Juxtabook

Juxtabook's Classics Revisited Bookclub

Juxtabook's Classics Revisited Bookclub is a venture that I've been planning for quite a while. I now have an account with a book wholesaler so I can sell new books too. I wanted to combine this with my knowledge of the very long tail of publishing (the one that still swished 100-200 years ago) and offer a subscription Bookclub aimed at solving life's present buying problems!

So, the first Bookclub is one that will focus on less well-known classics: the sort of thing that if you like the Brontes or Dickens will be just your cup of tea, though needless to say those authors won't be on my sending list as their books are too well known. All the books will have had their first publication before 1960. All copies will be new paperbacks.

I'll be offering a choice of 12, 6 or 3 months' subscriptions and the emphasis will be on the fact that this is a present. All the subscriptions will start off with a literary themed present in the parcel along with the book, and with the option of a handwritten card (card not tag) in an envelope with your message, and all the books will be beautifully wrapped, month after month, and then securely packaged. The aim being that your recipient really feels that they are experiencing your present throughout the whole year (or part year if you opt for a shorter subscription).

If you're interested you can see the UK prices here. For other countries I will have to do a quote based on the increased postage. Let me know if you are interested and would like to know the international postage.

There is still time to order a subscription as a Christmas gift and have the first book and literary gift arrive before the big day within the UK. You can of course order for other events and have the gift start in any month of the year. You're also welocme to have the parcels addressed to a couple, not just one person, which can make it more economic.

If you have suggestions that you'd like to add, please let me know.

 

**Edited to add: just in case it isn't 100% clear, although I am best know as a seller of secondhand books, these books supplied through the bookclub will be brand new shiny paperbacks: the contents will be old classics but the books themselves will be new.

Small Kindnesses by Fiona Robyn - free download

Awhile ago I reviewed the utterly charming The Blue Handbag by Fiona Robyn. It has just been re-released with a new title, Small Kindnesses and a lovely new cover.

For today and tomorrow (26th and 27th November) the download is free for Kindle reading click for Amazon UK and Amazon US. You can read more on Fiona's blog. It is well worth getting hold of, as it is the perfect fireside read in this dark, damp weather.

There is a paperback version coming soon too and it will appear here .

New blog: Gifted by Juxtabook

Just a quick post to tell you about a new blog I've started. As I was making notes on books to read with bright 9-14 year olds it seemed silly not to publish them. So I've started Gifted by Juxtabook. The top cohort of children are known as 'gifted and talented' or G&T and schools have a duty to identify these chidlren and address their special need. So, using that title of gifted and talented I've gone with gifted for the name of the blog. These are not full blown reviews but summaries and notes on watch points, as the problem for bright children is often appropriate subject matter and appropriate reading level are out of kilter.

I will be doing my best to keep up with proper reviewing duties on here too!

Bookselling coincidences

Books of like feather often seem to be sold together. Sometimes the reasons for this are obvious. In January 2006 I found myself selling every copy of a compilation of 'Peter Simple' columns that I had. I then realised that the creator, journalist Michael Wharton, had just died. A writer's death often increases the interest in their work so that is not that surprising. Neither was selling out of copies of Gowk Storm by Nancy Brysson Morrison (excellent Canongate edition introduced by Edwin Morgan) after a particularly good radio adaptation, as such serialisation is bound to bring interest.

What is more odd are the days when I seem to sell on a theme. On one occasion every book sold that day had Marx (or Marxist) in the title, and that kind of thing seems to happen more often than you'd think. The oddest was selling, over the course of 24 hours, three different books on different subjects that all had part of the same painting on the cover: "Coalbrookdale by Night", by Philip de Loutherbourg. You can see it here on one of those books, The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age by E. P. Thompson.

 

Another funny one was selling a book to my childhood home village and a few moments later another book to my husband's childhood home village. Neither village is near here, or near each other.

I suppose a mathematician would say that I am misunderstanding coincidence; that books are complex objects, with so many facets (contents, author, themes, illustrators, design, publisher, country of origin, etc), and the customers too, have lots of features, and that in some of these large lists coincidence is more likely than not amongst the many features. And I guess that's true.

So it is very much a moment of folk wisdom when I look at a day's sales and think, 'How odd!' But it happens a lot.

Colour Scheme by Ngaio Marsh

Colour Scheme by Ngaio Marsh was a re-read as I was looking for classic crime to read for a young person's bookclub*. I bought this for myself with a gift voucher from W.H. Smiths in Burnley when I was 15. One of January's great pleasures as a teenager was spending my gift vouchers, preferably on books. I loved Colour Scheme then, as I do now, and it started a long love affair with the crime fiction of New Zealander Ngaio Marsh.

Many of her novels are set in England but this one, written and set during WWII, is set in New Zealand. The Claires are an ineffectual colonial family retired from Indian service to run a health spa amongst the hot springs of New Zealand. The parents are useless with money and very conscious of their class. The grown-up children Barbara and Simon are, in their different ways, very gauche, and lack either the sophistication or the leadership that the usual upper middle class boarding school educated young people might have which leads them both into difficult situations repeatedly. Though perfectly pleasant and hard working, they word hard in the wrong way, worry about the wrong things, and are generally unfit to run their retreat.

Offsetting the pleasant uselessness of the Claires is Mrs Claire's brother Dr Accrington, an eminent doctor in the mould of Maggie Smith's Dowager Countess of Grantham from Downton Abbey. He is one of my favourite characters in detective fiction and has a range of put downs I should learn by heart for future use, though of course I won't.

As well as their usual residents a famous Shakespearean actor and his entourage appear. The arrival of this group and the impending financial collapse of the Claires upset the uneasy stability of the retreat causing tensions to run very high.

The crime strand is two-fold: a resident of the retreat is a suspected spy and shipping is being sunk by enemy craft; and, as a consequence of this, someone is murdered. This is a neat transposition of the country house murder to the primordial landscape of the hot springs, as we have a fairly tight and stable group of suspects in a confined area. Added to this are the local Maoris, some of whom we meet, and one last newcomer to the scene, Septimus Falls.

One of Marsh's strengths is her handling of different of levels of society. Whilst there are inevitably some of the assumptions of the era, on the whole maoris, upper classes, middle classes are treated more as individuals than as types. The New Zealand setting is not given the middle class veneer of the time. It would have been alien to many of the intended readership but Marsh doesn't shy away from this, glorying in the landscape's difference:

Barbara stood for a moment at one of the open windows and stared absently at the freakish landscape. Hills smudged with scrub were ranked against a heavy sky. Beyond them across the hidden inlet, but tall enough to dominate the scene, rose the truncated cone of Rangi's Peak, an extinct volcano so characteristically shaped that it might have been placed in the landscape by a modern artist with a passion for simplified form. Though some eight miles away, it was actually clearer than the nearby hills, for their margins, dark and firm, were broken at intervals by plumes of steam that rose perpendicularly from the eight thermal pools.

The pools become a perverse theatrical set. The veranda of the house overlooks them. It's platform nature might make it look like the stage, but often the inhabitants find themselves the audience, looking instead to the auditorium of the pools as they realise, in a baffled way, that the real action is happening down there. The colonials thought they were observing the landscape but we're left with the sense that the landscape is observing them.

Marsh's background, like that of fellow crime novelist Josephine Tey, was theatrical and this comes over strongly in many of her books. If you like theatre and theatrically themed mysteries like  Nicola Upton's Tey mysteries then I am sure you'll enjoy this. Operating on many levels, and with the marvellous Dr Accrington to amuse, it is a great winter evening read.

Colour Scheme appears to be out of print as a single volume but it is available with a number of other Marsh titles thus A Surfeit of Lampreys / Death and the Dancing Footman / Colour Scheme (The Ngaio Marsh Collection, Book 4) and as a kindle download here .

*Any suggestions for books for very bright pre-teens gratefully received.

Blue Friday by Mike French

I have reviewed a book by Mike French before. That one, The Ascent of Isaac Steward, was wonderful but it was hard, a form of extreme reading both linguistically and psychologically, if you will. By comparison the new offering, Blue Friday,is a whizz of a slick, smooth read satirising the modern quest for the work-life balance with real finesse. I compared his last book to a Michelin starred meal; this one is more like a well executed ballroom dance, light (in the most positive sense), well directed, sharp and elegant.

In 2034 Lieutenant Richard Trent works for the Family Protection Agency, dedicated to stopping overtime, working on weekends, and all of that malarkey. Overtime has become an underground business, and doing it could cost you your life. Pills to make you work, sort of the uppers of overtime, are illegal and being caught carrying them could cause serious trouble, and their effects are feared by the authorities:

In twenty nineteen a man called George Winston smuggled a pack of tablets and company markers into a commuter train and handed them round like sweeties. By Potters Bar half the train were high and conducting brain storming exercises using the black markers on the windows, floor, everywhere.

The draconian hand of the law doesn't just enforce the overtime ban: it preserves family time by enforced viewing of family television (what an appalling thought!) and monitoring family meal-times. And if you don't have a family by 25 then the state will ensure that you do by selecting a spouse by computer for you.

By turning the norms of our own society on their head, and looking at them through the experiences of one nuclear family in hiding, Mike French certainly makes us think about freedom, and how laws to protect, to fence us in from harm, also just simply fence us in. It also shows how freedom fighters often inflict trouble upon their families and that the law will always be an ass when taken to its logical conclusion. What happens when an anti-overtime enforcement agent reaches the end of his shift the second he's about to catch a fugitive? He chooses between letting the fugitive go or becoming one himself.

Although easily marketable as futuristic genre fiction this is much more than that, as you'd expect from a man whose last novel should have come with a PhD for every reader. An entertaining, satisfying and witty read.

Blue Friday has been out for a couple of months as an e-book for the Kindle but is being launched as a paperback at Novacon, the UK's longest-established regional science fiction convention, on Saturday.

Hanging on in there

Yet another post apologising for my blogging silence. This last year has not been good for the booktrade. I know of a number of dealers bringing forward their retirements or otherwise moving away from bookselling. C L Hawley is still here and will live to fight another year, but only because I've spent most of the last year fighting for it, and that has sadly left little room for reading, never mind blogging.

Anyway, catching my breath, I finally have time for a few reviews, so November should see some new posts. First up will be a review of Blue Friday by Mike French which is out very soon.

In the meantime it is easier to find time to tweet or add a few lines to the business Facebook page than write a full post on here. You can always catch-up with me there.

A last word should go to my books newsletter - this is now going out once a month with new stock news and discounts, and we also have a book of the month email with a book discounted for one day only. You can sign up here. It goes without saying that your details will never ever be passed on.

Quebec’s Garden of Decaying Books

I imagine many people will have mixed feelings looking at this, a garden where, "As time passed, the some 40,000 books and wood plates making up the walls of their garden have decayed and dissolved, while new life has also found its way in to the space."

In truth booksellers throw out very many books all the time: over-productions, book club editions, the broken spined, the missing paged, etc. I can see no better use for such books than this natural decay that provides both a work of art and a great environment for insects. I know some people can't bear the thought that books should be thrown out (probably the second most thing common customers, who are selling books to me, tell me) and not everyone will like it but I think it is rather charming. What do you think?

You see read more here.

I can across this via my Facebook timeline but I am afraid I can't remember who to thank!

Reading Lists

I came across this great post on "Reading lists and how to wrangle them". The writer said we could share her great flow chart - very useful if you have just received your first reading lists for uni. Hopefully if you click you can enlarge it. You can read the original post here and follow the author on twitter here.

The Land of Green Ginger by Winifred Holtby

 The Land Of Green Ginger by Winifred Holtby has one of the most startling and memorable heroines that I've had the pleasure to encounter in a long time. For this alone it has been one of my favourite reads of this year.

Joanna is born in South Africa to a missionary father and a romantically minded mother who had longed to travel. Her mother dies immediately and Joanna is sent to live with her spinster aunts back in her mother's native Yorkshire. She inherits her mother's strong imagination and as a child, tripping along with her stately relatives, she sees the end of The Land of Green Ginger a romantically named street in Hull. Her aunts are busy, and Joanna, to whom this seems like fairyland, is disappointed that she cannot explore.

Growing up Joanna is unconventional and says what goes through her imaginative head. With her close friends she plans her education and her travels. With her father dead her links with abroad seem severed and she can't wait to spread her wings as we approach 1914.

Working in a nursing home she meets a young man visiting. Teddy tells her he has "just been given the world to wear as a golden ball". In reality he is more consumptive that romantic and after the rigours of the war Joanna is left with two small children, an invalid husband and an inefficient farm in the wilds of the North Riding that they can't really manage. Her old friends meanwhile are both footloose and travelling abroad.

Joanna's imagination is a blessing but interferes with any practical view of her situation. Her dilapidated farm is described thus:

Joanna used to think that the house was like a ship, and the rolling curve of the moors like great ocean waves. Its windows at night shone like the post-holes of a tramp steamer, ploughing its way up the North Sea in dirty weather. She had never seen ships except in Kingsport Docks and from the esplanade at Hardrascliffe, but she felt sure that they were like this.

The bulk of the novel deals with Joanna's life in Yorkshire, of the social expectations of her as a wife and mother and the community's reaction to her, of their financial difficulties, their marriage difficulties and what happens to a young woman of imagination in such constrained circumstances. Her flights of fancy often take her abroad but in the end abroad comes to her in the form of a dispossessed aristocratic Hungarian they are persuaded to take in as a  much needed paying guest. In the hands of another writer we might be able to see what was coming here, but this is a Winifred Holtby novel, and women are not so predictable.

Joanna's trials and tribulations are largely specific to her era but the feeling of unfulfillment and the loss of the imaginative life when bogged down in the mundane everyday things is universal. In truth though the book is not as strong as might be plot-wise and loses its way here and there in a rather fairytale way. However Joanna stays in the mind and I know she will do so long after the book is shut, even more so than Sarah Burton in the wonderful South Riding . Throughout the book has tons of charm without being saccharine. A funny kind of modernist fairytale on the transformative power of imagination, in its own way this book is a little gem.

Keeping Up

For the last couple of months we have had our old website still running in tandem with the new one. The time has come to shut the old one for good so if you haven't done so already you might like to bookmark the new one which is here. I am keeping my old email address but apparently something happens behind the scenes as hosting moves which might mean there is a bit of a break in service so if I don't reply to an email please either try again, or contact me via the blog here or twitter or through the new site.

A reminder than you can also like C L Hawley Books on Facebook. Like the Juxtabook blog it is not full of me selling my business (she says, whilst talking about her business!), rather it is hopefully a useful mix of book news and views. As I mentioned on my post about my writing I find writing very hard so it is easier to find time to fit in a tweet or a Facebook post than a full blog post.

And finally to keep with with news on my business (and this is very focused on my bookselling and on literary criticism and biography rather than general news or reviews) you can sign up for my bookshop newsletter here.

Forgotten Letters: An Anthology of Literature By Dyslexic Writers, edited by Dr Naomi Folb

The book I am about to review is by dyslexic writers. As a dyslexic myself I felt it was time to 'out' my writing, and so for the first time (and probably the last!) I am going to review this book as myself - me the dyslexic, with none of the usual checks and strategies to make it easy for you. Easy for you because writing conventionally is such a strain for me. From here on there are no more spells checks, proof reading, reading it out loud or backwards, leaving it 48 hours in the hope that I will 'see' my own errors with a bit of time passing, or asking my "normal" literate husband to check my work. After the colon is my unamended style:

Forgotten Letters: An Anthology of Literature By Dyslexic Writers, edited by Dr Naomi Folb is a collections of poems and essays by writers ho are dyslexic. I met the editor Nim Folb on twitter abut eight months ago. She runs RASP - rebel against spelling publishing - which specilisies in publishing deslixic writers and is dysleci herslef. We exchanged a few amused emals. Nim was entertiained by the idea of a dyslecic bookseller and I by the idea of a dslexic publsier.

Nim has a wonderfully positve line on dyslexia and has no time for cures or other attitudes that suggest we need fixing. I have struggled with writing, and especially spelling all my life, and as you can see have troubl with it to this day despite two English degrees, a post grad teching qualification, 5 years teahcing experience (two as whole school literatcy coordinator) and 8+ years as an assistant examiner for th GCSE literature paper. My main probem is sequencing: letters withing words, words withing sentences, sentences within paragraphs and ideas with an essay or indded a blog book review. Normally writng is very hard for me and takes a long time. I have a lot of stregegies to cope but they are time conduming. his oine reaosn why I trouble fitting blogging in- getting my prose fir for public sondumption take so much linger than I guess it doe sfor most of you. The one things I envy 'normal' people is the ease at which they can produce something so crisp and reable. I am guessing tht quite few people have given up readingt his already, but it is incredibly liberating for me.

So, it must be incredibly libberating for dysleic writers to be able to submit to a publish whos says: "no need to use ‘spell check’ or nondyslexic grammar rules. RASP is more interested in dyslexic creativity than the ability to conform to external ‘standards’." Nim, as you;ll see from ehr site, can like me, make a show of largely conforming to the external standard but frankly it is like speaking another language!

Forgotten Letters, to continue the refreshing theme, is a very resfeshing read. it is not as hard to read as this probably is for you, as many of the sydleci writers do conform. better known names included are Benjamin Zepaniah, Billy Childish (the painter0), Sally Gardener etc. The poems and the essays are moving and funny and show the wide veriation in experience and talent of these writers. It makes wonderufl book for dipping into whether you any interest in literacy or not, but it is amust read for a teacher, parent or employer.

It has been long argued that dyslexia is not simple a disbility it is a differnt ability. I've never been anything else so it is difficult to comment but my husband maintains I think in very peculiar ways. My very self-employment as a books seller (and Nim's as apublisher) might be held as typcial of the dyslei who can think outsife the usual box. If you intereste din teh subject of what dyslecis can do rather then what they can't the Proust and the Squid,. which cover the science history of how humand learn to read is also veyr good on the dslecic gift. Fate throuh me two lifelong conditions. I suffer from Hypermobility Syndroem. I *suffer* from that, but I merely am dysleic and am quite happy being so. It is wonderful to see dyslxia so postivley protrayed. It is a bit of an effort  to write but I am not uduly bothered by it. I never wake up thinking I wish I wasn't dyslexic.

Having praised all that positiveit do I really thnk we dyslecixs shoudln't try and confirm? No. On ethe whoel I thnk we hve to - written communicvtion is too hard with out the ttempt. But it might be nie for thse who are nrmal to see just how much effort we have to put int o communicationg with you! We hope you appreicate it! So, if your a dys;eic teenager who has stumbled on this I'm afriad yI still think you need to learn strategies tha work for you. there is no way roudn working harder in thend.

And it is a very speedt post for me this - I#d normally spend an hour sorting the above out! So, Forgotten Letters: An Anthology of Literature By Dyslexic Writers (I cut and pasted that can you tell??), come with a more than usually personal commendation from me, but don't buy it becuse you feel sorry, or even just curios, buy it because it is actually a damn good read. And that's no more surpising than a sylexic English teacher, or bookseller or publisher!

What to read over summer

I can across this amazing flowchart via a Facebook post by The London Library. From teach.com it intends to help teens find quality fiction to fit their tastes and help stem the academic regression that happens during the long summer break from school. Anyone feeling the need to brush up on classic or contemporary literature, fiction or non-fiction, might find it useful.

Via Teach.com and USC Rossier Online

The Book of Summers by Emylia Hall

The Book of Summers by Emylia Hall is a review copy which is why I read it. I would have never have been drawn to such a saccharine cover otherwise. It's external sweet shop tones belie the rather tough well written interior however, so I am very glad to have been given a copy.

The book begins with Beth Lowe, a young professional in London, living in a flat and awaiting her father on a visit from Devon. He brings with him a parcel for Beth from Hungary with a letter telling Beth her mother has died and a photograph album displaying the photographs of seven consecutive summers of her late childhood. The Book of Summers is structured around this album as Beth tells us the stories of those summers, of her parents' marital breakdown, of her own relationships with both her mother and father and of her growing-up and falling in love with a Hungarian boy Tamas.

The album idea and series of flash backs are, like the cover design, rather overworked features of some forms of genre fiction (Chick lit? Holiday reading? Maeve Binchy chest flatteners? Take your pick) and at this point I'd have been wondering what the heck the publicist thought they were doing sending this to me had not I been immediately enchanted with both Hall's prose and the protagonist Beth. Not, in the end, that I particularly like Beth (she is self-focused, juvenile, and full of misplaced anger and loyalties) but that in itself already lifts this novel away from what it first appears. Unlike typical holiday reading you need not identify with the main character, nor like her at all; she is too real, and like a colleague or a neighbour one just accepts.

Throughout the book has so much to recommend it. The handling of the troubled teenage years is done beautifully and if I am frustrated by Beth's rather arrested emotional development, then the events of her youth and the progression from happy child to surly adult is clean, clear and believable. The descriptions of life in Devon versus Hungary are lively, colourful and full of believable details. Relationships too are handled well, believable but not too tidy.

In the end I found myself thoroughly enjoying the book. As a bookseller I should know better than to judge a book by its cover. But what of the reader who picks this up seeking holiday reading? Well, it is a lovely read but it also has a very dark heart, and it is one that darkens as you finish the book and think about the events over the next days. On a sunbed I'd have been rather un-nerved by this. The colours of this book, despite the summers of the title, seem rather more autumnal to me. It has pretensions to literary fiction but it is at the more entertaining end of that spectrum. To me it is a warm throw and open fire kind of book, to mull over as the nights draw in.

All in all a very readable and worthwhile book, rather oddly packaged.

The Book of Summers by Emylia Hall is due out in paperback this week.

New in stock

A recent book buying trip has meant we have rather more fiction in stock than usual. I thought you might like an early peep ...

These copies of Philip Larkin's novels Jill and A Girl in Winter, in matching red and grey Faber paperback editions are rather tempting me. There a bit faded to the spine but I still wish I could keep them!

Another nice pair are these David Storey novels in dust wrappers. Flight into Camden, which won the 1963 Somerset Maugham Award and was Storey's second novel, Radcliffe was his third. Storey is best known for his first novel This Sporting Life, about a rugby league player, which was filmed staring Richard Harris.

We have a few new works in translation in stock including these: Memoirs of a Korean Queen by Lady Hong and The Swing and Other Stories by Vera Cacciatore.

Other new fiction includes this nice hardback in dust wrapper of The Bell by Iris Murdoch which is a very early printing but sadly not a first edition, and a Virago edition of The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West.

We also have these less well known works by Christopher Isherwood and Wilkie Collins. Basil by Collins is in the old style Oxford World Classics series, and A Meeting by the River, here in a Macmillan paperback, is a novel set in India.

Also of interest are this volume of short stories and other odds and ends by Mary Shelley, which is a substantial volume rather nicely illustrated, and this UK first edition of Seek My Face by John Updike.

We also have a range of other items in by early to mid-twentieth century writers, in both paperback and hardback, plus quite a few from Heinemann's African Writer Series. They should be catalogued some time in the next month when they can be viewed on our new website! Should you wish to jump the gun however please just drop me an email.

A New Bookselling Website and a Reading Round-Up

Well, it has been rather a while... and I have really missed blogging. The business has been keeping me busy and one of the reasons for this you can see here - ta daa!!... the new Clhawley.com. This is my new bookselling site thanks to Daniel at Eviam. Most indie booksellers in the world of used and out-of-print books have online shops powered by an American company that used to be independent but is now owned by A... well you can guess who. I have one of those sites too, but I have been looking for something brighter and speedier and easier to use for sometime. My new site is by an independent British developer which, as I am sure you'll agree, is rather more in keeping with being an indie bookseller in the first place! It seems to be running very nicely so far, but if you notice any niggles please let me know.

Whilst working I have of course been reading so by way of a catch-up here are a few thoughts on some of my recent favourites:

The Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth is subtitled 'A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language' and that is exactly what it is.  We potter along with Forsyth teasing out the meanings, origins and associations old and new for each word before progressing to another word, like a word-association game with a PhD. Part linguistic treasure chest and part history book it is a delight from start to finish, not that you ever do really finish. I keep picking it up and going round again. I know quite a bit about words, in part because of my academic background, in part because my father collects them like other people collect stamps (actually he collects stamps too), but there was plenty new to me here. Having waded through Paradise Lost as an under-grad I closed my eyes and my mind, I think, to the linguistic richness, and the section on new words by Milton was the one that amazed me the most. How did I miss all that!

I am delighted to see from Icon's catalogue that plopped through my door last week that Mark is doing it all again in the The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt Through the Lost Words of the English Language . As many of you no doubt know you can follow Mark via his blog and on twitter.

I have been reading some really good crime fiction recently. Favourites include the Inspector Banks series by Peter Robinson. Some of the titles have been filmed recently for the ITV series with Stephen Tomkinson , which I enjoyed, but I wish I had found the books first as they are so much better. They are set round here (Yorkshire Dales) and I am very much enjoying the local flavour.

My favourite crime fiction read so far this year though is The Stepmother by Simon Tolkien. Strangely out-of-print I thought this was an utterly engrossing book on both plot and character levels. An MP's second wife is accused of conspiring to murder his first wife setting her husband and his son against each other at the trial. Part conventional detective story, and part coming of age novel, I think The Stepmother captures the difficult relationships perfectly. Tolkien is a lawyer and much of the novel is courtroom based giving it a 'Witness for the Prosecution' layer, but it is so much more than that. I will be hunting down Simon Tolkien's other books. And, yes, he is of that family.

Edited to add: Simon Tolkien is the grandson of J. R. R. Tolkien, and the eldest son of Christopher Tolkien. I've discovered that the reason that The Stepmother appears to be out of print is that it has been renamed Final Witness and it is very much still available in that edition. There are two subsequent books too and you can read more on the author's own website here.

Last up for this little round-up is Promised Land: A Northern Love Story by Anthony Clavane. This is a wonderful book that I can see myself reading and re-reading. It is about football, but that is not the half of it and you should not let the football put you off. Promised Land is a tripart history telling, in lovely old-fashioned narrative style, the story of the arrival and rise and then dispersal of the Jewish community in Leeds; the arrival and rise of Leeds as a large commercial centre and newly minted city and its subsequent fall into depression with the other industrial towns of the north of England, and then its further yo yo economic fortunes; and the arrival and rise (and fall), (and rise), (and fall...) of Leeds United FC.

The author is a former history teacher turned sports reporter so he is well qualified on all counts. He is also a Leeds fan, which if you support any other club can prove to be irritating when he lauds the club known to the rest of us as 'Dirty Leeds'. In that sense the non-football-fan will enjoy the read more! It is however a pretty balanced account, often funny as it details the peculiarities of the managers (Don Revie getting a gypsy in to pee on the corner flags to lift a curse??), and quips that the Jewish support was so large that the Rabbi had them in the morning and Revie in the afternoon, and that's before we start on Brian Clough.

Overall it is a wonderful piece of history covering families, industry, and the wider socio-economic ups and downs of Britain. Much of what happens in football - racism, financial mismanagement, social cohesion, urban planning, stadium architecture - parallels important parts of British life as a whole. I found the chapters on the late Victorian and early twentieth century especially engaging, and if you find the social history of novels of that era fascinating then there is much here for you. Important and interesting, this is definitely not a book to ignore because you don't like football.

The Composites

I've just come across this site The Composites via SimonNRicketts on twitter and I thought you might like it. It is images created using law enforcement composite sketch software and descriptions of literary characters. Which is to say the author's physical description of the character is fed into the software and the resulting image published. I rather liked Tess from Tess of the d'Urbervilles but Edward Rochester (scroll right to the bottom) looks like the missing link. Pinkie Brown and Keith Talent are good ones. You can suggest characters for inclusion too.

Newly in for the TBR pile

My biggest influx of books for my own use (as opposed to stock) is always in December and January. Despite living in a bookshop my favourite presents are still books and with a birthday and Christmas in those months the TBR pile is always teetering at this time of year. I thought I'd share a few of the titles with you.

Firstly, in honour perhaps of Euro 2012, Mr J had a football theme to his present. I do love football (this is not one of those examples of weird male present buying) and these come highly recommended:

J. L. Carr is a favourite with many bloggers I know and I've wanted a copy of How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the F.A.Cup for ages. This is the lovely Quince Tree Press editon. Quince Tree was Carr's own publishing firm and is these days run by his son.

Dirty Leeds is Robert Endeacott's fictional account of the life of a long suffering Leeds United fan and the history of the club through the Don Revie era. This is the first of a trilogy and I am looking forward to it. I know Leeds, the city, well and very much enjoyed David Peace's The Damned Utd . I am NOT a Leeds United fan though and it will be interesting to see if this book can hold the attention of someone whose footballing heart lies at the far west of the M62.

Promised Land: A Northern Love Story by Anthony Clavane is also about Leeds United and strictly speaking it is no longer on the TBR pile, except that it was so good I want to read it again! Fascinating throughout you don't have to like football, and you certainly don't have to like LUFC, to think this is a cracking read. A review will follow soon.

Mr J received one football book of his own The Anatomy of England: A History in Ten Matches by Jonathan Wilson and I might be having a read of that once he's finished. There'll be plenty of reading time once England are knocked out of the Euros early... I have had a sneaky peak and I loved Wilson's description of trying to finish a finals paper on Old English at super speed so he could make it to watch a match. Rushing your Anglo-Saxon translations, now that's dedication!

Away from football much pleasure is anticpiated from these:

Spurious by Lars Iyer was a present from an old friend Anna from 6th form days. Lars Iyer is a philosopher and this is his first novel though he has another, Dogma out later this year too. Anna reminded me that I met the author over 20 years ago when she brought him to my parents' house for a meal. She and I cooked the meal, my first ever entertaining, and I still have a photograph somewhere of our 18 year olds selves and me with long black hair as opposed to the mid-length stripy badger coloured version I sport these days. A lovely present to get, though a bit nerve-racking in the 'I hope I like it' sense.

The next two I dropped hints for (Mr J is very good with book hints). Steampunk? Well why not? There's a time for everything and this year seemed as good as any for steampunk.This anthology inventively titled Steampunk is edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer.

The Richard Russo, Straight Man, is one I read a glowing review of on someone's blog and now I can't remember where. The majority of my bookbuying is stimulated by Cornflower, Gaskella and ShelfLove but I can't find the Russo reviewed on those sites, so I am afraid I don't know who to credit for this. I remember leaving a comment on whichever blog it was so if you know it was your review please let me know so I can link to it.

Next up are a couple of review copies. I don't get many review copies: 90% of the books that I review I buy new, have in stock secondhand, or borrow from the library. These two I am pleased to get however.

Of the two I am most drawn to The Little Shadows by Marina Endicott. Described as "Little Women meets Water for Elephants" it is the story of three sisters making their way in the world of vaudeville before and during the First World War. It makes me think of the film Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? though that's not very Little Women.

Another comparision strapline is being bandied about for Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway, in this case "Dickens meets Mervyn Peake", and again how appealing is that? A sneaky pre-read suggests it is going to be just as frenetic, exciting and inventive as other reviews suggest.

And lastly this is a book I bought myself as a birthday treat.

The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English Since 1950 compiled by Carmen Callil and Colm Toibin was reviewed by Dovegreyreader last week. She made it sound very tempting so I let myself be tempted. Despite two degrees and twenty years working with books and readers there are still many, many books in here that I've not read, or thought of reading, or read so long ago I've forgotten. The page per book format feels very luxurious and I enjoyed all the reference sections at the back - gosh it used to feel like this before blogs and wikipedia, browsing a reference book by the fire with a cuppa... I shall be returning to this frequently and it is NOT going to help my ever growing TBR pile one  bit. To be honest though, that's how I like it!

Juxtabook talking Charles Dickens and favourite books on Radio Leeds

I was taken aback by a phone call at 8.20 this morning asking me to go on Radio Leeds to talk about Dickens and my favourite books. With the school run to do before my allotted timeslot I didn't have time to worry about it too much. I had just scampered back through the door when the producer rang and we were off.

So here, in an internet first, the dulcet tones of Juxtabook are available to listen to for the next 7 days on the show dated 07/02/2012 here- I am on after about 24 minutes. I was more nervous listening to it afterwards than during the chat but apart from thinking that I say "lovely" too often it is not too bad for my first ever live interview. I fluffed my opportunity to publicise my website by stumbling over the words at that point so in case you missed it, my site is here!

Teeny tiny Red House giveaway

This post must be a contender for the tiniest ever giveaway. Going through my Mary Taylor things I discovered I have duplicates of a couple of postcards of The Red House and leaflets about Taylor and the Brontes. Bearing in mind the tiny number of visitors the house gets I am guessing most of you have never been and if The Red House does close then you'll never get the chance so it seemed right to offer these few things:

The stained glass postcard is the an image of the glass described in Shirley (the house features as 'Briarmains' in Shirley).

If you'd like them the just leave your name in the comments before the end of Wednesday. If there is more than one of you I'll draw names out of a hat.