No-one expects the French inquisition

On holiday in the Tarn last week, 29C kept me sitting in the shade from the moment I came in from the morning's baguette-foraging until about 4pm. While the others played by the pool, I kept my pale skin safe and my geeky brain entertained with some local history.

This area of the south-west of France was full of the Cathar heresy during C13 and into C14, people who rejected the Catholic church and opted instead to be 'good Christians'. I really enjoyed The Perfect Heresy, which sets the early C13 sieges and massacres in the context of wider history - the state of the Catholic church and competing popes setting up across Europe; rival powers with claims on the land (including the English King, the local Count of Foix and the tiny kingdom of France) and changes in society and technology. It's a compelling and vivid read, showing us how human the individuals were. And the descriptions of medieval sieges and burnings were truly horrendous.

And then I read Montaillou, which is a classic. Emmanuel La Roy Ladurie drew on the detailed records of the C14 Inquisition's interviews and interrogations of the population of this tiny village. It's a magnificent work of scholarship, with astounding levels of detail about the most minor aspects of life. My gripe is that it's a dated book - it reads like an academic study, taking different aspects of life thematically and marshalling the evidence for each section. I think a more modern history would have invested more focus in the stories of the families - it could still have kept different chapters to focus on different aspects of rural medieval life but would have been more plot and character-driven and so a more engaging read.

Both books came from Daunts - I love the way they arrange history and fiction by country, with the travel books. I'm not into the Dan Brown-type stuff on Cathars etc, and didn't manage to find any 'quality' fiction to read while there, so I'd welcome any other suggestions of books to read - whether about the area or more fiction set in medieval Europe.

Reading in the right place

There's very little beats a holiday read set in the same place that you're actually reading it. I enjoyed some Cathar history last week near Lavaur - and then came back to see that the Guardian's got writers to suggest books for ten holiday breaks.

I definitely fancy Egypt, Spain and Italy - for holidays and from the one-line summaries of suggested books...

Someone At A Distance

I bought Someone At A Distance as the third of my latest Persephone '3 for a bit cheaper' deal. I was already committed to Round About A Pound and Few Eggs, and I'd really enjoyed They Were Sisters. 

I started the book a couple of weeks ago and finished it on my first day in Hay - and it didn't disappoint. A quick plot summary from Amazon: "Apparently a 'fairly ordinary tale about the destruction of a happy marriage,' Nina Bawden wrote in her Preface, yet 'it makes compulsive reading' in its description of an 'ordinary' family, husband commuting up to town, wife at home ('Ellen was that unfashionable creature, a happy housewife'). Disaster strikes when a young French woman visits (the scenes back in France are most beautifully described, with touches of Balzac or Maupassant) and calculatingly seduces the husband. He abandons everything for her; then there is no going back."

I loved the characterisation of the North family, and the way that Dorothy Whipple captures their happiness and relationships while also showing us their tics and flaws. And I found Louise loathsome but captivating - from the first moment we see her we know she's not a nice piece of work. Her seduction of Avery - and the end of his marriage to Ellen - is slow and specific, with key moments described in detail through one or both character's views. Although we know through the omniscient narration that Louise is playing a careful game and shifting her aims as she works out her options, as a reader I felt that there was no escape as each incident seemed to lead inexorably to the next. And maybe that is how Avery explained it to himself at first, because none of the individual actions/situations on their own were inexcusable - and many were inappropriate only because of the cumulative impact.

The book left me thinking about three quite different things.
1) Early on, the narrator compares Louise to Madame Bovary in her social ambitions and as I went on reading the book I found that echoes and parallels kept coming to mind. I've not been able to find any reviews on line which explore this properly with quotes and more sharp comparisons - but it sounds like an essay question just waiting to be set!

2) The book ends 'right' with Ellen back on her feet with a new home, kids happy and secure, and Avery and Louise miserable in each others' company. I found myself wondering about Ellen's final reaction - her sense of pleasure and pride that Avery misses her and is so evidently upset. I wondered about whether they would ever find a way to be together again, and whether I would think that a good or bad thing...

3) Nina Bawden's preface to the Persephone edition suggests that although the book was written and set after the Second World War, the overall tone has a sense of nostalgia which might better place the book in the prewar period. I've been wondering about whether that's true - or whether it's just that the big changes of post-war England had much less impact on wealthy country-dwellers. And I was very struck by how much has changed since the 50s in terms of women's lives - we don't have maids any more and we do expect to work - and often to have a career, with all the associated increases in independence and in hard work because we're still expected to keep house and home together.

There are some great reviews around, including on the Persephone Forum and from the Persephone Reading Weekend (Tuulenhaiven and BookGirl). I also thought that Carol Wallace's review picked on something important about how we feel about unpleasant characters when an author/narrator lets us see inside their worlds too. 

How to save your spine

No, not a post about posture while reading. Yes, a post about how to look after the spine of a paperback book - my university boyfriend taught me, and I'm now passing on the word. It only takes about a minute, and I don't think I've broken any spines since I learnt about it.

Get hold of your paperback - you need to do this before you read the book. Find a table or similar hard surface, and stand the book on its spine.

Take the front and back covers, one in each hand, and open them out onto the table. Leave all the pages still standing up. Use your thumb nails to smooth down the right-angled crease between the cover (now flat on the table) and the pages (still standing up). I think this works best if you do both sides at once. 

Pick up 10-15 pages from the front and back of the book and open them onto the table, leaving the rest of the pages still standing up. Repeat the thumbnail manoever, running both thumbs down the crease between the pages that you've opened and the rest which are still standing up.

Keep on doing this - taking 10-15 pages from each end, opening them, and running your thumbnails down to make sure they'll stay open - until you get to the middle.

Close the book again, smile, and start to read from p1. 

Any other tips for looking after books? Or for saving your spine while reading in stupid positions?

One Book, Two Book, Three Book, Four... and Five!

I've picked this up via Cristina, Verity and Darlene - who in turn took it from Simon (who's illustrated his post with lovely photos). I'd love to know what other people's five books are - pop a link in the comments if you've done this one...



The book I'm currently reading


- Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. It's taken me more than a week, and I put most of that down to the fact it's a physically big and hardback book, so it's a bigger deal to cart in and out of work and it's harder to find a comfy position to read it in bed. I'm enjoying it a fair bit - the complicated characters, the echoes and themes that resonate. But with 70 pages to go, I've not yet clocked why it's the next/latest Great American Novel. 

The last book I finished


- Annabel, and I posted a brief review here.

The next book I want to read


- The Finkler Question - I've read the rest of the Booker shortlist, and think I'm good and ready for the winner now. I hope it's good, because I enjoyed Long Song and Room but found the others a bit meh, really. 


- I'm also going to be rereading American Wife in the next week or so - having pressed it on my book group girls, I want to make sure I'm really well prepped with some good questions and thoughts to prompt the chat. 

April's reading round-up

I've not reviewed any of my reading this month - and I'm not motivated to write properly considered posts for any of the books. But here's a quick round-up:

8) Round about a Pound a Week - I first added it to my TBR list during Persephone Reading Weekend, then moved it up the list to make sure I've read it before Hay so that I can discuss with the lovely Sally. I'm about 150 pages in, finding the writing a bit dry but the content and argument shocking and provocative. Makes me think of Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier, and also of Polly Toynbee's Hard Work which I read when I first moved to London. 

7) Annabel - I thought this was superb. Again, it wasn't the first Orange longlister to leap out of the list and entice me, but after picking up and putting down a copy on several different bookshop trips (in part captivated by the astounding cover photo and a serendipitous link to something I'd read on Jezebel about androgynous models), I decided to give it a go. The story is of a child born in 1970s Labrador, his childhood and adolescence as a boy and young man (Wayne) living on the edge of the wilderness, and his move to the big city and attempt to live as his true self - both Wayne and Annabel.

This is really a book about human relationships - Treadway and Jacinta (Wayne's parents) have an unusually good relationship that turns over time; Thomasina (Jacinta's friend/neighbour) projects her longing for her dead husband and daughter; Wayne's relationship with Wally - and the awful echo that both of their dreams are damaged/delayed by shards of glass wielded by judgemental bullies. I was struck at the end of the book by the depth of characters and the focus on understanding who, how and why they are as they are - and the range of characterisation which accepts multiple identities and/or ambiguity.

And finally - the 'BBC' meme

The 'BBC Top 100 books' list has reappeared on facebook. I've never done it before - here goes (and I'd welcome suggestions)...

So the official story is that the BBC created a list of the 'top 100' books in the English language and discovered that the average adult had only read 6 books on the list. Turns out there's several problems with this story - what kind of 'top 100' is this so full of recent (and kids) books, it was probably started by the Guardian, some of the books are only in English through translation, and really - only six books? I can believe it's true but don't think reading seven of them makes anyone well-read...

Anyway - for now, here's where I'm up to - 58 read; another eight I'd definitely like to read. 

The rules
- bold for books I've read
- italics for books I plan to read
- underline for books I love
- strike through for books I hate (or will never read)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

Long Time, No See

So I just completed my first 'Early Reviewers' book - Long Time, No See by Dermot Healy. The blurb on the back describes him as 'the finest prose writer at work in Ireland today' and describes the book as 'A novel about community, family, love and bonds across generations, Long Time, No See is an epic in miniature, peopled by a cast of innocents and broken misfits, its still lyrical power casts a miraculous literary spell.'

The dialogue is hard to penetrate - and whereas books like Clockwork Orange or The Inheritors suck you in - I felt like this book was aiming for something more Pinter-esque with apparently unrelated and banal dialogue meant to convey emotion, drama and depth. If it wasn't for Early Reviewers, this would have been a five-page-rant book. But I persevered - and so I got to know the characters and events. It passed the time and there were moments of lyricism, but I wasn't sucked into a sense of place or time, I didn't care that much about the characters, and the plot didn't really work for me. 

If I were to recommend it to anyone, I'd go for someone who knows and likes the countryside/life in a small community, and someone who's up for a slightly slower read and happy to sift through the dialogue to appreciate the drama and character sitting behind it.

Tiger Hills

I picked up Tiger Hills because it had an attractive cover, and bought it because it had an interesting blurb, was recommended by the TV Book Club and was only £4 from the bookpeople stall at work. Twenty pages in, I thought - ugh, is this trying to be a new Suitable Boy? 

100 pages in and I was well and truly hooked - and it kept me gripped to the end. It's an Indian story of a little girl and boy who grow up together, the terrible events of their teens which wrecks their relationship for decades, and the way it reverberates through the next generation(s). Above all its a story about favourites (and presumed favourites), and about mothers.

Brilliant Posts

Ten great posts that I've read in the last few days

• Darlene (Roses over a Cottage Door) on favourite words - so good it made me want to do a top ten list of my favourite words, but I'm struggling to sort my ten
• Elisabeth Mahony on In Our Time (I loooove R4) h/t marbury
• Sally (Sow and Sew) with a brilliant stopmotion bookshelf reorganisation (I know, I know, sounds stupid, is actually brilliant) - also Sally's posting on 'discomfort' as a weekword was brilliant.
• #UkTownSongs - kicked off a couple of days ago, just brilliant.
• Joanna (Confident Writing) on 'what if' - a nice prompt to reflect on why and how I blog. 
• Claire (Paperback Reader) on her trip to see TV Book Club getting recorded
• A couple of goodies from Book Club Classics - passing on a list of 'best science writing of 2010' (following my recent reading of Henrietta Lacks) and a review of the Invisible Line (I've read a few things recently about race in the US...)
• Litlove (Tales from the reading room) with a thought provoking post on women and how we make things harder for ourselves and each other. 
• HBR on 30 things we need, and 30 things we don't - worky but also work-life-balancy
• OldSpice - there's a load of new ads up on youtube. Brilliant as ever.

(Miserable) Consequences

Endpaper for the Persephone edition - 'Thistle' sold in Liberty's in 1896

I finished Consequences (EM Delafield) last night - or actually about 1am this morning. I picked it up in the Lambs Conduit St shop when my book group met there, and held on to read it as part of the Persephone Reading Weekend.

What a sad book - although the blurb and introductory essay had drawn out a sense of wryness or irony in the portrayal of a conventional and comfortable family at the end of the nineteenth century, I found it profoundly sad. 

I felt for Alex, so uncomfortable in her own skin, unable to 'read' other people - except for their disappointment in her - and so ill equipped to be happy in any of the circumstances and societies she lived in. I liked the complexity of the characters - for example the layers of Alex' relationship with her sister felt human and real, with the mixture of guilt, love, frustration, incomprehension, a desire to dominate and be the best mixed with awareness and envy of Barbara's greater social skills. I'm not sure that I agree with readers who draw out lesbian subtext, to me Alex' attachment to Queenie, Mother Gertrude et al was about idolising someone she wanted to imitate, and about her desperate loneliness and response to anyone who would accept her, take an interest in her and behave as if they cared about her.

I wondered how much to read into the title and the opening (vulgar???) game of consequences - it would be easy and maybe interesting to draw out a thread in which what happens to Alex is often the result of someone else (and different people each time) taking their turn to decide what happens next. And there is a refrain through the book about waiting for things to pass and for the next thing to happen...

In terms of how it's written, I'm obviously going through an anti-narrator phase. As with a couple of late-19th/early 20th century books I've read recently, I found the authorial voice irritating as it set the context or drew out inferences. My only other criticism is that I found the wrapping up of the book a bit too quick - it felt a bit bish-bash-bosh as one thing happened after another, and then slammed into the final scenes.

Sisters (not) doing it for themselves

Yesterday's book club saw one of the best discussions (and venues) we've had in a long time - well done Rachel. We met at Persephone Books on Lamb's Conduit Street - and talked about They Were Sisters by Dorothy Whipple.

'Pattern of Anemones', a 1935 printed cotton crepe dress fabric 

We all thought it a good book, though didn't all like it. Geoffrey is awful and destroys Charlotte; Vera is vapid and exploits Brian - and the cruelty to children (and dog) is shocking. Lucy is good, marries a good man, and does her best to help her sisters and nieces. Although the outcomes can be predicted from early in the book, this isn't a classical tragedy - all of the characters are culpable for failing to act when they have moments of insight and self-awareness. I think it would have been better with a bit more light and nuance, and a bit less authorial commentary, but it's eminently readable and very human - we follow the narration through each character's viewpoints and gain insight and empathy for their position. And the more I reflect on the book, the more internal echos and structural patterns I see. 

And we talked - about families, telling the truth to siblings and looking after children; about problems in relationships and whether we'd express concerns to friends, or see any echoes in our own lives; and about blame and responsibility.

***
And we made it to the British Museum to see the Rosetta Stone, the Lion Hunt and the amazing table of pills in the Living and Dying room. Superb.

Fictional FLOTUSes...

So here's the real and long-mulled-over post on American Wife and Primary Colours. It's the first time I've written at any length about novels since I left university, and I'm definitely out of practice.

Primary Colors - I've wanted to see the film for ever, but never tracked it down. Finally saw the book in Waterstones and lashed out.

It's a roman a clef, about Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign in 1992 - but the similarity comes through characters and situations rather than through the specific features of the plot. It's told through the voice of an idealistic 'pol' (Henry) who joins the campaign at an early stage and follows his arc from his initial inspiration by an idealised candidate (Jack) with a real love for and commitment to 'real voters', through difficult debates as he confronts the candidate's constant cheating of his wife and low skulduggery to improve his chances, and on to exhaustion and exasperation as Henry plans to leave the campaign.

On ending a book...

Just finished reading Alone in Berlin - I've whompfed through it in about 3 days and loved it. It's not one of those books that leaves you needing to think and reflect (unlike, say, Room which needed a good few hours of quiet to digest). But I am thinking about what to do next, because it seems a bit disrespectful to treat it like any old commodity and pile straight on into the next. 


And the afterword and endnotes drew out a whole set of literary ideas that I'd only just about been aware of about the fact that all the rebels were such obvious failures, but also presented as parents of the future and as decent humans etc. So I'm thinking vaguely that I should probably pause a bit after books that have any literary merit to think about them a bit, because I really do find my appreciation and enjoyment is improved by some analysis and insight, even post hoc. Hmmm. Maybe it's time to start adding reviews to by LibraryThing - though for now I'm also quite psyched by having read more than six books so that my widget can finally start doing its thing. 

Poudlard, Moldus and all that jazz

So - as part of my efforts to get back into the habit of reading in French, I just spent 10 days reading 'Harry Potter et l'ordre du phenix'. It's a fat old book - just over 1000 pages and in my cheapo edition with already-yellowing pages the print job wasn't great so every 15 pages or so there'd be loads of blobs of ink. But it really does crack along at quite a pace - and a couple of nights I pretty much resorted to reading under the bedclothes because I couldn't bear to stop yet and the lovely man needed his beauty sleep.


As I was reading it though, I realised why I've found watching the films slightly disconcerting - although I read the first few Harry Potters in English (I was at uni, what else was there to do??? other than a new author every bloody week), I've since read them all in French - and so I've got used to the French words for things. It's a great translation when the translator keeps the allusive and punning sense of language - so in Asterix we English bods have 'Getafix' the druid (he's called Panoramix in French), Dogmatix (for Idefix) and Vitalstatistix (for Abraracourcix).


In Harry Potter there's some lovely frenchifications in the original (Malfoy anyone? and what about Voldemort?) and then some great - and some not-so-great - translations.

Books going on the 'to read' list

So last night in the pub, Patrick put me onto Easy Riders and Raging Bulls, the story of a bunch of Directors who grew up in different directions and created very different films.

Today, I got some training. In the classic mould of a senior civil servant, the bloke leading it was the kind of person who seems to have anecdotes, quotes, allusions etc tripping off his tongue. I'm thinking of following up on Trollope's 'Three Clerks' though I've not read any before, and thinking again about whether Watership Down is a political tale.

And then I've also had an email today from Waterstones, to tell me that Leopard has just been published, and to update me on my points balance. It was hotly tipped in a bunch of 2010 reviews, so I'm guessing this is the paperback.

I really mustn't buy any more books for a while - I've bought loads already this year and want to catch myself up. But I am about to 'teach' Jane how to browse a bookshop and so I'm preparing my lesson plan...


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Entertaining weekend

Lovely afternoon yesterday with book group girls - it's been running 3 years so we celebrated with pink fizz and a fantastic spread of savouries and cakes. Everyone had enjoyed The Help - and it's been a while since I've really enjoyed a book club selection so it's nice to be getting back into it. Talking on the phone to Mum she'd enjoyed it and found it provoked a lot of thinking for her - although interesting not about apartheid South Africa which I'd expected.

And today a really lazy start with a big lie-in, breakfast and papers and then I rustled up some cake before Bruce and Carmel came over for a neighbourly return match to compare house layout and damp problems, drink mulled wine and coffee and eat said coffee and walnut treat. Carmel's brilliant on local history - including where the bombs dropped, famous people who live/have lived around here, and the Tudor history of Greenwich, Blackheath, Eltham etc. I'm really enjoying feeling like part of a street and making the choice to get to know people. Am hoping to find a scrabble player somewhere near here...

Now it's time to get ready for Zen.

Dorkiness in the evening

So I finished work on time (yay), went to Waterloo for coffee with Caz - a lovely treat and more importantly a chance to hand back her phone which I've had for more than a week. We've fixed a date for dinner next month and it feels good to be seeing each other more regularly. Funny that something as basic as her monthly teaching session gives us the structure we need to see each other and makes it a lot easier than when we have to pick up the phone and pluck a date from thin air.

This evening I raced through the last 50 pages or so of The Help, and since then I've been updating my LibraryThing - utter dorkiness, but so satisfying to go through a few hundred books and tag them with things that will help me find and remember them. And to realise I've been reading the Booker shortlist since 2005 which does make me ancient. Now about to upload some photos, then into the bath with book No.3 of the year...