Books from Felixstowe

As promised, here are the books I bought in Felixstowe... I intended to take a photo of them on the beach, but I forgot, so... here they all are at Felixstowe train station...

Almost all of these came from Treasure Chest Books (which was even more wonderful than I'd remembered - it looks like quite a small shop, but just keeps going on and on, room after room) but I'll start with the one that wasn't. I can't remember the name of the shop it came from, actually... a secondhand bookshop nearer the sea, anyway.  Having been to Guy's wonderful talk, I couldn't leave behind a copy of E.F. Benson's first book (and, during his life, his most successful) - Dodo.

Let's start at the top of the pile, shall we?

Patricia Brent, Spinster - Herbert Jenkins
Although the word 'spinster' in a book title is almost certain to make me want a copy on my shelves, this one comes with an even greater recommendation - or series of them, because several people from my online book list have been reading this one lately.

Virginia Woolf - E.M. Forster
You can barely see it in the picture, but there's a little pamphlet in the pile.  I love it when authors write about other authors, so E.M. Forster on Virginia Woolf sounds great - indeed, I have actually read it in the Bodleian, and now I get to have my own copy.

The Windfall - Christopher Milne
I do already own this, but I couldn't leave it behind when it was only £1... so I'll find someone to give this to at some point...

Magda - Meike Zeirvogel
Meike is better known to many of us as the doyenne of Peirene Press - I think I was actually offered a review copy of this, but knew I wouldn't be likely to have a chance to read it for a while, and this way I get to try it without the self-imposed time pressure!

Moving House - Katharine Moore
I love the idea of someone publishing their first novel in their 80s, and have previously enjoyed Moore's letters with Joyce Grenfell, and her novel Summer at the Haven.

Nothing Sacred - Angela Carter
I keep stocking up my Carter shelves, and I've still only read one book by her... but now I have another one!

Mr. Bridge - Evan Connell
There has been quite a lot of talk about this, and Mrs. Bridge, in the blogosphere lately - and Simon S's recent review of the latter made me want to give Connell a try.

My Father and Myself - J.R. Ackerley
There might be people in the world who can see a beautiful NYRB Classics edition of an author they've been intending to read - but I am not one of these people.  This comes as no surprise, does it?

Dodo - E.F. Benson
As mentioned above!

On The Side of the Angels - Betty Miller
See my comment about NYRB Classics, and transpose to Virago Modern Classics...

This is Sylvia - Sandy Wilson
A £1 sale means I give things like this a go... the memoirs of a cat! It could be very funny or it could be utterly mawkish. We'll see...

Autobiography - Enid Bagnold
This book wasn't in the £1 sale, but I couldn't resist buying it... once I saw that it was signed by Enid Bagnold, with a lovely inscription from her. One to treasure!

As always, do let me know if you've read any of these, or if any are tickling your reading fancies.
Over to you!

Felixstowe Book Festival: reporting back

Well, what a wonderful weekend!

Elaine and I in the lovely ex-stable venue

Felixstowe Book Festival may be in its first year, but you wouldn't have guessed it from the polished organisation, public enthusiasm, and general success of the weekend.  It certainly looks encouraging that there will be many more, and I would definitely like to go along to future years.

I should report back on my talk with Elaine - I'd decided that I would be happy if there were 6 people in the audience, so I was delighted with 14 - particularly since they were an incredibly friendly, engaged audience who seemed genuinely interested, and (what's more) laughed at our jokes - for example, Colin, you got a mention with your comment that you "read Stuck-in-a-Book, except for the bookish bits".

Our talk was about book blogging in general and particular - how it fits in with traditional media, how we got involved ourselves - and then onto the changing opinions of publishers towards bloggers (we especially cheered on the forward-thinking enthusiasm of Bloomsbury) and meeting people from the internet.  We were a bit nervous that we hadn't got enough material, but we needn't have worried - since Elaine and I have known each for so long, we were able to bounce off one another, and add in extra anecdotes and comments in turn.  All in all, I'm very pleased with how it went, and want to thank the audience for making it such a fun experience - and, of course, thank lovely Elaine for asking me to participate.

Elaine, me, Linda

In that audience were two online author friends, Guy Fraser-Sampson and Linda Gillard.  It was lovely to see Guy again, for the third time I think, and his talk on E.F. Benson's family and Mapp and Lucia was sublimely funny (as is the second Mapp & Lucia book Guy has written, Lucia on Holiday, which I read this weekend and will post about soon.)  And I finally got to meet Linda, having known her online for, gosh, the best part of a decade - and, of course, loving her novels. We had a lovely long chat, and it was an absolute delight.  It was a good weekend for meeting online friends, because I also met a lovely lady called Daphne, who has been an online friend for about as long as Linda, I believe - and is an absolute scream, I must add.

Daphne also asked me, after I'd spent a couple of hours browsing the two excellent secondhand bookshops in Felixstowe, whether I'd bought anything.  I think she probably knew the answer anyway.  Treasure Chest Books (the one I remembered from a trip to Felixstowe aged about 16) had a sale, so that most of their fiction was £1 each. I came away with quite a haul... all will be revealed in my next post!

Bookish weekend

Oh dear! I seem to have opened a can of worms with my comments on Dorothy L Sayers... I've read two (Strong Poison and Gaudy Night), wasn't hugely impressed by the former, and liked the latter even less... I shan't go into much detail, because I don't want to upset her fans, but suffice to say that Sayers and Lord Peter are not for me! To propitiate Sayers fans, here is a piece written by Diana on the OxfordWords blog today, commissioned by yours truly.

And another reminder that I'll be appearing (with Elaine) at the Felixstowe Book Festival on Saturday - I spent the evening putting together some notes for it, which has got me quite excited and looking forward to it.  My one hope is that people come, so if you live remotely near Felixstowe, please do come along and introduce yourself!  More details here.

The next few days are going to be really busy, so this might be my last post until Monday.  Have a fantastic few days, and I'll let you know how the talk went!

And PLEASE bully me until I write about seeing Judi Dench in Peter and Alice, and the excellently funny 1944 film I watched the other day.

In my absence... why not tell me what you're reading?  I'm just about to finish my first book by Winifred Holtby - but perhaps not one you'd expect to be my first...

Folio & Agatha

photo source

For those of us who love the book as a physical, aesthetic object, the Folio Society is spoken of with breathless delight.  They are the antidote to the ebook or the mass market paperback - their beautiful hardbacks with slipcovers, with exquisite paper and specially commissioned illustrations, are joys on anybody's shelves.  Since they're at the pricier end of the book market, I don't have huge numbers, although I do prize the first one I ever owned - Selected Stories of Katherine Mansfield, given by my friend Barbara, which not only introduced me to one of my favourite writers, but to the beauty of Folio.  I'm under no obligations to say anything about them, I should mention, but they really are perfect gift books, and I aspire to having shelves full of them one day.

This became all the clearer when, yesterday evening, I sat in their members' room in Bloomsbury, shelves and tables filled with their beautiful books.  I managed not to shove any in my bag, you'll be pleased to know - except for the one they sent me home with in my goody bag, which was the Miss Marple Short Stories - because I was in London to hear a talk about Agatha Christie by her biographer Laura Thompson, in the company of various other bloggers.  I'd only actually met one before, and we just said hello across the room - most of those present seemed to be crime bloggers, and know each other, but I did get to chat to a lady from a fashion blog with a sideline in book blogs.  If a fashionista is going to like any books, they ought to be Folio books.

Anyway, there is nothing quite like hearing about Agatha Christie.  I think only Jane Austen unites so many diverse readers in eager agreement and enthusiasm - but, while most Austen fanatics have read all her novels (even if not her abbreviated novels, letters etc.) it's quite possible to love Agatha Christie without having read a very big percentage of her prolific output.  Take me, for instance - I love Dame Agatha.  Like many people, she was my transition from teenage reading to adult reading.  And yet I've only read (quick scurry to Wikipedia) 16 or 17 of her novels.  So many left to discover!

Thankfully Laura Thompson didn't assume we'd all have read everything by Christie, and so she didn't give away endings - or at least she didn't give away specific endings, so she mentioned that a murderer turned out to be a child, or every possible candidate, or a suicide - but didn't spoil which novels these endings belonged to.  (Please be similarly considerate in the comments!)

And, indeed, Laura Thompson's talk and Q&A afterwards was brilliant all round.  She was very personable, and obviously a big fan of Christie as well as a biographer (has anybody read her biography, incidentally?  I haven't, but want to now.)  Her favourite Christie novel is Five Little Pigs - she said that the plot movements and character movements work in sync beautifully, which makes me want to read that too - and, conversely, The Clocks is her least favourite.  My favourite comment she made was that Agatha Christie didn't feel the need to prove herself better than the detective novel genre.  She embraced it, and (as Thompson said too) although she thought a lot about what she did, she didn't analyse what she did.

My feelings are that Agatha Christie is such a perfect detective novelist that other authors don't only seem inferior, but seem failures.  They have wandered from the blueprint Christie excelled at - her plots are almost always breathtakingly flawless - and so people like Dorothy L Sayers and Margery Allingham barely even qualify as detective novelists to me, however enjoyable they may be in other  qualities (and, for my money, Sayers is short of those too!)

I asked a question about Christie's romantic novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott - which I've never read - and turns out they were better reviewed than her main output!  Thompson adds that some are, indeed, very good.

All in all, a highly enjoyable (if swelteringly hot) evening, which has cemented my admiration for Folio books and my affection for Agatha Christie.  Thank you, Folio!

Me, elsewhere...

Quick post today, pointing you in the direction of two posts I've written for other people!

Today I appear on Vulpes Libris as part of their Poetry Week - explaining why I struggle to get on with it!  (I also throw in some of those poems about authors I wrote recently.)

And last week I appeared on the OxfordWords blog, writing about Alanis Morissette. Great fun!

Some Tame Gazelle - postscript

Following on from my review of Some Tame Gazelle, below... I'm too late to enter Thomas's competition for designing your own Barbara Pym cover (it closed on 7 June) and nothing can compare to the beautiful Moyer Bell designs he posts here, but I couldn't resist giving it a go anyway.  And I only have MS Paint to work with...

Teacup image from here

Some Tame Gazelle - Barbara Pym

I wasn't intending to join in with Barbara Pym Reading Week, which I've seen everywhere around the blogosphere (well done Thomas and Amanda!) and, it seems, I might be late to the party - because I hadn't spotted that the week ended on a Saturday.  Oops.  Well, hopefully they'll let me sneak in as a last minute participant, because I have just finished Some Tame Gazelle (1950) - Pym's first novel - because I realised Mum had given it to me, and thus it would qualify for Reading Presently too.

This isn't my first Pym - although it is only my second.  The first one I read, back in 2004, was Excellent Women.  I'd rather expected to love Barbara Pym devotedly, and was a bit nonplussed by my lukewarm response.  I certainly liked it, but it wasn't quite what I was expecting - it was set in London, for a start, which wasn't at all what I envisioned Pym being like.

Some Tame Gazelle, at any rate, is set in the countryside.  That helped me get in the right frame of mind.  It has the same "three or four families in a country village" that Jane Austen recommended as the perfect novelistic topic (for her niece at least, and to many Pym is a figurative niece of Austen) - more emphatically, it reminded me of the close-but-carping rural communities inhabited by Mapp and Lucia in E.F. Benson's series of novels.

The families in question are really households, I suppose.  I shan't write too much about the plot, because there have been so many reviews of Some Tame Gazelle in the blogosphere this week (scroll through Thomas's blog to find all Barbara Pym Reading Week links), but I'll give a brief precis.  Belinda and Harriet Bede are eldely sisters living together, and we see most of the goings-on of the village through Belinda's eyes (although Pym often gives a moment or two from perspective of other characters, which gets a bit dizzying.)  Neither are immune from the arrow of Cupid - the title, indeed, derives from the poet Thomas Bayly:

Some tame gazelle, or some gentle dove:
Something to love, oh, something to love!

 Harriet develops a love for every curate she sees - a love somewhere between maternal and romantic - while Belinda is more constant in her love.  It's for their local vicar, an Archdeacon, who was with Belinda at university, is unaffectionately married, and gives sermon which were 'a long string of quotations, joined together by a few explanations'.  Indeed, a less lovably man would be difficult to create.  He is selfish, snaps at everyone, quotes self-importantly and at length at the drop of a hat, neglects most of his vicarly duties... and yet I get the idea that we are not supposed to think Belinda foolish in her affections.  Is he in the same boat as Jean-Benoit Aubrey, Heathcliff, Rochester, and all manner of other literary romantic heroes whose charms entirely pass me by?  Belinda, on the other hand, is very lovable - as, indeed, is Harriet, despite one being cautious and the other impetuous.

But I suspect Pym is chiefly read for her tone.  As I mentioned, she is frequently mentioned in the same breath as Jane Austen - recently by Thomas himself - and while (from my limited experience of two Pym novels) I would say she has neither Austen's genius nor her tautness, Pym is certainly a worthy successor to Austen's love of irony.  And now, of course, I can find no examples.  But time and again the narrative voice says something which coyly suggests - oh so innocently - that the character is foolish, or doesn't know as much as they pretend, or in some other is not being honest.   This narrator is far too polite to say so outright, and isn't so common as to wink, but... raises her eyebrows a touch.

As for me?  I still like Pym.  I liked Some Tame Gazelle rather more than Excellent Women - it was funny, affectionate, moving without being heavy-handed.  As the son of a vicar, I relished reading about church families, even while it all seemed rather unlikely from my experience. It even felt like the 1930s novels I love so dearly (although published in 1950, I couldn't work out when it was meant to be set - everyone has servants, and levels of propriety are decidedly pre-war, but I suppose these things were both true for some 1950 villages).  But I still don't love Pym.  I love Jane Austen, and (later) E.F. Benson, E.M. Delafield, and other authors who laid out the blueprint Pym picked up - but I still felt as though I were reading at one remove from the originals.  And, of course, even Austen was not an original - if I'd read Pym before I'd read Austen, perhaps I would love Pym more.

If other people did not love Pym so wholeheartedly, then I think I would sound very enthusiastic.  I think Pym is a very good writer, and Some Tame Gazelle is a lovely novel - but it will not be on my top ten for this year, I suspect.  Perhaps I am still too young?  Perhaps I am too familiar with the generation above Pym. When so many people rate her as one of their absolute favourites, even my very-much-liking of Pym feels a little bit like a failure.

What I really do love is the cover, and indeed all the covers of these Virago Pym reprints.  But curiously I can't find any information about the designer or artist on the book jacket - I hope I'm just being dozy, because otherwise very poor show Virago.  Very poor show indeed.