2017, the reading year. Reading Bingo, and onwards to 2018

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2017 Challenge, Bits and Bobs, Bits and Pieces, Book Bingo, Book Review, Happy New Year, Other Stuff, The Reading Bingo Challenge

2017 has been not the best of years, out in the world with the various heading-rapidly towards-disaster-and-foolishness events which certainly seem to be alive and well on both sides of the Atlantic.

It may or may not be coincidental that not only has it been a very bad year for my reviewing, but also for the memorable excellence of my reading (see next paragraph). I had a complete reviewing break for two months where I was working far too hard. I have been reading, reading, but seem unable to get my reviewing backlog down – currently just shy of 20 titles.

It has also been an unusually poor reading year in that a fair proportion of my reading did not make the ‘clear 4 star minimum. without rounding up’ for reviewing here – I only review what I am recommending. And some books were not good enough to stay with, and got abandoned, unfinished, unreviewed at all, anywhere. Punishment enough to read as far as I did, to spend further time thinking about such turkeys in order to write a review…life is far too short.

So, to that Bingo. I have tried where possible, to give preference to what is already  reviewed here – but there are titles which are still part of my backlog of what WILL be recommended reads, but are waiting to be reviewed.

There are links to all the original reviews on book titles within text, (as long as I HAVE reviewed them) not the pictures……and also, links to other blogs in places where thanks are due…….  If the chosen book is recommended by me but the review will be for future writing and posting, the link will be to that South American river site, where hopefully you can do a look inside.

More than 500  pages…..A good deal more, at 768 pages will be Mackinlay Kantor’s monumental American Civil War Pulitzer Prizewinning  Andersonville This is not available on Kindle though, and is something of a ‘forgotten classic’, winning its Pulitzer in 1956. More readily available at reasonable price Stateside, I read it as a small group ‘Buddy Read’ in my on-line book group, The Buddies each chose an American classic. I could easily have slotted this one into the next category, but as this was the only over 500 page novel I read which I can recommend………….(Other over 500s were abandoned turkeys. And I am vegetarian.)

A Forgotten Classic…..The Buddy group within the group again came up trumps (oh dear, that word has lost its original meaning, which I intended here), for our next lit-fic foray, ‘European (including UK)’ We gave one person two choices, as hers were short stories/novellas to attract more of the group to old classics (I think those of us in the Buddy might indeed ourselves be the old classics of the group !) So, not Flaubert’s most well-known novel, but the short, beautiful story of a faithful servant A Simple Heart 

A Book That Became A Movie…….there might have been several choices here, but the dark, perhaps horribly prescient, The Road seems almost too obvious a choice in the year where a dangerous and terrifyingly, elected man is escalating the despoiling of our planet

A Book Published this Year……has me staying Stateside with Jennifer Egan’s absorbing Manhattan Beach . 3 stories, interlinking, and a setting largely as America enters the Second World War, and women are moving into areas of the workforce not previously available to them.

A Book with A Number In the Title….Well I read a few, but the only one which I’m champing at the bit to recommend is one which is a scheduled post for next month, Joanna Cannon’s second book, to hit the stores on 11th Jan Three Things About Elsie There are reviews up (as positive, for the most part, as mine will be) but these are from Amazon Vine. Those of us who read and reviewed this from NetGalley are not allowed to post ours on Amazon till publication day

A Book Written by Someone Under 30…..Anne Brontë was only 28 when her second novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was published, and the following year, she was dead of consumption. Anne’s writing is being re-appraised, re-appreciated. She rather stands outside the Romantic Tradition of her sisters, and is being seen now in the light of being a feminist writer, a realist, someone with views which sit her beside politicised sisters. This one was my own choice for our Buddy foray into ‘Europe’ (as opposed to American), and old classics. How I finally came to read it, for the first time, will be the byline for another choice (non-fiction)

A Book With Non-Human Characters.…The weird and wonderful Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Cat’s Cradle Book was so happily brought to my attention by Jane from Beyond Eden Rock. Otherwise, this slot would have been filled by something which did not get reviewed on here. Unfortunately though, this delightful collection of folk tales told to kittens by their mothers is out of print, and I may have snaffled the last easily available, modestly priced on the internet copy. Keep your eyes peeled, habitués of second-hand shops for any chance found copies. It is lovely and features all sorts of talking animals

A Funny Book’s… place goes to a book which I so happily re-read, and is, indeed funny, but, oh so very much more than just a funny book. Gerald Durrell’s book about his childhood on Corfu My Family and Other Animals is a stunning delight for lovers of beautiful writing, of autobiography, and of close and loving observation of the natural world. This could also have won a place as a book which scares me….young Gerald loved all creatures……even including praying mantids, creatures which belong in my nightmares, mainly due to the detailed descriptions which terrified me, and which I read here as a child. Sadly, it was these which put paid to the fantasy that perhaps I could be a naturalist………

A Book by a Female Author… (sighs that this category might even be deemed to be necessary at all) but I am going to fill it with a book which is still waiting to have its 5 star, more if I could, review written. That glorious writer Rebecca Solnit, whose book Wanderlust: A History of Walking was one of the first load of reviews from my prior reviewing which I posted on here when I first started blogging. This year I read her book which probably fits this ‘by a woman’ category with nice irony and disdain Men Explain Things to Me and Other Essays

My book with a mystery….. almost turned out to be a double mystery. It is Elizabeth Kostova’s The Shadow Land I had adored her first novel The Historian, a historical/vampire story. I do not normally willingly read the vampire genre, but this was far more than an excuse for lots of gore, wooden stakes and the macabre. So even though the cover, and the setting (Romania) suggests the mystery will involve the pointy toothed ones, there are far more mysteries, and some, far deadlier and more chilling, which come along with twentieth century totalitarian politics

A book with a one-word title…….this must go to a wonderful writer on perfume, particularly natural perfumes. Mandy Aftel is a bespoke perfumer, teacher of perfume making, and, equally as important, a wonderful writer. She was in a prior life a psychotherapist, so her book is full of science, and of mystery and poetry. He description of natural perfume ingredients, and the potency of perfume, and its initial linking to the sacred, through the ages, is sheer delight. And don’t even get me started on the line drawings….Fragrant DOES have a sub-title, but I’m choosing to ignore that, as it is in tiny letters!

For my Book of Short Stories...I was very impressed with most of the stories in Jen Campbell’s The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night This is Campbell’s first foray into fiction …and a fine one it is too. She has a dark and vivid imagination, and I look forward to reading more of her imaginative writing. She may be known to those who love books about books, books about bookshops. As a bookseller in independent bookshops she has compiled a couple of books about the weird things customers say in bookshops, and also, a celebration of the world-wide quirkiness and style of independent booksellers

For my free space choice……There were so many I wanted to include here but I decided it must be Colm Toibin’s House of Names which explores the Oresteia story. I do particularly love Toibin’s explorations of myth and history. This left me feeling half here, half millenia ago. It was a hard choice, though, between this one and a couple of other books by less well established writers,; Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fires, and Sara Taylor’s second novel The Lauras were both singing a siren song. As was Richard Flanagan’s First Person, still stuck in my to be reviewed backlog

A book set on a Different Continent… yields that written by a favourite children’s author of mine, Marcus Sedgwick. Another book which seems a particularly pertinent one this year. Sedgwick has written a book for older teens set on the Mexican side of that proposed wall – so Central America. The cover of Saint Death is clearly designed to bring in YAs who like action and the macabre. It was the author (I have read many of his books) which drew me – I knew it would be a very different sort of book – and it is.

A book of Non-Fiction…. has to be Samantha Ellis’ Take Courage This is a kind of hybrid of biography, literary criticism and autobiography. The subject matter is Anne Bronte, her life and her writing, an analysis and review of how her writing was seen over the last 150 odd years, and also the influence of her writing on feminist writers. Ellis herself is one such. It was this book which made me, long, long after I should have done, pick up A Tenant of Wildfell Hall. I had fallen into the trap of not exploring her writing because of the way she had been dismissed by literary critics.

The First Book By A Favourite Author….must involve Ngaio Marsh, regarded as ‘The Empress’ of Golden Age crime. I am working my way sequentially through her canon (I think it is Book 10 which is waiting for its review before I am allowing myself to read the next. So, with a marvellous classic country house setting setting is the very first outing with wonderful Roderick Alleyn, A Man Lay Dead. Now the link is to a portmanteau review as my copy was a book containing the first 3 books, each of which gets its own review in the one post

A Book You Heard About On-Line might be another redundant category these days, given that so many of us discover books through bloggers, NetGalley, Goodreads, Amazon reviews etc. I am going to pick – because I really want to flag it up again ‘Samer’s’ The Raqqa Diaries, which I got as a digital ARC. This might also have been my ‘author under 30’ ‘Samer’ (anonymity essential, as his family are still in Syria) was part of a resistance group struggling both against the Assad Regime and against Daesh, who took Raqqa. Grim, humbling, heartbreaking and inspiring all at once

A Best Selling Book…. had me eventually surrendering to Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent which reminded me so much of the vitality and exuberance of writing to be found in Sarah Waters Victorian set writing. A similarly twisty turny delight in the Victorian period, the conventions of its literature, and the telling of a wonderful yarn. Assuredly, this was not just a book with an utterly gorgeous cover. I had feared it might only be a hyped book, and I ended up one of the many who fell under Perry’s spell

A book based on a true story…. was a marvellous crime and detective re-read, Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time published in 1951. And that I came to read it again, for possibly the 4th, but at least the 3rd time, was because its 1951 publication meant it was my choice for Karen of Kaggsy’sBookish Ramblings co-hosted The 1951 Club. Co host of this was Simon of Stuck In A Book The true story, of course, that the book is based on, is the mystery of ‘What Happened to the Princes In The Tower’ and the whole complexity of the end of the Wars of The Roses, and the Tudor Succession. Richard IIIrd, in other words, wintry discontent, glorious summer of the sun/son of York and all

A book right at the bottom of my TBR… had to be a book I kicked myself for avoiding for so very very long. The estimable Fiction Fan had recommended this to me back in 2015. I bought it, and it languished on the bedside table, hidden by newer purchases. It almost became a running joke – was i ever going to read it? It seemed a good idea to make it MY Buddy Read Choice for our ‘American classics’ And I completely fell under the spell of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral I must be honest though and say the rest of the buddies really did not like it and I think we all wondered if we had been reading the same book as each other. I remain so moved by it, and so glad I read it, finally

A Book Your Friend Loves….One of the buddies (can you tell there are a lot of plugs for this group who are wanting to recruit members….more later) strongly recommended John Boyne’s The Heart’s Invisible Furies to me. And how right she was. Reminding me not a little of William Boyd’s spanning-the-history-of-the-century books, this is a beautiful, warm narrative of an Irish boy, from 1945 to 2015. Fact and fiction wonderfully woven together with ‘real’ characters occasionally drifting through the margins

A Book That Scares You….Well Fiction Fan scores tangentially here, pushing me towards Algernon Blackwood’s extremely scary The Willows – the link is to HER review, though I have also read and reviewed it on here. It would indeed have been MY scary one, except that a commenter on that review suggested I should check out Blackwood’s The Wendigo. I have to admit that the shivery chilly scale of terror did indeed get even higher. Be afraid….be very very afraid

A book that is more than 10 years old.. is going to be another marvellous Buddy read, or, in fact, another re-read, from the American book project. This was the choice of the person who recommended the Boyne, and was one we all thought terrific. Published in 1966 Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood is the story of a crime which happened in 1959 and shocked America – just that, a murder which took place ‘In Cold Blood’ and seemed to be a reflection of a changing society, losing its sense of apple-pie security

The second book of a series…. is sometimes the category I fall down on, as I am not a big ‘series’ follower. Well, not this year! Once again my online group, but this time, the group as a whole introduced me to a new author, when we chose, from the 3 books offered by the co-hosts, Mick Herron’s first in his series about the Z listers of Intelligence, dark, terrifying, and very funny. So I read Slow Horses and was instantly hooked, up-ended surprised, shocked, delighted……and have gone roaring through all 4. Book 5 comes out next year – I can’t wait – but, yes, I also read the second book in the Slough House/Jackson Lamb series Dead Lions

So to a book purely on the colour of its cover – Blue..Well I feared I might have used blues up in other categories, but, actually the blue was a hard choice between several worthy contenders. I decided, in this remarkably dystopian year, to go for Jennie Melamed’s Gather the Daughters It is a horrific, beautifully written dystopia, which seems rather less ‘speculative fiction’ at this point, than one would like. It could easily have filled the ‘a book that scares you’ category, but for far less pleasant reasons. We read ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night for a kind of pleasure that we aren’t in a haunted house at this point – but, dystopias when we might be there, in some ways……….

So……..despite in some ways a disappointing reading year, due to the larger number of abandoned reads/so so, okay only reads, I’m delighted with the books on my ‘card’

And for those who might be interested in an online book club – we are a small group, choosing a book a month to do an online discussion of, which happens on a Sunday early evening. Those who can’t make the ‘live’ tend to post answers to discussion questions later. I have been very pleased with the more informal ‘join if you want’ Buddies this year, with those of us taking part reading something like a chapter a day and perhaps posting or offering a discussion point at some point during the week, and carefully avoiding any reading ahead reveals. Although UK based we currently have a Canada based member and have also had a Statesider Here is an email to contact one of the co-hosts if you want to find out more discussitbookgroup@hotmail.co.uk

And it only remains, this being my last post of 2017, to wish for all of us that our 2018s might be a year in which we see our extraordinary species embracing more of its amazing, inspiring side, treasuring our planet and our interconnectedness.

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Christmas wishes for all of us……….

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Christmas, Christmas Days, Christmas greetings

Wishing us all  good time spent with those we love, and those who love us. (and that the ones we love are the ones who  also love us)

May you find your Christmas time be everything you might wish – as far as reality allows (!) and, even if it isn’t, let us all wish for the grace, humour and compassion for ourselves and those in our lives to help all of us appreciate the moments

Manchester, Arena: In Sorrow, In Anger, In Despair : Searching for a way ahead

This is nothing to do with religion, nothing to do with faith, nothing to do with any kind of cause worth anything at all

It says nothing about humanity’s desire to leave a world in any way better for the generations which come after us. It does not resonate in any way with how life itself strives for better adaptation. There is nothing here of any rationale, nothing here of anything which might make us hope humankind has anything to admire, to desire to emulate about itself.

All of that lies only within the hearts, minds and actions of those who came forward to succour and protect those who have been victims of an act perpetrated by deluded, aberrant, distasteful and irretrievably stupid, on every possible level, individuals

Children. Targetting children, a concert appealing to, particularly, young girls. A clearly deliberate choice, no doubt with the desire to provoke the deep distaste and revulsion that it does.

This is the worst our sorry species might be capable of – any who get sucked into these kinds of acts by believing they are following a ‘cause’ are deluded and in denial of their own true dark desires – these are the bullies, these are those who sublimate their own deep mental and emotional sickness and insufficiency by pretending to themselves that they are serving some greater purpose.

All they do is reveal the generosity, compassion, and humanity of those many others who rushed forwards to help, support, save, soothe, rescue, in all the ways they could.

We may not get to know the names of the admirable many, who remind us, in our helpless rage and despair, of what we can be, of what we want to be. But they are the ones I so surely need to focus on, and to hold like a beacon in my mind. They are the health and the wholeness.

Announcing a blog tour – Rebecca Mascull – The Wild Air

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Blog Tour, Rebecca Mascull, The Wild Air

Rebecca Mascull, an author I much admire, has her third novel out early next month. And, to whet your appetites, there will be a blog tour (me too!)

I shall be eagerly reading other reviews, interviews and so on, and will certainly be featuring them on my Posts I Like widget, but these are the blogs and these are the dates:

Rebecca writes literary historical novels with strong female characters. This one is about an aviatrix, and set prior to, and encompassing, the First World War. She always researches meticulously, so just when you might think ‘surely THIS couldn’t have happened at that time, you will find yourself surprised and educated.  The Wild Air has a much more introverted, central character than the ones from her first two novels, but she is as interesting, layered, unique and entrancing as ‘The Visitors’ Adeliza Golding and Song of the Sea Maid’s Dawnay Price.

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!

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

Remembrance

Tags

Globalisation, Isolationism, John Lennon, Leonard Cohen, Remembrance Day, Remembrance Sunday, US Election

Remembering, forgetting and making connection

It’s been a funny sort of week, a funny sort of few months, a funny sort of year. Funny, most in terms of peculiar, unsettling, weird. Not too much of laughter really.

My reading has continued, though sometimes I’ve lacked the emotional or intellectual energy to devote to the deep and fine stuff, feeling too raw, too wrecked, too appalled and exhausted , too benumbed by what seems to be shouty, screamy, excess in the political arena, rather than the laying out of complexity which needs reflecting on. Reviewing has suffered, too, a kind of ‘what’s the point’ ennui and laissez-faire.

I was approaching the American election with dread and despair, seeing ‘populism’ on the rise, in various countries, and following its landing here, could see similar infections spreading. A pandemic of dissatisfaction being medicated by flaming invective, illusory promises and soundbites  It’s shocking that what is ‘popular politics’ seems to be retrogressive, divisive and narrow rather than the wouldn’t-it-be-wonderful-if-what-was ‘popular’ was inclusivity, connection, a recognition of our common humanity, not to mention the fact that we share our planet with other species, and just as humans need to recognise the needs of shared humanity, we need to acknowledge our interdependence on our Planet Earth, both now, and for the sake of generations which may be to come.

Isolationism, making this little country or that ‘great again’ is a dangerous illusion. We are inextricably linked, each to another.

We have become so fixed on that winners and losers, survival of the fittest, red in tooth and claw view of evolution and reality. But the fittest merely means the best adapted. As a bipedal, not particularly fast, becoming hairless ape, our best adaptation proved to be with each other. We are a tribe animal, and did best by managing collectively together, not purely me versus you, but me with you. And now, we have forgotten that the ‘tribe’ is no longer little isolated pockets untouched by and untouching of each other. The tribe is all of us earth dwellers.

It’s a sobering and darkening time of year in the Northern Hemisphere. The fierce blaze of October fading and quietening, the days shortening, the energies of the natural world going inwards, consolidating, resting, dormant. A beautiful, spare, reflective season as the mask of leaves fall, and reveals the individual beauty of each tree’s core.

The eleventh of November is always a potent day anyway. It took me a long while to come to terms with ‘Remembrance Day’. In my youth, I thought on this day war was being glorified , that conflict was being celebrated. I thought we were being asked to glorify the dead ‘the glorious dead’ when there was little glorious in why they had died like this. I see it differently now. Those who have died in conflict SHOULD not have died in vain, if only we who are living can learn the lessons which their deaths have to teach us – precisely that division and conflict-between-nations will lead to more dead.

It is terrifying that the lessons of not one, but two world wars in the last hundred years (not to mention years of other smaller conflicts endlessly happening) have not been learned, and we seem to be bent on dismantling our recognition that the bellicosity of our nature needs to be tempered and restrained. The more we think ‘greatness’ is this nation against that the littler we become

I thought about those who have died through conflict, and I also thought about two poet troubadours, complex, often deeply troubled men, whose willingness to explore their own contradictions, and the contradictions of the times they lived in, produced songs that said more than simple

Remembrance day brought me to John Lennon’s Imagine, and also to his ‘God’ ( ‘I don’t believe’) We fight each other over so many ‘isms’ Simplistic though Imagine might be, Lennon’s coda,  in ‘God’ after all the ‘I don’t believes’ is ‘I just believe in me, Yoko and me’ – that’s reality’.  I thought that when it is just down to the struggle and complexity of the ‘You-and-me’ what frees us from that charged fear and hate place of ‘the other’, is the recognition of common humanity. Every day (and I am consciously having to work to notice it at the moment) there are tiny, unconscious acts of kindness and recognition between individuals. THESE people are the ‘little people, the ordinary decent people’ – not what the rabble-rousing populists are claiming as ‘ordinary, decent’

In fact, the populists are asking us to embrace everything that is UNdecent about ourselves, and claim THAT as ‘ordinary decency’

Real ‘decency’ is all around, and probably rarely found inside a whipped-up political rally. And never when what is being whipped is a hatred towards ‘other’

I do believe in the You and Me of us. Writ small, life by life, connection by connection, humankind is full of Wordsworth’s :

that best portion of a good man’s life;
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.

That is all around, if I take the time to notice it. The splitters and those who call to our hate, our rage, our fear, make us forget unity, seeking to bind us together through division and disunity. Us and Them. You-and-Me, by contrast, might simply be We

And, of course, Remembrance Day also brought the news of the wonderfully layered, complex Leonard Cohen’s death. Like many, I’m one who has found the man, and his music and lyrics, an abiding comfort and inspiration. His willingness to own and acknowledge his demons, rather than fly from them and project them onto the other, always made him someone who ‘lived in the light’ The truly whole are those who know they are wounded and terribly broken. The damagers are those who see others as broken and view themselves as right and righteous.

One of the very wonderful gifts Cohen’s lyrics have to bring is that whatever a song is seemingly about, it has the possibility of other, wider, deeper meanings. He was far more than a simple troubadour of the layered love song. Poets, poetic vision, poetic writing not only makes us see the world in a new way, but often welds together oppositions which might seem to want to fly apart. With Cohen, the contradictions are deep and viscerally felt. Love itself is both Eros, and a trans-personal yearning for surrender to the Divine. And also a challenging to the Divine, a wrestling between Eros and Thanatos – the blaze of love and life, the loss of love and life, the ‘ring of bright hair about the bone’. Death feared, Death making meaning, Death the awareness of mortality, giving our loves their fierceness and intensity.

I’ve been listening a lot, over the past couple of days, to my Cohen collection, but also to some of the many covers of his songs. Many by people with voices of far more musicality than Cohen’s. However, for me, the particular laconic, restrained, felt, but not emoted and over-shown delivery Cohen gives us, perfectly allows the listener to experience their own visceral response, in a way that the over throbbed demonstration by others, doesn’t.

There will be no new songs, but we are gifted to be living in a world where we have the old songs, we can play them, even watch Youtube videos of live performance, and, I think, we can continue to find new meanings and resonances in his words, his music, his renditions

On Wolves, Roses and the Russian Revolution

Tags

Bits and Bobs, Bits and Pieces, Oddsocks, Romanovs, Roses, Soapbox, Wolves

Now my third birthday is over and I am feeling the effects of quaffing too much of Margery Sharp’s champagne, inevitably this book blogger’s thoughts turns towards her reads, not to mention her posts on her reads. And idly looking through WordPress stats to see which posts have been most viewed, yielded results which intrigued me a little.

Far and away my most viewed post was the hardly mainstream non-fiction book by Mark Rowlands, the title of which gives away the contents The Philosopher and The Wolf Rowlands is a philosopher, with a passion for wolves, and his book explores what it might be to be human, and what it might be to be wolf. I posted this review shortly after I started blogging, when, to generate some bloggy content I was cannibalising some of my most loved reads which I had raved about, sometimes years earlier, on Amazon. My review of Rowlands book has been viewed (and continues regularly to attract viewers) over 1160 times in my 3 years of blogging – though a miniscule number of likes!

In a shifting competition for second place, with 650 and rising views each are two other non-fiction books.  Currently ahead by a whisker (at the time of writing this post) is Robert Massie’s Nicholas and Alexandra, which he wrote back in 1967. Admittedly, it is more directly about the Romanovs than the progress of the revolution, but of course, the journeys are entwined. And Massie wrote the book largely because his own son was born with haemophilia, which of course had devastating effects on the last Tsar’s family.

It may be that the third book, by Sharman Apt Russell, published in 2001, Anatomy of a Rose which, unsurprisingly is about Roses, will have knocked the Romanovs into third place by the time this goes live, as these two continue to jockey with each other.

Apt Russell is a Pantheist and a writer who is much concerned with the environment. Her writings about the natural world are plenty full of science, but laced with a poet’s, mystic’s sensibilities, so they are the very reverse of drily factual, objective laying out of unemotional fact.

A much needed quality – the Peace Rose

Curiously (or not) the Wolf and the Rose books have attracted their many visits from image searches, not from the titles of the books. I have no idea whether those who landed on my blog following their viewing of a page where a picture of a wolf, or a botanical drawing of the parts of a rose appeared, were pleased or irritated by what they found.

The three continue to steadily get viewed, and it is a rare day when none of them feature in my visiting stats

We are a patterning, narrating species, drawn to making connections and looping together this and that. The web, the net, both wonderfully named, offer new kinds of connections, and can begin, in the mind of the viewer, to tell new stories. Quite possibly, the wolves, the Romanovs, the roses connect not at all, but as the weaver of particular junctions on the patchwork quilt of my own blog, I have rather embarked on an idea of connections. This journey has meaning to me, even if the conclusions have no resonance for anyone else.

Let’s start

The wolf, that creature of the wilds, particularly of the shadowy fastnesses of forests, has long inhabited our dark dreams, our nightmares. Canis lupus exists as the shadow side of man’s best friend, the domesticated sub species Canis lupus familiaris, which we have made safe and beloved. But, maybe, a little bit of wild exists in the memory and genepool of even the most civilised and tamed of little doggies, who satisfy our days by honouring its tribe, pack, heritage by offering its human, leader of the pack status.

But, those untamed ones, what of them? They, like us, are a top predator. They, like us, are a tribe, pack, community animal. They, like us, are highly intelligent. But, unlike us, (or, perhaps, like us?) they are untamed. Once the wolf threatened our attempts to make our world safe and domesticated. When we became agriculturalists, the wolves were predators on our gathered flocks. Wolf was a story to scare our children with, the dangers of roaming through those dark forests – and what a field day those twining, tendrilly, loamy, mushroomy forests offer symbolically to post-Freudians. And what symbols the voracious, hungry wolf, confidently rampaging through those forests might hint at, lurking in hairy fashion under our buttoned up clothing. Whose are those slavering bloodied jaws?

Who could forget the transformation scene from American Werewolf in London

It’s no wonder that one of the staples of gothic horror fiction is the werewolf. Man (and woman) rips through the civilised and restraining veneer to become a creature of howling unrestrained desires at the full of the moon. Not our fault, of course, instinct overcame and possessed us. Jekyll and Hyde, each one of us.

But the wolf fascinates, because they are creatures of more than just the savagery we like to tar them with. Wolves are fiercely loyal to their pack. They are the tenderest of parents, the most intelligent of hunters, they symbolise a power, an honesty, a freedom. They live on the edge, and we envy and fear them for that. There are those who hate and fear them, and are opposed to re-wilding. And there are those who perhaps yearn for them. We half fear, and half long to find our untamed, unconfined wolfishness.

The unearthly sound of wolves howling is one of the most popular recorded soundscapes. We respond to them in a way beyond intellect. And some of us want, however foolishly (we might be made mincemeat) to run with them, to run, run, run with them

And what do you know – wolves are good for us, wolves are very very green indeed. I’m indebted to another blogger, Jilanne Hoffman, for reminding me of this wonderfully charged and wondrous video, narrated with such enthusiasm by George Monbiot.

The rose might appear to be the antithesis of the wolf. Although wild roses exist – we have tamed, named, brought them into the garden, into order, pruned and civilised them. They smell sweet, and, we might think, are a million scent miles away from the musky animalic odour of wolf.

Interestingly, the wild rose is also known as the dog rose, Rosa Canina – so we can see a botanical wolfish connection. I wonder where that connection to dogginess came from. Does it refer to the fact that delicate though the petals of a rose may be, the plant can fiercely defend itself, sharply stabbing with its little canine tooth shaped thorns?

But, to go back a little to the rose, now beautifully cultivated in gardens, possibly shapely, possibly highly scented. However, that succulent, seductive, rose perfume is actually rich in some extremely musky, urino-faecal odour notes, containing pheromonal notes (that’s what acts as the chemistry of desire to pollinators) the indoles. Indoles occur in faeces, (nice!) and have a faecal note – but at very low concentrations – are perceived as floral. Some of the most heavenly and expensive essential oils and floral absolutes – for example, rose, orange blossom, jasmine, contain indoles. The whiff of sex adheres to roses. Roses are, of course, above all other flowers, the flower that symbolises love, sexual love, the I love you gift of lover to lover. But roses are not only symbolic of sexual love and Eros.

The Roses of Heliogabalus by Alma Tadema, 1888, Wiki, Commons

In Christianity, the Rose is synonymous with the Virgin Mary, and symbolises spirit incarnating, surrender to the divine. The rose with its thorns also symbolised Christ’s wounds. In Sufiism, the connection between rose and love became translated to symbolise the desire for union with the divine.

Roses, particularly red roses, symbolise the heart, heart’s blood – and by a sideways jump, adopted into the red rose of socialism, the red flag of the people, deepest red, shrouding oft the martyred dead.

Stirringly sung here, by Pól Macadiam with solidarity poster accompaniments

And the Rose can be militant and warlike too, in English history, where the Plantagenet succession battles between the Yorkists (White Rose) and the Lancastrians (Red Rose) were known as the Wars of the Roses. This delicate flower here standing for strife and conflict, later the heraldic Tudor Rose, a composite of the white and red, symbolised the end of the Plantagenet conflict. Henry Tudor (Henry VII) was a descendent of the Lancastrian side, and marriage to Elizabeth of York, and the children of that marriage, marked the formation of a new dynasty.

Henry VII’s son, he of the six wives, created a kind of revolution in the religion of the land, mainly because of his following that doggy-rutty-overwhelmed by deepest desires. That man well in touch with his inner werewolf, I feel. Not to mention how fervent ideological belief led to the potential for further over-throwings and rebellions, if not quite revolutions, in the generation of the children of that much marrying king.

Which gives me the sew-up to the Romanovs, and yet more blood, yet more brutality.

I think all I can say on that, whether dwelling on the history of the bloodiness of Roses Wars, the Tudor succession, or how blood itself (haemophilia) contributed to that Russian Revolution is a quote from the Scottish play, used to justify further bloodshed. Something I feel drives escalations of all violence

I am in blood stepped in so far that should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er,

I am so sorry–this post has turned out to be dour and bloody. I should at least offer some refreshment!

Glass of bull’s blood, anyone?

To lighten things a little, before you all leave the morning after the night before birthday party early, do at least have a nice bunch of roses. I will make certain the wolves stay in their pens till you all get home, and that the ghosts of queens with severed heads and others somewhat bloodily despatched stay within doors

Blame those visitors doing their searches, not me, ‘twas they that started me thinking along these roads

And I can’t resist one of my favourite chanteuses, the magnificent June Tabor, here with the driving rhythms of Oysterband. Staying with an earlier, bloody connection between Russia, (by way of France) and Roses, the flower symbolises the United Kingdom, in the folk-song Bonny Bunch of Roses. Here,  from their album, Ragged Kingdom, the driving rhythms can accompany your journey home, clutching your bonny bunch of roses-oh!

(Apologies to Welsh listeners, who might or might not feel a little aggrieved at how the song-writer’s need for metre and rhythm has done strange things to ‘our United Kingdom’ to quote the current political-speak)

William Butler Yeats – Vacillation

Tags

Poetry, Reading Ireland, Vacillation, William Butler Yeats

I

Between extremities
Man runs his course;
A brand, or flaming breath.
Comes to destroy
All those antinomies
Of day and night;
The body calls it death,
The heart remorse.
But if these be right
What is joy?

II

A tree there is that from its topmost bough
Is half all glittering flame and half all green
Abounding foliage moistened with the dew;
And half is half and yet is all the scene;
And half and half consume what they renew,
And he that Attis’ image hangs between
That staring fury and the blind lush leaf
May know not what he knows, but knows not grief

III

Get all the gold and silver that you can,
Satisfy ambition, animate
The trivial days and ram them with the sun,
And yet upon these maxims meditate:
All women dote upon an idle man
Although their children need a rich estate;
No man has ever lived that had enough
Of children’s gratitude or woman’s love.

No longer in Lethean foliage caught
Begin the preparation for your death
And from the fortieth winter by that thought
Test every work of intellect or faith,
And everything that your own hands have wrought
And call those works extravagance of breath
That are not suited for such men as come
proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.

IV

My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.

V

Although the summer Sunlight gild
Cloudy leafage of the sky,
Or wintry moonlight sink the field
In storm-scattered intricacy,
I cannot look thereon,
Responsibility so weighs me down.

Things said or done long years ago,
Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do,
Weigh me down, and not a day
But something is recalled,
My conscience or my vanity appalled.

VI

A rivery field spread out below,
An odour of the new-mown hay
In his nostrils, the great lord of Chou
Cried, casting off the mountain snow,
`Let all things pass away.’

Wheels by milk-white asses drawn
Where Babylon or Nineveh
Rose; some conquer drew rein
And cried to battle-weary men,
`Let all things pass away.’

From man’s blood-sodden heart are sprung
Those branches of the night and day
Where the gaudy moon is hung.
What’s the meaning of all song?
`Let all things pass away.’

VII

The Soul. Seek out reality, leave things that seem.
The Heart. What, be a singer born and lack a theme?
The Soul. Isaiah’s coal, what more can man desire?
The Heart. Struck dumb in the simplicity of fire!
The Soul. Look on that fire, salvation walks within.
The Heart. What theme had Homer but original sin?

VIII

Must we part, Von Hugel, though much alike, for we
Accept the miracles of the saints and honour sanctity?
The body of Saint Teresa lies undecayed in tomb,
Bathed in miraculous oil, sweet odours from it come,
Healing from its lettered slab. Those self-same hands perchance
Eternalised the body of a modern saint that once
Had scooped out pharaoh’s mummy. I – though heart might find relief
Did I become a Christian man and choose for my belief
What seems most welcome in the tomb – play a pre-destined part.
Homer is my example and his unchristened heart.
The lion and the honeycomb, what has Scripture said?
So get you gone, Von Hugel, though with blessings on your head.

I have had, for a time, an uneasy relationship with W.B. Yeats. He was an early (though, thankfully not lasting) casualty of academia. Yeats was an intensive and obligatory part of my degree, and the detailed dissection with literary scalpels killed the life in the poetry stone dead. Yeats and Chaucer lay side by side, dismembered. Yeats was lucky, he inhabited only a shallow grave, but my resistance to digging up Chaucer’s bones continues to this day.

I was probably one of the luckier ones: some perhaps found it impossible to approach literature with joy and excitement ever again. One permanent corpse seems like a small price

Yeats began to rise and speak again to me quite soon, and this particular poem, Vacillation, from his 1933 Collection, The Winding Stair and Other Poems, was one of the ones which brought me back to hear his complex, beautiful voice

I was going through the almost obligatory early twenties state of existential unease, reading Sartre, Camus – and alongside, a lot of Colin Wilson’s non-fiction – starting of course with The Outsider, which focused on some writers I loved. But Wilson, alongside alienation was also looking at its opposite – connection. His writing introduced me to the work of American psychologist Abraham Maslow – which immediately struck a chord.

Western psychiatry, like Western medicine seemed focused on the damage, the lesion, the woundedness of the psyche. Maslow was championing a focus on the health. I suppose he was an early proponent (or a hangover from a much older tradition) of what might be called holistic medicine. Maslow was interested in studying the psychology of the healthy, recognising that this might be something which might be emulated, and, in terms of psyche, found within us all.

Maslow referred to the ‘A-Ha!’ moments, what he called Peak Experiences – that sense of coming right, being in the flow, somehow expanded into a world of meaning, connection. It’s the other side of the coin to that alienated disconnect, the sense of sickness, wrong, discomfort in one’s own skin and the skin of the world.

What has this to do with Yeats? (I can hear the muttering at the back)

Well, as Wilson was writing about Maslow, and Peak Experiences, he illustrated this with four lines from Vacillation, which resonated, profoundly, with me, and not only sent me back to Yeats, but have also been lines rather carved into my being

Yeats wrote the poem, a long and complex one, in middle age. In his 50s, he had long moved away from his sojourn and sympathy with Revolutionary Ireland, away from the lilting misty green lyricism. Politically he had moved rightwards (another reason for falling out of my favour!) in many ways. His poetry felt difficult to me.

In Vacillation, Yeats is looking back and forward on his life. He manifests much cynicism about the world – look at that cynical snarl in the first 3 lines of stanza III

Get all the gold and silver that you can,
Satisfy ambition, animate
The trivial days and ram them with the sun,

But, it is that 4th stanza, for me, the heart of the poem, and a wrenching into reality, that flames into clarity, particularly the last four lines, which are so potent – and something which resonated most powerfully for me:

My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.

The language is unerringly simple, almost trite with its rhymes, but the meaning, profound.

And the placement of it, in the midst of some complex dialogues between Heart and Soul, within classical allusions Attis, Lethe, not to mention the Lord of Chou and von Hugel, the reference to whom is by all accounts linked to a book contrasting Homeric and Christian symbolism, is also potent.

There is the complicated surround, a kind of tangle of intellectual, philosophical themes, which almost pushes away and alienates the casual reader – and then, suddenly, in stanza 4, there is the recounting of the most ordinary of events, a prosaic normality, sitting in a café in London – and suddenly , blazing, being blessed, being able to bless.

By setting the A-Ha! The Awake! In the middle of the prosaic, Yeats acknowledges the absolute ordinary extraordinariness of those rapturous, graceful moments where suddenly we arrive at a sense of meaningfulness.

Those four lines have become a kind of mantra for me – a sense that however dark and alienated and full of ‘trivial days’ the world can sometimes seem, or us within that world, those pockets of twenty minute blaze are as much of reality as the sense of alienation. And, I believe the ‘blaze’ trumps the alienation, because the blaze also enfolds and acknowledges the alienation, the sense of blessed and could bless encompasses the knowledge of disconnection, whereas the disconnected moments cannot remember and hold the possibility of the other

And, in an irreverent conclusion, Yeats is clearly advising all of us to keep reading, and to keep reading in cafes: they are clearly excellent for the bless bless moments of awakening!

So, this Irish poet, reminds me, in Reading Ireland Month, how poetry is one of the provokers of the ‘super-reality, awake, awake!’ experience

Here is Yeats, near the end of his life, reading three of his own poems

In great praise of rare bloggers and their passion for rarer books, and to celebrate my THIRD BIRTHDAY

Tags

Bits and Bobs, Bits and Pieces, Happy Birthday!, Oddsocks, Other Stuff

I received a lovely and unexpected email from Open Road Integrated Media, an epublishing company who seem to have been keenly re-establishing sometimes neglected authors fallen out of attention in a world where the often badly written latest hypery, in bookie terms, is drowned in sticky saccharine puffery

(I had to get that off my chest again)

But, as this post is meant as a thanks and a celebration of discerning publishers, discerning and dedicated bloggers who champion the neglected splendours from earlier decades, lesser trodden paths, hidden byways from other lands and the like, I will put on my best smile, fill the best champagne glass and shout ‘Huzzah’ ‘for she’s a jolly good…..blogger’, applauding ferociously in specific directions…

Open Road Media emailed to thank me for my review of Margery Sharp’s out of print Cluny Brown, and to tell me that they were releasing 10 Margerys on April 12th and would I like advance copies of Cluny and The Nutmeg Tree to download and review (or in Cluny’s case, mention again) Yes, I would, I certainly would. What a treat. Thank you Open Road

And I do believe that it is the sterling work on Margery’s behalf done by passionate reader bloggers who have created a buzz which a responsive publisher ‘in the niche’ has responded to

And so the biggest cheer goes to Jane at beyondedenrock. I had never heard of Margery Sharp before Jane ran her MargerySharp day LAST year, which I missed, but her periodic Margery including posts, and my appreciation of her discernment about half forgotten writers made me take notice, and track down a rare battered copy of Cluny from a marketplace seller. Most of her titles are now only available, battered, at eye-watering prices, so it was a jolly find. Except that I was left with a taste for more. And more was unobtainable outside eye water.

Until now

And then Jane also introduced me to another Margery champion, The Margery Sharp blog. I’ve become aware of a wonderful little community championing the rarer, the ones who should not have been forgotten…..and of course the lovely small publishers (Persephone, Pushkin and others) who are also tenderly re-planting books, and sending their cuttings out all over (okay, the metaphor might not quite work)

So, as well as Jane, I also want (nervously) to thank another little clutch of bloggers who have rather grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and thrust new reads, not to mention re-reads into my path. They are all making me aware of ‘so many WONDERFUL books, so little time’ And I am buying, buying, buying, not to mention desperately scouring the shelves of second hand shops, for lists and lists of treasures

So, my new Nemeses (it sounds better than Nemesises, and, what do you know, the spell checker slumbered at Nemeses, but spat at the snakey version with the extra hissing consonants), are found below,  in no particular order – they are equally dangerous to the diminishing of bank balances and the cluttering of space, as I earnestly search for second hand copies of rarities. Who knows, perhaps their fierce and championing work may yet yield re-releases of any gone out of print (as in the Sharpists’ successes)

Let’s nervously, gratefully hear it for

HeavenAli (responsible for my happiest re-read of the year thus far, To The Lighthouse)

JacquiWine’s Journal (I will be heading towards Jean Rhys re-reads)

Kaggsysbookishramblings (I expect her to be responsible for another glorious re-read as part of her 1938 Challenge (Homage to Catalonia)

Shoshi’s Book Blog (all things Russian, and much much more – re-reads of Dostoievsky are well overdue)

Of course, thanks to these (and other) bloggers my own self challenge (Reading the 20th) is woefully foundering, as book after book which I intended to read at some point in a glitteringly beckoning future year gets bumped into the present urgent read, due to a splendid and seductive heads up, generally as one of their irresistible challenge. I keep telling myself – ‘I will continue the sequential Reading the Twentieth next week’ At this rate, it will be next decade.  Shame on you and your blandishments, ladies!

Meanwhile have some of Margery’s champagne. I’m sure she won’t mind