Best of this funny old year’s reads: Reads of, if not from, 2016

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Book Review, Books of The Year, Soapbox

A strangely old best of the reading year: Top reads of 2016

It has been a very weird year, both ‘out there’ within the wider world – which, of course, paradoxically seems set on being a smaller, narrower, meaner world obsessively devoted to self-harm in a foolish attempt to numb its pain – and, reflected in my reading world

I have read (though in some cases, abandoned in disgust) 113 books. Now some of them are still to be reviewed on here : I am regrettably behind on my reviews. But I haven’t posted anywhere near treble figures on reviews. My ‘won’t make the blog unless it is at least a CLEAR (not rounded up) 4 star’ tells its own story. And a goodly number of the books read have not been reviewed anywhere. Books so drearily derivative or, just so abysmal, that I abandoned time spent with them as soon as indecently possible. And that included any time spent explaining their dreariness. Better to head off quickly to time spent with a wonderful book.

I note that a goodly proportion of my ‘best ofs’ were not just reads, but re-reads: books so good half a life-time ago, that it was a treat to dust them off and say hello again. And also, books by authors never read at their time of writing: older writers, discovered.

I think what has, in some ways, sadly, impressed me about those mainly dead and gone older writers is their discipline and craft with language, character, setting, style and narrative. Writers with things to say, and the ability to say what they said memorably and with authenticity. We have a fast-book culture, and sometimes I think, that like fast-food, we have surrendered ourselves to ersatz, sitting heavy in the gut, and with little memorability or feeding much at all.

Now I HAVE read some most enjoyable new books this year, and a small number have crept into my ‘best of’ but, in the main those older reads were more powerful at keeping me thinking and admiring, weeks after closing their final pages.

But I’m still quite shocked to discover (getting into the stats thing) that despite reading 41 books published this year, only 1 of the 2016 novels got into my top fiction reads. Though I race to also say I read some very very good new fictions indeed. It’s just those earlier writers took centre stage

I also had to leave it at top 9 and top 8, as they were clear, and having spent several days agonising over which titles should get the final places, particularly the fictions, as some 5 or 6 were together at the finishing line, I thought I’d podium place the smaller number. If I had to rank, I’d still be here by midsummer 2017, constantly rejigging!

So In no ranking order, just in the order they were read :

Non-Fiction – I had a great NF year, including, inevitably some NF standout re-reads (Oh, Virginia! Oh, George! You delighted me a lifetime ago and you delight me more, and still)

Bee Wilson is an utterly engaging writer on matters historical and foodie – together. I love the history of the domestic, but with First Bite, she soared to new heights, as she wove other passions of mine together – the psychology of food, the relationship we have with food, the politics of the food industry, childhood and the development of taste

Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City as ever, with her reflective, soulful writing about the arts and her relationship with them, delighted me. This book explores mainly American artists, some known to me, some not, and the role of solitariness, alienation and the ability to observe both one-self, and the society one inhabits, in artistic creation. It was also a book which had me blessing the internet as I could search for every artwork she was describing so eloquently

Martin Stevens’ Cheats and Deceits was a fabulous book about the evolutionary ploy of Cheating and Deceiving, and the myriad ways in which it manifests and works. In a year where cheating, deceiving political figures appear to be on the brink of taking us to regrettably dangerous places, it has been quite salutary to think of Trump, Farage et al as particularly obnoxious blister bug larvae, and the populace as a sadly duped Habropoda pallida, taking (to mangle a metaphor beyond recognition) these vipers to the bosom of their children’s nests. Whaaa? Habropoda Pallida is a bee species, and the obnoxious blister bugs hop onto the duped HP, so that they will get carried back to bee nest. Their favourite food is young bee grubs – i.e. they destroy the next generation and its world

On the heels of my snucking in the politics of the present, came a re-read of the wonderful George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Orwell, like many in his generation with a sense of idealism enlisted for the left in the Spanish Civil War. This was part of Kaggsysbookishramblings 1938 Club. I have loved Orwell’s writing since first discovering him in my teens. And I loved what his writing revealed to me of the man. He still seems an unusually honourable figure

Svetlana Alexievich’s harrowing Chernobyl Prayer allows those most directly affected by the blowing of the nuclear reactor, ordinary Belarusians, to tell their own stories and the land’s story. This is compassionate journalism as witnessing.

I needed some non-fictional joy, following a couple of painful recognitions of what our worst can lead to, and I got it in John Powell’s enthusiastic, playful, erudite Why We Love Music. Another read outrageously enhanced by the benefits of the internet, as I could roam around listening to snippets of illustrative sound

The January Man, which I read in the summer as an ARC from Amazon Vine has not yet been reviewed on here, as there seemed little point to whet appetites when its publication day is the 12th January 2017. The link therefore is to my Amazon UK review. Suffice it to say Christopher Somerville’s wondrous book is much more than a book about walking through the landscape of these isles, it’s a journey through time, through relationship, through music, and it made my heart sing even whilst it made me weep. Curiously, it also reminded me, in the compassionate tenderness of Somerville’s writing, of the very first Olivia Laing book I read, To The River. It will be appearing here closer to publication date with some entrancing media

Jeanette Winterson was my big find of the year. How could I have missed her, how? Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is the autobiographical story which provided much of the material which formed the narrative of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. Here is a woman with a childhood start which is unbearable to contemplate, but whose fierce, fierce, glittering intelligence, and whose capacity for joy sing out. She had me laughing so hard through my tears and anger

And my non-fictions end with Virginia. It’s easy to think of Woolf through knowing her end, and the mental illness she suffered. But she was another who burned with intelligence, humour, joy. A Room of One’s Own takes to the barricades of feminism; singing, wit, creativity and incisive argument its weapons. Again, one I devoured in my twenties, and though much has been achieved since its writing unfortunately it still has relevance, and is not a purely historical read

So to the fictionals – and, as you will see, Virginia and Jeanette take their places on this podium too

It seems kind of fitting that Virginia Woolf should have been my last top non-fiction, and turn out to be, late in February, the first of my top fictions. I re-read – or probably re-re-re-re read To The Lighthouse, as part of Ali’s Brilliant Woolfalong. What can I say? Any time I re-read this one its going to make a best of list. Is it possible (yes!) that it continues to get better, that I continue to find more, with each read. Looks like it,

Alain Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, first read, most potently, in my adolescence, was another re-read. I approached it slightly nervously, as with any book which had glowed out, and been remembered, for decades. Could it speak to a much older reader, or would its delights be limited to youth. Well, good heavens, there was again so much to discover and to re-discover. A shifting focus, a little more ability to stand outside so that, on this read, Fournier’s extraordinary craft and magic delighted my more critical, intellectual appreciation.

Meaulnes led me to another favourite, more modern author – John Fowles, whose The Magus owed a deep (and expressed) debt to Fournier. The French Lieutenant’s Woman plays majestically with the novel’s structure. He was using ‘meta-fiction’ devices quite early. Everyone does it now, but it was a wonderfully playful, sly thing, when I encountered it first (yes, another re-read)

Finally we get to a fiction published this year, Eowyn Ivey’s To The Bright Edge of The World. In part, her inclusion is because her first, The Snow Child, was such an extraordinary first novel that she had set herself a dangerous peak to attain with her second. So I was delighted to find that this book was both very different from her first, but had elements of the strengths of her first – the potency of myth and magic, and, oh yes, the wonderful, cold, mysterious setting of the frozen North

H.E.Bates was an author I thought I had read but in fact, never had. Love for Lydia (which had been a TV adaptation which I never saw) was a sheer delight. Luscious writing, restrained writing, in this story of the interwar years.

Christopher Isherwood’s Mr Norris Changes Trains was another re-read. Once again, I think in part it is the lurch to the right which has made many of us think uneasily of those major conflagrations of the twentieth (and of course we are moving through the hundredth anniversary of the 1914-1918 War To End All Wars) Isherwood’s part autobiographical part-fictional narrative of his time in Berlin as the world of the 30s was doing its own inchings to the dark places, as dangerous demagogues were making their appeals to hatred, fear and castigation of ‘the other’

Oh, Virginia again! Her magnificent cross-gendering historical fiction Orlando was my very first Woolf, in my teens. And this romp from Elizabethan England to the twenties crossing geography and gender, mixing historical personages with invented ones stays so pleasurable – another book where I wasn’t only re-reading, but re-re-reading

I discovered Jeanette Winterson’s 1997 novel through some chance or other, this year. Gut Symmetries was my first Winterson, in late August. I am currently reading my fourth, so, perhaps, expect more Winterson’s to imperiously demand inclusions in best ofs, for 2017. A marriage of the story of an affair and the Grand Unified Theory of particle physics. Rarely does a writer make me think about maths and physics so delightfully, and force a mental work-out without making me whimper

And there, sadly I have to leave it. There were just too many books fighting really really hard for the final two places. I could briefly decide to place one or two, but the others started screaming ‘Me! Me! deservedly, so I would substitute, but the screaming never died down.

At least all the ones chosen meant that the unchosens stayed respectfully silent and stopped yelling at me that they deserved the podium instead.

Duelling Banjos were menacing enough, with or without the presence of Voight and Reynolds, without the nervousness of duelling books at dawn, fighting for places!

And, of course, I wish you all the very best for you, yours and all your books, in 2017. I hope we might have some chance of living in ‘less interesting times’ as far as ancient Chinese curses go. I wish you all a harmonious year, and excitement, derring do and much ‘interesting’ firmly within the pages of your books!

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Delphine de Vigan – Nothing Holds Back The Night

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Book Review, Delphine de Vigan, George Miller (translator), Nothing Holds Back The Night

“Writing can do nothing….it allows you to ask questions and interrogate memory”

Delphine de Vigan’s Nothing Holds Back The Night is a curious book to categorise. On one level, it should be easy : it is an account of the difficult, yet sometimes vibrantly experienced life of de Vigan’s mother. Lucile Poirier, born in 1946, was one of 9 children born to Georges and Liane Poirier. The family was extremely Bohemian. Lucile, remarkably beautiful, a rather introverted child in some ways, helped family finances through money earned as a child model. The family was beset by tragedy, and there was some history of mental and emotional fragility. There were also various family secrets, the nature of which can probably be surmised by the reader.

Delphine herself was born when Lucile was 19. She had fallen in love with the young brother of one of her father’s colleagues, and the two married in a hurry. Lucile was different from Delphine’s classmates’ mothers – more vibrant, more playful, more sophisticated, fun and glamorous. But she was also unstable and the instability took over. The marriage itself foundered quite quickly. Delphine had various love affairs which would buoy her up. Some of her partners were also unstable. Delphine and her younger sister Manon, sometimes with Lucile, sometimes with their father Gabriel and his new family, had a childhood far from ideal. There were periods where Lucile was institutionalised due to the severity of her bipolar disorder.

The book starts with Lucile’s shocking death in 2008, and Delphine’s discovery of her body. de Vigan at this point was an already published writer.

Lucile’s pain was part of our childhood and later part of our adult life. Lucile’s pain probably formed my sister and me. Yet every attempt to explain it is doomed to failure. And so I am forced to content myself with writing scraps, fragments and conjecture.

Writing can do nothing. At very best it allows you to ask questions and interrogate memory

She wrote Nothing Holds Back the Night because it was what she had to do, in part to understand her own story, and her mother’s. But she acknowledges it is not quite purely memoir. Much was underground, forgotten, hidden, denied, and different members of the Poirier family and others produced different memories. So, inevitably Delphine, in order to find the shape, pattern and sense of her mother’s life, acknowledges that what she is writing is part memoir, part fiction, the shaping of narrative to create pattern and story to events. Memory remembers some events and not others. And sometimes what is remembered is memory of someone else’s narrative of their memory. A memory of a story told, becomes an account of ‘this is the fact of what happened’. Sometimes, what gets forgotten is that memory is often as much interpretation as a laying out of moments taking place in time

De Vigan’s book won a couple of literary prizes. It is beautifully written, and here translated by George Miller. And I assume the translation is a sensitive and thoughtful one, as I lost awareness of the fact I was reading de Vigan’s words, images and thoughts through the filter of another person

I was brought to this difficult but strangely illuminating read, by a mention of it from another blogger, JacquiWine, which caused me to search out her earlier review, and then to read this myself

Nothing Holds Back The Night Amazon UK
Nothing Holds Back The Night Amazon USA

Beryl Bainbridge – Sweet William

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Beryl Bainbridge, Book Review, Sweet William

The implacable carnage wreaked by a charming seducer

Beryl Bainbridge’s Sweet William, here reissued as a digital version by Open Road Media, is a short tale of a foolishly naïve woman (or women) and a man sophisticated in deception – including self-deception

Published in 1975 there is, as often with Bainbridge, a degree of events in her real life acting as springboard to the story.

The William of the title is William McClusky an up-and-coming playwright. He has a fascinating mix of the fiercely wilful, creative and seemingly unworldly persona, theoretically tender and emotionally expressive manner and boyish appealing loucheness which can effectively set womanhood’s heart a-flutter. The springboard for Bainbridge was that this character was modelled on the novelist and screenwriter Alan Sharp, with whom she had a daughter.

The central character of the book, into whose life William strolls like an out-of-control juggernaut, is Ann Walton, a naïve young woman working for the BBC. Ann comes from a determinedly ‘keeping up middle class values’ background, her mother implacably wanting Ann to fulfil some social dream of her own, and unable to embrace the daughter she really has. Ann is engaged to Gerald, an academic, off to America on a placement. Gerald is a selfish, bullish and rather cold man. Marrying an academic and one with prospects in America does however initially, theoretically, meet with the aspirational Mrs Walton’s approval.

Things don’t quite go to plan when Ann is determinedly picked up by William, who sweeps her off her feet with his touchy feely passion and freely expressed need and desire for her. Unfortunately, William is married and he still maintains all sorts of connections with his wife Edna – including sexual. And it turns out that there is more than one significant earlier relationship in William’s life. And later ones too. He is incapable of resisting the desire to conquer the heart, not to mention the haunches, of any woman he meets. His deadly charm is that he is not a cold seducer, but believes himself to be a loving man, who just happens to love a lot of women at once and have them all meet his needs for love, care, affection and meals, all at once

When the doorbell rang Ann was amazed to see a messenger boy on the landing, holding a large white cake with pink ribbon, crowned with flaring candles of red and gold.

‘Mrs McClusky’ he said ‘Special delivery’

It was Edna’s birthday……’He said I was to expect a surprise’ she cried, her face glowing….She insisted they cut into the cake

Ann didn’t know what to say. It was such an extraordinary thing to do, sending your wife a cake to the flat of another woman. She couldn’t for the life of her wish Edna many happy returns of the day.

They sat opposite each other, mouths blocked with the birthday surprise, a faint lingering smell of wax in the room

Even those around Ann who can see William for the philanderer he is, and will warn Ann that he is not a man to be remotely trusted, will not be immune to his charms, though some of the other women are only interested in a bit of good time sex with him, and have no fond illusions of forever.

The reader (well this one) felt both sorry for the foolish Ann, but also thoroughly exasperated by her. And by the rest of William’s entourage. And by William himself. Sometimes, ‘Williams’ are usefully spotted a mile off, but sometimes they possess an ability to hide in plain sight…..

The book was turned into a film in 1980, with Jenny Agutter as Ann and Sam Waterston as William. It was directed by Claude Whatham, with the screenplay written by Bainbridge herself

I read this as a review copy published by the excellent Open Road Media as a digital version

Sweet William Amazon UK
Sweet William Amazon UK

Rose Tremain – The Gustav Sonata

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Book Review, Rose Tremain, The Gustav Sonata

As rich, beguiling and satisfying as the best of sonatas should be

Rose Tremain is always a tender, subtle, rewarding writer, and so she is here. The Gustav Sonata starts shortly after the Second World War, in Matzlingen, a small, unremarkable town in Switzerland. It is 1947. Gustav Perle is a stoical little 5 year old, only son of Emilie, a repressed, joyless, depressed widow, whose ability to love seems non-existent.

Gustav’s father died during the war, and his death left his widow and child financially struggling. In the first ‘movement’ of the sonata, the outwardly phlegmatic little boy befriends a smaller, excitable, vulnerable little boy on his first day at kindergarten. Anton Zwiebel, it turns out, is everything which ordinary seeming Gustav is not.

‘I don’t want my heart stilled’ he said ‘ I want my heart to overflow with joy.’

Anton is an exceptional, privileged little boy, the son of doting, loving, wealthy parents. He is a musical prodigy, and great things are expected of him. The two boys become great friends, though Emilie has a kind of distaste for Anton, because he is Jewish. The Zwiebel family, particularly Anton’s warm-hearted mother take Gustav to their hearts, because of the initial kindness he showed to their son. The first section is the story of the two boys in childhood

He sipped the wine, which tasted sweetly of apples and of elderflowers, and he thought that this was how he was going to live life from now on, savouring small pleasures and not looking beyond them for happiness that was more complete

The second movement unpicks the story of Emilie and Erich, Gustav’s dead father, revealing how they met, how Erich made a clearly disastrous marriage to a small-minded woman, and how his own warm, compassionate, just nature led to him suffering disgrace. Erich had been in a position to behave nobly, in a time and place where society had made pragmatic, meaner choices.

Skating, and its joyousness, figures beautifully : Hence, Andre Rieu live at the Royal Albert Hall with Emile Waldteufel’s Skaters’ Waltz : Les Patineurs

In the third movement, Gustav is a quiet man, unambitious, in his 50s. He is a little man, an ordinary man, a moral man, doing the good he can, running a small hotel, endeavouring to make this a ‘home from home’. Anton has long since left the small town where Gustav still lives, though that childhood friendship keeps Gustav close to Anton’s ageing parents, disappointed in some ways by their brilliant, selfish son.

When he asked himself if he was unhappy, he discovered that he could find no deeper unhappiness in his own soul than he perceived in other people’s

On the surface, Tremain is not telling a huge, operatic story, merely the story of an ordinary person, one of the ‘little people, the ordinary, decent people’ . Unlike the trumpetings of divisive populist politicians, who seek to normalise small-mindedness, suspicion, fear and hatred in their appeals to the ordinary and decent, Tremain shows something very different in the ordinary. Gustav’s is indeed a story of the small and modestly heroic, the loving, the forgiving and the kind within ‘ordinary’ .

Friendship in all its complexities and contradictions, and love, with all its obligations and joys, surprising in the forms it may take are beautifully laid out here for the reader. Readers of Tremain’s earlier novels where music and flamboyant characters are beautifully woven, will not be surprised by the author’s ability to still weave what is rare, strange, and lovely, in more modest, contained, less obviously expressive characters.

Like a musical piece, Tremain has themes which appear again, as variations, reminding us of their earlier manifestations, in subtly transposed fashion, in later ‘movements’

As ever, this being Tremain, the writing is beautiful, truthful, the characters are rich and layered, and the plot is masterly. I was delighted to be ‘gifted’ this by the publishers, via NetGalley.

The Gustav Sonata Amazon UK
The Gustav Sonata Amazon USA

And, especially for the bookie bloggers amongst you…..

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Books, Christmas greetings

Very warm wishes for the season, and an eminently practical approach, at least till Twelfth Night, for your TBR pile. You might as well surrender, as you know that your rellies and besties are going to make that pile higher……….

 

Bingo – or, Not Quite, I’m Afraid.

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2016 Challenge, Bits and Bobs, Bits and Pieces, Book Bingo, Book Review, Other Stuff, The Reading Bingo Challenge

So……..I have dusted off my wings, – or, at least attempted to exercise them into non-existence .

Provoked by a reminder of the bingo by blog-world’s Queen of Jersey
Cleopatralovesbooks – who…managed to complete her own Bingo – well done Cleo!  –

I thought I must see how I would fare

And, breaking all the keep them guessing mystery writing rules, you can see, by the title that I didn’t get quite past that finishing line. Alas, no Brownlee brother was there to support me, gasping and dizzy, and help me to complete my readathon Bingo

There are links to all the original reviews on book titles within text, not the pictures……and also, links to other blogs in places where thanks are due…….

More than 500 –This is a straight steal from Cleo’s over 500 – I didn’t list the page numbers so though I knew this was a long one, it was a quick cert for a 500 without more checking. Jodi Picoult’s  Small Great Things unhappily seems a particularly pertinent look at prejudice, and  more than ever important in what has been a disastrous political year, on both sides of the pond, and wider.

Forgotten Classic – HE Bates The Triple Echo was a film I saw many years ago, and a recent discovery of Bates sent me on a search for the book that gave rise to that film. What a marvellously crafted writer he is, and this one is another book which in many ways, seems remarkably ahead of its time, though subtly hinting at something that I suspect that present day marketing departments might have wanted a writer to be lurid about

A Book That Became A Movie I suppose I could have had the Bates, above, in this slot, and had John Fowles – The French Lieutenant’s Woman as the forgotten classic. Both good films, but I suspect the Bates novella is more apt as ‘the forgotten’ though the wonderful Fowles IS reissued in Penguin Modern Classics, deservedly. Fowles, writing later, is perhaps less forgotten in-the-mists

A Book Published This Year The insufficiently well-known Patrick Flanery’s thrid book was published this year. I Am No One may not quite reach the spectacular level set by his first two books, but I can’t resist any opportunity to fly the flag for this wonderfully astute, subtle and excellent writer. Once again, unfortunately, world events seem to make this an even more sober and important read about the surveillance society.

A Book With A Number in the Title Alison Weir Six Tudor Queens Katherine of Aragon Now, Alas, I did not fall overboard enough in enthusiasm for Weir’s first in a series of fictional accounts of 6 unhappy ladies, to review it on the blog. However should you BURN to read my account of it, follow the permalink for my Amazon review, This was a Vine book, so I HAD to review it there

A Book Written By Someone Under Thirty Many of my very best reads this year have been re-reads. I’m tempted to say most of them, as I have had a standout year reading favourites from my teens and twenties. Alain Fournier’s only book was written before he was thirty, and is incandescent.  Fournier died, aged 27, one of the many millions scythed down in the First World War. Le Grand Meaulnes is an elegaic, dreamlike book, one which felt far richer read as an adult, than it did when I was the age of the teen aged central characters, and first read, and never forgot the book

A Book With Non-Human Characters  A recent re-read of another book from childhood is this magical one from Paul Gallico. Jennie should find particular favour from the cat-adorers amongst us. Many, I suspect, as reading and cats go together superbly, as they often involve the seductive availabilty of laps. particularly if the book is absorbing enough to keep the reader pinned to a comfortable chair. The adventures of a white cat called Peter and an appealing Scottish cat called Jennie shouild warm the cockles of all hearts, though the ailurophiles will be certain pushovers

A Funny Book The wonderful Jane from Beyond Eden Rock banged drums for the delightful wit and sparkle of Marjorie Sharp. Readers wantiing to make her acquaintance now can, with ease, thanks in no small part to the efforts of Jane and others who whipped up the rest of us to hunt down long falling to pieces second hand copies, rare as hen’s teeth. Open Road Media, a brilliant epublishing company, have reissued ten of her titles. Now, come on, you know you want to join Jane’s celebration of Marjorie’s birthday next month (January 25th), so follow the Open Road link and buy a happy Marjorie. We really need her to make us see the world can still be a warm and kindly place. I think the inauguration of the Deplorable, and the 2017 triggering of Article 50 must have me heading Marjorie-Wards. Here is the enchanting Cluny Brown

A Book By A Female Author I think it’s probably largely due to HeavenAli’s Woolfalong that she must win my ‘the blogger who got me to read most of my best reads of 2016’ awards. All my Woolfs, almost entirely re-reads, fill slots in the Bingo To The Lighthouse was a particular potent Voyage Out (see what I did there?) as it is a book which has some particular, personal meaning for me.

A Book With A Mystery  I had adored Eowyn Ivey’s first novel, The Snow Child. So I was completely delighted to find that her very different second  To the Bright Edge of the World was as memorable and magical, though in a different kind of way

A Book With A One Word Title  And here we are, back with Virginia Woolf again. Orlando was the first Woolf I ever read, in my teens, and what a fizzy, playful delight it is.

A Book of Short Stories  I loved Michael Cunningham’s   A Wild Swan and other tales, beautifully illustrated, subversive fairy stories. It’s particularly apposite he follows, and precedes also, another Woolf title on the Bingo, as he wrote the book The Hours (from which an acclaimed film was made), with Woolf, her writing and her life, as a theme. It has been long on my TBR and needs to move to ‘Having Been Read’ and, no doubt, if my enjoyment of his writing here, indicates, reviewed on the blog.

Free Square  Who else but Virginia Woolf again, this time the marvellous lecture she gave, a sparkling, witty, imaginative classic of the feminist canon. In no way ‘worthy’ or dusty and  dry  A Room of One’s Own is a book which still, sadly is about battles which are still needing to be fought. Sorry to labour the point again, but the unfotunate election of a man to the highest office in the land despite expressed attitudes and actions towards women that should have died out well over a hundred years ago, show there is a long way to go.

A Book Set On A Different Continent So yet another wonderful re-read was set for me by the invitation to JacquiWine’s Jean Rhys Reading Week. The marvellous Rhys fills the ‘another continent’ slot for her Mainly West Indies set Wide Sargasso Sea a kind of companion novel or alternative view of Jane Eyre. This tells the story of Rochester’s Mad Wife.

A Book of Non-Fiction My re-reading of George Orwell ‘s  Homage to Catalonia, an account of his time with the POUM militia during the Spanish Civil War, is, again, thanks to another Blogger. In this case, Karen from Kaggsy’sbookishramblings. It was my read for her 1938 club

The First Book of A Favourite Author  So, no surprises, we stay with Woolf courtesy of Ali’s Woolfalong. and The Voyage Out I could also have had this in a book set on a different continent, due to its somewhere in South America setting. It’s less stylistically innovative than her later writing, but my, all that unique voice is unfolding 

A Book That You Heard About Online  So, my most recently reviewed title The Summer That Melted Everything perfectly qualifies, as it was one of the choices offered by my on-line bookclub!

A Best Selling Book Robert Harris’ Pope Election thriller Conclave also gives me the chance to link my oldest virtual bloggy (in fact, pre-bloggy) chum Fiction Fan, particularly as she encouraged me in the writing of a pretty please to Harris’ publisher for a review copy on the strength of previous 5 star reviews I’d given to Harris’ earlier works

A Book Based on a True Story  Thomas Keneally’s  Napoleon’s Last Island  was the fascinating story of the friendship between the Emperor, imprisoned on St. Helena and young Betsey, daughter of the Superintendent of Public Sales for the East India Company. It was one of those strange, but true, narratives

A Book at the Bottom of The TBR Pile  I had requested Alain de Botton’s part philosophical reflection, part novel structure around philosophy The Course of Love and I have no idea why it took me so long to embark on it. It was wonderful

A Book Your Friend Loves  As Cleo got me into trying this year’s Bingo it seems only fair to let her have the honour of  the Friend Loves slot – it was her review of  Anna Hope’s wonderful  The Ballroom that alerted me to the book

A Book That Scares You It was an earlier book by Michelle  Paver, another frozen setting in her Dark Matter, that filled this slot on an earlier challenge. And she scared me again with  Thin Air

A Book That Is More Than Ten Years Old Rather more than Ten Years Old is E. Nesbit’s wonderful The Railway Children first published in book form in 1906 – it had been serialised in a magazine, the previous year

The Second Book in a Series – Alas! Alas! Alas! No full card for me. This was, as I suspected it would be, once I looked at the card, my stumbling block. I’m not really a fan of ‘series’. Unless I have only just discovered the writer somewhere in that series and have been attempting a feverish re-read, this particular bingo is always likely to trip me up.  Mind you, that did happen with Tana French last year, and, if memory serves me well it was either Cleopatra or Jane, both of whom feature in my 2016 Bingo card, who introduced me to Ms French – I know one lured me with Broken Harbour and one with The Secret Place and within 6 weeks I had submerged myself in the Dublin Murder Squad’s company.

I DID, briefly, on finding a one square missing, consider a quick re-read of the magical Moomin series – book 2 of it, to be precise, but those of you who would frown on such behaviour can un-purse your lips. I didn’t. Though I may well have a little Moomin re-explore, as Tove-Land is sheer joy, and I have only ever reviewed  Finn Family Moomintroll, the first I read, as a child, on here

A Book with A Blue Cover So, finally an author I have been very late to come to, but am working my way through her stunning books, so, thanks to  Jeanette Winterson, with a blue cover for Gut Symmetries an astonishing weave of love story and particle physics

And that, dear bloggers, was Bingo 2016 in this house

Tiffany McDaniel – The Summer That Melted Everything

Tags

Book Review, Gothic Horror, Ohio, The Summer That Melted Everything, Tiffany McDaniel

A lush jungle of garden – and if it is Eden, it is before, within and after the Fall.

Tiffany McDaniel’s first novel The Summer That Melted Everything is a strange, unforgettable and wondrous one. It was a choice by my online bookclub, and has rather secured my continuing membership, as, in this case, it presented me with a book I would never have come to from my own reading preferences, and which hooked me from the off.

In fact, being honest, none of the choices-to-choose-from drew me from blurb alone, but it was the ‘Look Inside’ facility which made me sit up instantly and see ‘this woman WRITES’, so it got my vote, and I was immediately sucked into the centrifugal whirlpool of McDaniel’s strange, hot, summer of 1984 Ohio world :

The heat came with the devil. It was the summer of 1984, and while the devil had been invited, the heat had not

Wha….a..t?! The devil invited, the heat not invited……who? Who has invited the devil? Why has the devil been invited……..and, you can see, I needed to know

McDaniel started with a sinister, compulsive and alluring drum-roll there, and her densely packed, image filled writing – a quite marked individual voice – grabbed me by the throat.

Le Douanier Rousseau – 1905 Painting, Lion Devouring Antelope -it’s the combination of beauty, innocence, terror and savagery which I found in this book

Okay here is setting, narrator, and sketch of the journey’s beginning and a loose laying out of terrain – but as the power, shock and particular unfolding can only happen for each reader, reading the bookmap for themselves, you need to bring your own (possibly violently swinging as you will be traversing through areas of magnetic interference) moral compass

I once heard someone refer to Breathed as the scar of the paradise we lost. So it was in many ways, a place with a perfect wound just below the surface.

It was a resting in the southern low of Ohio, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, where each porch had an orchard of small talk and rocking chairs, where cigarette tongues flapped over glasses of lemonade

Edward Hopper : People In The Sun 1965 – again there are sinister undercurrents implied here

Fielding Bliss is a 13 year old boy, son of a small town lawyer, Autopsy Bliss. And I nearly wrote Atticus Finch there, by mistake (more later) Fielding is, we quickly see, younger son in a happy, quirky family. He idolises his popular, kindly, widely admired-and/or desired older brother Grand, star of the baseball team, self-taught speaker of Russian, just because little brother Fielding tells him he has ‘Russian eyes’. Mom is a beautiful and warm woman….except a little damaged, as she has agoraphobia, and can’t go outside her house for fear of rain. And, it turns out, no real spoiler here, as it is revealed only a couple of pages in – it is Autopsy who has invited the devil by placing an ad in The Breathanian, the local newspaper of Breathed, Ohio.

Summer in Breathed was my favourite season of all. Nothing but barefoot boys and grass-stained girls flowering beneath the trees

Fielding is the first person narrator of the events of that strange, melting summer. He is also the one who first meets that devil, or, perhaps, the one who first meets a small boy of his own age, impoverished and hungry, who claims to be the devil, and is desperately wanting ice cream.

Yes, I know, strange, weird, but, believe me, not random, not weird-for-the-sake-of-bizarre. McDaniel knows exactly where she is going to take us, and everything we think we need to know (and much we had no idea we were going to need to know) will be revealed.And, I fully expect along the way you will shiver in shock and terror, bark in appreciation at the oddball humour, weep in despair, and be riven by pity and rage.

Again, no spoiler,  because this will come quite early. Fielding is not writing his story in real time – this happy boy is being looked back to from behind the eyes of an elderly, bitter, self-hating and broken man. The journey will take us from the then of 1984 to some seventy years later, and a trailer park.

Some startling comparisons have been made, by readers, professional and those like us to mark out the territory McDaniel’s book occupies – Shirley Jackson, AND Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. And I would like to add one of my own – Carson McCullers – who was (I quote Wiki here) ‘often described as Southern Gothic, …..explores the spiritual isolation of misfits and outcasts’

Generally I find myself harrumphing in disbelief at these kinds of comparisons. Not here. The Jackson comparison is apt for the wonderful combination of horror, a strange, dysfunctional world and sometimes savage, dark humour. Mockingbird gives us the child of a small-town lawyer, and events triggered by a small town mentality of suspicion and fear of the outsider which might go along with the better aspects of small-everyone-knows-everyone community. And the dark effects of small-town mentality also expose something which has wider, more pertinent effects country, and even, world wide. More later. As for McCullers, it is the mix of tenderness and brutality, both within the misfits, between the misfits, and towards the misfits – who, surely, are everyone

You say, ‘Momma, I just want more. I want to fly like the sudden light. I want to know what it’s like to have a reason to dance. I want all the possible love’

She says people like us don’t dance and we don’t fly. People like us, she says, don’t get more. We take the life we are given and we say grace and glory be to God who is His merciful wisdom has granted such bliss. You hate her God and His wisdom. You hate her acceptance of that empty life.

Added to this mix, quotations from Milton’s Paradise Lost at every chapter head nod us back to that complex portrayal of the devil. Milton is always reminding us Satan, Lucifer is fallen angel. The small boy who has arrived in Breathed in response to Autopsy’s invitation, takes the sobriquet Sal – Sa for Satan, the devil, and L for Lucifer, the reminder of the original, angelic light filled (lucent) angel before fall. There are other names belonging to other characters within the book that we might need to reflect on. Who is good, who is not good, what is evil, and who might be evil and how might evil move amongst us. And what of God, and who, and what, and who might be and how might goodness/Godness move amongst us

And all this complexity is twined and hooked into wondrous writing, as I hope my quotes have illustrated

William Blake – One of his many illustrations of Milton’s Paradise Lost – souls in hell

The further I read, the more I was thinking of the political events of the year, of the move towards a kind of global suspicious, fear-filled, small town isolationism – particularly on both sides of our ponds, but also wider. I had read that McDaniel writes in a kind of fermenting heat, and completes a first draft remarkably quickly. This book was published in June, so, putting those facts together I was assuming that the impulse of the book was very rooted in the events of this year, in the States, and the unleashing of dark populism. It was one of the questions I asked McDaniel, as she was invited to our on-line book group discussion, but, no, of course it takes a book a good two years to come to publication from acceptance. All I can say is, reading this I was so aware of the politics, the Zeitgeist of now

A small cavil – yes, there are times when I think McDaniel can overwrite and the wonderfully rich layers of meaning within her writing can sometimes become a bit left dangling, in need of pruning back, clipping, tidying up or even, finished off by leading them to a clearer conclusion. And to continue with the gardening metaphor……this is a first book. If McDaniel left a few weeds in situ, which might have been dealt with to better reveal the strange beauty of some of her plants, I also appreciate the vigour and the dynamism and the unusualness of her voice. A completely sanitised writing garden with every word neatly in its border and row would not have the compulsive weird energy of this one.

The Summer That Melted Everything Amazon UK
The Summer That Melted Everything Amazon USA

And, specially for Statesiders – keen though I hope you are to instantly jump into this one – it might be worth waiting till after Christmas to get it as a present for your eReaders – it will be on a price drop promotion to $2.99. So it would definitely become worth waiting for!

Mandy Aftel – Essence and Alchemy

Tags

Book Review, Essence and Alchemy, Mandy Aftel, Natural Perfumery, Perfumery

Writing on perfume so fine and evocative I could smell the accords in imagination!

Aftel’s book is a delight, to all who might be interested in perfumery, the mysteries of olfaction, and, particularly how psyche and aroma connect. Her book is far from a leaf through, light on substance pretty picture coffee table book. Instead, dense and engagingly written text, lightened and deepened by beautiful line drawings – which are actually so much more satisfying (for this reader) than the usual photographer and bottles of perfume artfully arranged number.

There is something enormously pleasing about the original slow work involved in making, for example, botanical line drawings, woodcuts and the like, which are then here reproduced.

Aftel is a fascinating writer, too. Originally a psychotherapist she brings that listening delight to teasing out the useful story of ‘the other’ the uncovering of hidden meaning, to the way she sees her present vocation – perfumer. And, her interest is in natural perfumes, rather than those of novel synthesised chemistry created in a lab.

Those of us who are pulled, for many reasons, by perfume using plants, know that this is slow, reflective perfumery. At its best we are drawn into a realisation of the complexity of growing the plants, of extractions to yield their aromatics, of a weight of history behind them

And Aftel brings all this along with her in her book, connecting ‘’Per fumem” to its original, sacred roots, and the making of perfume from extracting essential oils from plants to an original pairing with alchemy.

                   C. Gesner, The newe jewell of health

Along the way as well as philosophical, psychological and historical reflections, there is much practical information for the budding kitchen perfumer, including methods, aromatic suggestions, information about what will harmoniously marry with what, and what might connect with interesting, piquant oppositions.

This is a book to enjoyably read and re-read – not to mention, embark on given formulations and sail out on one’s own to assay others.

                          Enfleurage, in times of yore

The book concludes with a list of potential suppliers, though as this was originally published in 2001 I note some of the listed suppliers have long disembarked from their perfumed barges and vanished into the wild blue yonder,

 

There is also an extensive bibliography and reference section, to take the eager reader onwards into further aromatic journeys, be these deeper into an exploration of alchemy, or neurobiology and olfaction, or, even weighty tomes exploring the history and design of perfume bottles!

This is very much a deep, broad, wide read on the subject, but beckoning the lured reader on the further exploration

Essence and Alchemy Amazon UK
Essence and Alchemy Amazon USA

Jeanette Winterson – Christmas Days : 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days

Tags

12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days, Book Review, Christmas Days, Jeanette Winterson

Sweet, charming, heart-warming, festive, scary…..and possibly delicious

Jeanette Winterson has here created a pretty perfect gift-wrapped 12 days of Christmas present. The wrapping is the beautiful presentation of the book, with its smart dark blue cloth cover, all decorated with stunning illustrations by Katie Scott, who has also provided the equally gorgeous patterned facing pages at the start of each chapter, not to mention manuscript style decorated letters to start the chapters, and tiny confetti style occasional type sized symbols – hearts, flowers, stars, a little dog. These are not random, but keep an eye out for them as you read, they are like little exclamations on the story you have been reading.

But, gorgeous as all this is, it just serves to enhance and package the delectable present of Winterson’s writing.

Soot Town had paid for the dinner, in honour of the day, and in charity towards the poor, parentless children who had taken shelter under Mrs Reckitt’s ample wings.

Had she been a bird it is unlikely that Mrs Reckitt could have flown far – or indeed flown at all – for in most respects Mrs Reckitt resembled a giant turkey. Not a wild turkey. No. A bred bronze bird with a substantial breast, a folded neck, a small head and legs……If in most respects the lady resembled the celebrated bird of the Christmas feast, in one singular respect she bore another resemblance.

Mrs Reckitt had the face of a crocodile. Her jaw was long, her mouth was wide. Large teeth lurked inside it

Twelve quite different stories, and all quite proper for the season itself, so we have the heartwarm of rewarded virtue, and celebration of love itself, in all sorts of different forms – whether of a poor child for a glorious snowman, which is, in fact, a magical and funny Snowmama, a bereft adult grieving for their dead lover, the nativity donkey touched by the birth of the Christchild, or a couple of looking-for-love New York lonely hearts. This is, after all, a symbolic time of change and new beginnings. There are proper Dickensian, type stories of wicked capital and the virtuous poor, and the wicked get the comeuppance they deserve. It is also a time more closely linked to pagan festivals, the shortest day, and the veil between the worlds of life and death.

So there ought to be dark stories, ghost stories, most frightening and powerful, to raise shivers in the reader. And, there are…some properly frightening ones.

It is the custom here that the husband provides the wedding dress; white, but with a small red stain placed where he chooses to mark the loss of a maidenhead. The maid came to dress me for the wedding. She wished me happiness and health.

‘Is he a good man, my husband?’ I asked as she fastened the dress tight.

‘He is a man’ she said. ‘The rest you must decide for yourself.’

I was dressed and I looked at myself in the silver mirror,. The maid had a vial of blood. ‘For the stain.’ She said

She dabbed the blood over my heart.

Just as well Winterson’s overall mood and desire is to bring cheer, and so she revives us with the other gift of Christmas – the festive connection of shared food and celebration.

There are 12 stories, the fictional inventions of Winterson’s imagination and writerly craft, and there are 12 recipes which have some link in memory to her past, and her present – things prepared by others for her, things prepared by her and others, things prepared by her – all part of festivities past and present.

I say possibly delicious because many of them are not vegetarian friendly, so I can only appreciate the lovely real stories she shares along with them, and some of them, particularly recipes from her childhood, might not be as appetising to a reader who doesn’t have a childhood memory to make them tasty (I was never a fan of tinned fruit salad!)

If I had to find one word to describe Jeanette Winterson’s Christmas pot-pourri, it would be that it is a kind one. And, kindness, surely is something which can sometimes seem in very short supply.

I was delighted to be offered this by Amazon Vine UK, and snapped it up eagerly. Alas, I intended to read just ONE story per day, but presented with a whole box of delectations and delights I ate/read one after the other. Delicious and satisfying and not an inch added to the waistline. Though, if I make the cheese straws (these I can eat), I might not be able to say that for much longer…………

Christmas Days Amazon UK
Christmas Days Amazon USA

Paul Gallico – Jennie

Tags

Book Review, Cats, Children's Book Review, Children's Classics, Jennie, Paul Gallico

Learning the profound arts of purring, mousing, and, above all, washing.

I was sent scurrying to a re-read of this following a chance post by a fellow blogger about fictional books with a cat-focus Interesting Literature. Particularly as another post by a different blogger, about a book by Beverley Nichols Kaggsy’sBookish Ramblings had sent me to my bookshelves in remembrance of a book from childhood by Nichols, about his cats. Beverley Nichols’ Cats’ A. B. C.

I first read Paul Gallico’s delightful (and sobbingly heart-aching) book about a little boy who finds himself changed into a cat, when I was probably at target age 8-11, I think. And I have occasionally read it again, and it’s similarly cats-eye view orientated successor, Thomasina.

Although the protagonist is a little boy, this is by no means childishly written, nor does it just offer whimsicality about cats. I’m afraid, despite of course knowing the story well, that I sobbed in all the places I had ever sobbed before – perhaps partly because of memories of the first sobbing, aged somewhere around 9 or 10, but also, because some quite deep themes are being explored – particularly loss, friendship, betrayal of trust, death.

Hers was the call of the loneliness of the rejected, the outcast of the granite heart of the unheeding city

Peter Brown is a lonely rather privileged little boy – he has a Nanny and two successful, socialite parents who are too busy to give him much love and affection. Above everything, he wants a cat, but as Nanny doesn’t like them and his parents are too occupied with their own concerns to risk upsetting Nanny, Peter’s dearest wish is denied. Seeing a little kitten across a busy main road, Peter follows his tender instincts and runs, without doing his Green Cross, across the road. And is knocked down. Unexpectedly he finds he has become a white cat (I know, I know, but stick with it, this is far from merely twee fantasy)

A typically charismatic and flirtatious Siamese also figures,, and is the source of some trouble and strife for our hero……

Gallico, a life long animal, and particularly cat-animal lover, absolutely takes the reader inside cat-dom. Peter retains human consciousness, and has no idea how to circumnavigate his new world. Starving, chased away, stepped on by unaware people because he lacks the cat sense to get out of the way, Peter is almost killed by a ferocious territorial feral top cat. Fortunately, he gets rescued by the eponymous Jennie, a sweet-faced, sweet-natured, intelligent and rather plain fellow stray cat. Jennie is a cat who now hates people, following her abandonment by the loving family who were everything to her. She begins to teach the little boy trapped inside a cat’s body how to be a cat. And the reader too! Peter must learn the intricacies of being able to wash himself, the difference between the game of catching your breakfast mouse and killing a deadly rat, cat courtesy, the rules of cat conflict, how to open dustbins – and much more.

Although Peter comes to think as cat, he also retains his little boy ability to understand human language, and, rather importantly, to read. He has many exciting adventures with Jennie – including travelling, as the two stowaway and work passage on a Glasgow steamer. They have several instances of narrow escapes from various dangers which might befall a cat, and, as in all good books, grow, develop and change through their relationship with each other and external events.

Peter and Jennie learn from each other and teach each other how to be more – soulful, whatever the shape of the body that encloses them.

Gallico leavens sadness with much fun and good humour, and all his characters, feline and human are quirky, recognisable and sharply delineated

This is a gorgeous book for a tender-hearted child, and a tender-hearted adult too. And with even more appeal if some of your tenderness is cat shaped

Happily now re-issued as a Modern Classic, it was originally published in 1950

Jennie Amazon UK
Jennie Amazon USA