pondering what might be in a title and Contact is perfect, others have picked up on it too, a  single word open to multiple interpretations within the context of this book.  I won't elaborate on them all because as you discover them it's as if you peel off another layer of meaning and gather in a bit more understanding, I had quite a list by the end. How often did I sit in a child protection case conference and discuss 'contact' orders between parents separated or estranged from their children for whatever reason. 'Contact' almost as bad as 'access', cold, clinical loveless words, a court order, an arrangement put in place seemingly to fulfill emotional need, but how often the artificiality of the circumstances failed to do that and often caused more problems than it resolved.
Thus began this reader's supervision of those contact sessions between Dominic and Sam, because somehow Jonathan Buckley cleverly pitched me right in there. I was perched on Dominic's shoulder and alternately whispering in his ear and shouting my loudest as Sam started his manipulation...note where my sympathies seemed to rest.
But perhaps Sam really is who he says he is?
Well the waters are well and truly muddied as his behaviour shifts from oddly sinister, to malevolent to stalking to befriending and poor Dominic is psychologically all over the shop as he desperately tries to recall the past, whilst struggling to exert some control over the present and preserve his future.
Sam is ripe for some amateur psychiatric diagnosis and I just couldn't stop myself.
I had him down as a complex personality disorder with a wide range of sociopathic tendencies, all profoundly disturbing as his astute skills in manipulation, his ready response to any paternity doubt expressed by Dominic, along with his violent outbursts and so much more all seem to demonstrate. I didn't trust him further than I could throw him, but still...
Sam is an 'ex-squaddie' who has served in Northern Ireland and Iraq so perhaps there's room for some post-traumatic stress disorder too, that might explain a great deal.
Except now Sam is a builder ...and not a cowboy either, a real craftsman in fact, and this is where the book throws up some of its most interesting undercurrents, because perhaps the reader spots what Dominic fails to.
When people tell me I am the spitting image of one of my children I can't see it myself, so was I spotting those similarities between Dominic and this man purporting to be his son, and which Dominic might be blind to himself ?
Or was I imagining them?
Sam's mother Sarah gave him up for adoption and it is abundantly clear he is not in Dominic's social grouping, but if Dominic were to be his father is he showing a genetic likeness and displaying those inherited skills?
Dominic's mother Sarah had suffered from mental health problems, in Dominic's words 'she wasn't always the steadiest vessel'
Is this nature versus nurture at work?
Is Sam in fact a 50/50 genetic likeness to them both?
And if so is Sam perhaps also revealing a hidden side to Dominic's personality now well-concealed by a lifetime of social and self-control?
So many interesting questions to ask and I've only given you the bare bones, a book group could really go to town on this one, but you can guess by now I was completely drawn in by the whole lot and Contact became my first really unputdownable book of 2010. There's a sort of quiet but steady build up of psycho-sub-thriller menace here which had me completely hooked and my sympathies were hither and thither and a bit like poor old Dominic, all over the place.
I also kept on reading through the early pages of frequent expletives which is unusual for me. If you deem these offensive (and I often do if they seem in any way gratuitous) I would just suggest that if you can shelve your scruples and stay with it, hold judgement until you are much deeper into the book, then you will be rewarded; their purpose will slowly become clear as an essential aspect of Jonathan Buckley's character development for Sam and also his plot.
There is real psychological depth to this book which paid dividends for me and I now plan a return to Jonathan Buckley's previous novel So He Takes the Dog which I gave up on too readily and now think perhaps I shouldn't have done. I was clearly only paddling in the shallows whilst the hidden depths awaited and now I've taken the plunge I'm ready for more, because I have a feeling there is a great deal to miss as you read a Jonathan Buckley novel.

On snippateering...

What on earth is she on about now I hear you mutter...snippateering?
Is it in the Oxford English Dictionary? Well perhaps not yet but it should be.
Snippateering (and I felt that extra 'p' added something) surely an art and a skill deserving of recognition.
For want of a newspaper there are times when all would be lost in this house, so you have no idea how often I have had to defend this stack with my life in recent weeks when the needs of the reluctant fire or the puppy's very willing derriere seemed paramount.
Resistant to all pleadings I suggest chopping up the furniture or putting the puppy in nappies, but just hands off my paper reviews.

We buy several, and though I know I can read them online at leisure, there seems nothing to match that crumply old folded paper version draped over the teapot, plus I'm a bit of a nerd when it comes to cuttings and paper reviews folded up and put inside books.
Imagine my delight when this copy of Virginia Woolf's A Writer's Diary, picked up at a book fair for £5, yielded rich pickings. I love this book, inscribed "For Hilary From Kenneth Christmas 1953", sounds formal doesn't it, and I presume it is Hilary who has written notes in it. I've added my marginalia and I really hope whoever this book moves onto eventually continues the tradition even though it is a first edition with a Vanessa Bell cover, it's a much used, much loved book, not an exhibit or an investment.

Several of the cuttings predate the book so I think Hilary was a real fan of Virginia Woolf. Tucked in there, Desmond MacCarthy's review of a book entitled Virginia Woolf : Her Art as a Novelist by Joan Bennett, published by Cambridge University Press and priced 6/-

'It is rather embarrassing to a reviewer when the publisher's account of a new book is as good a review of it as he could write himself...quote from it I must, for there, concisely stated, is what I want most to say myself...'

Desmond MacCarthy I discover was the literary critic for The Sunday Times back in the 1940s and also in this little batch Hilary has kept a stellar piece by him on book reviewing and criticism,

'good critics are much rarer than good poets, dramatists or novelists...'

more of that another day.
We can eke out the weekend newspapers to last a whole week of fire lighting here if we are very careful. There's a set order to these things too, Business, Work, Money and Sport sections will usually see us warm through to Wednesday by which time I've hidden the review section in my stash awaiting attention. Travel and Property go up in smoke on Thursday swiftly followed by the main papers which we can make last two days and then it's time to buy more.
A box of firelighters probably a whole lot cheaper.
Naturally this all went to pot with a puppy indoors and we were through the whole lot by Monday with firelighting eyes  gazing furtively at my snippateering box.

So I work on the principle that I'm not alone and that others may like to find my cuttings in my books eventually. My papers pile up until I suddenly feel moved to have a mass snippateering session. Then I set too with a glad heart and a fine pair of scissors, distilling several trees down to this...

Along the way I pause to catch up on things I've missed and then there are the little dilemmas, which to keep when there are must-have reviews on both sides of the same page,

After a lot or procrastination and sidetracking I end up with this

and then begins that leisurely wander around the shelves finding the books to put them in and more browsing.... you really would think I had nothing better to do.
Is it just me or do I have kindred snippateers out there?

Beside the Sea by Veronique Olmi

You have to admire the bravery of anyone setting out as an independent publisher these days, or so we are told from within. The book zeitgeist is supposedly not sparkling, more awash with doom and gloom, so I was delighted to be contacted by Meike Ziervogel recently.
Now I think I actually know how to pronounce Meike because I once visited a new mum called Meike and she told me it rhymed with forMICA as in kitchen worktops, so I hope that's right and I'm not having an Imogen moment, sadly pronounced Emogun by me for years after reading What Katy Did when I was about seven.
Meike's very cheery email was full of optimism with news that she was at the helm of a newish little publishing house intent on publishing contemporary fiction in translation and asking whether I would be interested in reading the first title from Peirene Press.
Peirene a Greek nymph who turned into a water spring providing a source of liquid and poetic inspiration to the poets of Corinth. Meike suggests that metamorphosis likewise represents the art of translation, and its efforts to turn a foreign book into an enjoyable read. Translation a skill, as we have oft appreciated here, involving that careful attention to detail and necessitating, as Meike elaborates in her publicity material, an understanding of the voice and the rhythm of the original.
I'm always up for more literature in translation and having now read  the first title from Peirene Press I'm very pleased I said yes.
It's a funny thing, don't you think that 30 mile literary gap across the Channel might as well be the Grand Canyon.?
Do contemporary French best-sellers travel well?
I'm not sure, perhaps it puts me under too much pressure to be told that the entire French nation have loved a book.

Beside the Sea by Veronique Olmi was first published in France in 2001 and translated into all the major European languages ...and the entire French nation loved it and I thought 'oh dear'.
This is Bord de Mer's first foray into English and firstly I do have to issue a health warning.

Journal du Dimanche said

'This story tears your heart apart'

and they are not far wrong.
A single mother has left home in a hurry with her two young sons, Stan and Kevin, on a trip to the seaside. It's quite clear from the off that her thought processes are jumbled and confused and I was immediately reminded  of two books,  When We Were Romans by Matthew Kneale for its portrayal of children in the care of a mother with mental illness and Prince Rupert's Teardrop by Lisa Glass. This latter for its unusual and discomfiting portrayal of mental illness. If you found anything in either of those that impressed you, then you might find more here.
Narrated by the unnamed mother, Beside the Sea becomes a strange mix of unreliable narrative and veiled hints at what may have gone before, and which I won't reveal because they are subtle and were interesting to pick up on as I read. The book is riven with acute physical discomfort, it's cold, it rains, it's muddy, everyone gets drenched, the hotel is dreadful and all this 'wrongness' somehow compounds and distills the impression of the mental anguish, as does the whole notion of the children tagging along, clearly mindful of their mother's problems. 
The sun has no plans to shine on this beleaguered little family so start bracing yourself.
With their mother misreading the signs around her and misinterpreting the gestures, the children's confusion is not hard to imagine. Watching Stan and Kevin through this fractured lens and the bizarrely refracted light of the mother's tangled thought processes and I could only begin to imagine what they were thinking and feeling
At just over a hundred pages Beside the Sea is perfect for one long sitting but be prepared for one of the saddest endings to a book you might read this year or even this lifetime.
I'm not sure I've ever read anything quite like it and as I turned the final page I was possibly a bit pale around the gills and dumbstruck at the place where Veronique Olmi had taken me and left me...it's one of those last sentence books... but I was also suffused by that warm glow of entente cordiale vive la France oneness because I think I got a sense of why this book has been so popular.
I have to applaud Adriana Hunter's translation of the mother's narrative voice which I feel sure has been captured and preserved in perfect pitch; it's remarkable and I feel sure very close to the original French because it works, maintains the vernacular, nothing incongruous or out of keeping with the characters on the page. I'd love to know your thoughts on this if you decide to read it and I see Adriana Hunter also responsible for another book I have sitting here, Once on a Moonless Night by Dai Sijie, author of the wonderful Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress.

Peirene Press have more books planned for later in the year, they have a lovely website and a very self-effacing and funny blog about giving birth to this, their first book, plus news of the literary salons they run, and I'm saying all this as if Meike were my best friend when in fact we wouldn't know it if we trod on each other. However I just think Peirene Press have been very honest, seem to have gone into this with no illusions or delusions and have held fast to the most important point, publish a good book.
I really wish them much success because they couldn't have tried any harder to shine a glimmer of light into this dismal world that we are told is publishing a la 2010.
I have an early proof copy of a forthcoming title, Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman by Friedrich Christian Delius of whom I know nothing, but the synopsis has me intrigued as does the format.

'Rome one January afternoon in 1943. A young German woman is on her way to listen to a Bach concert at the Lutheran church. Innocent and naive, the war is for her little more than a daydream, until she realizes that her husband might never return...a mesmerizing psychological portrait of the human need to safeguard innocence and integrity at any cost - even at the risk of excluding reality.'

That format, 'a single 105-page long sentence with a beautifully clear rhythm.'
Zut alors, je suis tres excited except this one's translated from the German but anyway, scroll down for gifts.

Prize draw copies of Beside the Sea by Veronique Olmi

Rocky tells me it's at least three weeks since we had a prize draw and he's disgruntled because the limelight has been far too canine of late, when actually this is his blog and he is far more famous than Rusty. Lot of attention-seeking behaviour going on including a bit of a cough (and even barking in his sleep...yes really, scared the living daylights out of me) which all miraculously disappeared when Bookhound, (now our resident Gina of the contented animal world) mentioned the V-E-T word but stopped short of showing him the problem-solving saw.
My thanks to Meike for getting me out of the dog-house with the cat in that case and responding to my request for prize draw copies for you,  which she has kindly agreed to post worldwide.
So three copies of Beside the Sea by Veronique Olmi up for the giving of today, and if you could just try and keep a straight face, because he's really trying to impress you, Rocky will don the beret and juggle his onions when he chooses the winners...