Juxtabook

Reading Round-up

Like most purveyors of used books I can safely say 2011 has not been one of the best. In order to generate enough sales I have to upload new stock like crazy as most sales come from the last couple of hundred books one catalogues. Doing this is keeping things ticking over for my business but it does mean that I have been rubbish at blogging this year. I also have not had so much time for reading or for commenting on your blogs for which I am sorry. Anyway, here is a little look at what I have been reading recently.

The Ascent of Isaac Steward by Mike French is the most peculiar, luxuriously grotesque and enchanting of books. Isaac Steward has lost his wife and sons, he can't remember how or why and if he does what will the knowledge do to him and how will he ever find a way out of the inevitable abyss? What this densely compact novel does is take us through the psychology of grief and denial in the most weird and inventive ways. Nothing is quite as it seems and the parameters of the story serve to disorientate the reader. Wth a situation so extreme only an extreme handling of language will do. Words are very much Mike French's tools and what he constructs is not quite like anything else I've ever read.

To be honest the dense richness of this Michelin starred linguistic meal is such that I struggled to deal with it over the first chapters. Once I stopped trying to consume it greedily and treated it as a tasting menu, small courses, one at a time, then I enjoyed it immensely. There is no denying that this book is hard, and hard in a way that so few books, even those of great literary merit, are now. But why should we always expect that easy-greedy read? I am pleased that a book so evidently defying all marketing genres found a publisher. I read a chapter a day and it was like being a student again. The pleasure in deciphering a chapter each morning was the same I once got from tackling a difficult poem. Neither this style of prose, nor poetry, are my reading mediums of first choice but I thank Mike French for reminding me why hard is good, and I should try it more often. The Ascent of Isaac Steward is a real neo-modernist triumph and in a nihilistic world is definitely worth your time and patience. There is a quote on the back of my copy by R. N. Morris that describes it as 'reminiscent of the surrealist literary experiments of James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake but blessedly readable' and I would agree with that. This work is a literary mountain but it is a perfectly climbable one, and boy, what a view.

Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky by Patrick Hamilton has been on my bedside heap for ages and I've had twitter conversations with several people about it. It has taken me absolutely ages to read, because of my time constraints, but has been a total pleasure from start to finish. Hamilton is best known for his plays Gaslight and Rope, the second of which may or may not have been murdered by Hitchcock for the film, depending on your point of view. In Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky you get three novels for the price of one as it was originally published as three separate works: 'The Midnight Bell', 'The Siege of Pleasure' and 'The Plains of Cement'. The overlapping narratives deal with the lives of pub waiter Bob, prostitute Jenny, and plain but good-hearted bar maid Ella. Bob is an aspiring writer with the goodly sum of £80 saved in the bank, he falls for Jenny and the narrative leads us on a will-they/won't-they pathos laden jaunt through those twenty thousand streets, and ordinary workaday London. Hamilton's ability to build a scene and people it with characters that could step off the page is very filmic in quality, and explains his best known successes. On the page not every manoeuvre is totally successful but Bob, Ella and Jenny are beautifully drawn and many of the pub scenes are hilarious. It would make a wonderful screen play and there is a BBC adaptation. I have dropped heavy hints to Santa on that one. All in all it's made me want to read Hamilton's complete works. What a joy if they're anything like this.

My last little treasure for this post is set quite close in time and place to Hamilton's work: Crewe Train by Rose Macaulay. I read and loved The Towers of Trebizond by Macaulay when I had it in stock and kept meaning to extricate it from the business for myself but never got round to it and last week I sold it! The horror! I shall have to buy it now, alongside the delightful Crewe Train. The world it depicts couldn't be more different to that of Twenty Thousand Streets. The heroine Denham is very much in the noble savage mode. Having had a free range childhood under the care of an indolent and careless father in the middle of nowhere (specifically Andorra) she finds herself living in her aunt's home in the heart of literary London. The story of her attempts to adjust and deal with the word-driven people around her is a timely one for those of us who live in a fiction-fuelled frenzy. Denholm shows just how we irritate the unconverted. I love Macaulay's writing and the sense that she keeps the reader at the end of a yoyo string, pulling us in and allowing us to see just as much of her creation as she chooses before she drops us below the line of vision again. One always gets the feeling that her books are like icebergs with so much more we can't see: omitted and deleted scenes that she won't be making available for the DVD. A bizarre and delightful book, the sort to read and re-read.

Portable books

Books are fairly portable, when you carry them one at a time. I can see the point of an e-reader for multiple copies however. Years ago being pocket sized was a regularly advertised virtue and the scores of Everyman and little hardback Oxford World Classics, like this one, that pass through my hands each year are testament to their continued popularity. I do still get the odd book search requests for "any edition so long as it will go in a pocket" usually from older gentlemen, younger ones I guess are all kindled-up.

Anyway, are pocket books fighting back? Hodder and Stoughton have flipped the text through 90 degrees and with thin pages and hardback covers come up with these little portable flip books. What do you think?

New Stock in: Decadence, T S Eliot and modernism, the thirties and forties

I've uploaded a lot of new stock over the last few weeks. Amongst the literary criticism there's quite a few items on the 1890s and decadence:

We've also quite a few things by and about Arthur Symons in stock.

Also newly in are some more items on T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound:

 

I've sold a lot from this Pound / Eliot shelf of late and am always interested in buying more books on these writers should any of you be having a clear out.

We've a also quite a few books in that focus on the literature of the thirties or the forties, as well as a range of books on key writers of those deacdes such as W. H. Auden:

 

Crewe Train by Rose Macaulay #fridayreads

Denham, lounging along Charing Cross Road, jingled the coins in her pocket and decided to go again to the Zoo. She was luckier, she felt, than Audrey, wasting a fine afternoon among those awful books. What a trade it was, increasing the number of books in a world already overstocked with them! As bad as parents, who increased the number of people. There must be millions of books already that people hadn't read. If they must read, let them read those.

From Crewe Train by Rose Macaulay, which is a cracking read.

The Youngest Miss Ward: A Jane Austen Entertainment by Joan Aiken

The Youngest Miss Ward (A Jane Austen entertainment) by Joan Aiken is a spikey offshoot of Mansfield Park. The plot envisages a younger sister to the three Miss Wards (Lady Bertram, Mrs Norris and Mrs Price), Harriet. Harriet is quirky combination of sensitive and practical, alternately ignored or actively disliked by her sisters and father. She is shipped off to relatives in Portsmouth as a young teen and experiences a Fanny Price like existence in the house of her uncle and becomes very close to one of her cousins (like Fanny) whilst in tandem becoming close to the charismatic utopian Lord Camber (oddly more like Jane Eyre). The denouement, when it comes, is unexpected in both its contrast with previous emotional sway of the book and one's prejudices of how a plot should run; it is no less satisfying for that however.

Hatty's trials are as many and varied as the literary references as at times we seem to be channelling Wild Sargasso Sea, or Jane Eyre with a misty, twisty quality of fairy tale. Like Fanny (and Jane) unfairness and indignity awaits Hatty in bucket loads, but also like Jane Eyre it is the fate of other female characters that is truly shocking. The locking-up of mad women, emotional and practical abandonment of children, the embittered spinsters and fallen wives who are cast off in disgrace are many and varied.

The emotional landscape of The Youngest Miss Ward (A Jane Austen entertainment) is wild and untamed and in that it is far more the gothic offshoot of a Bronte novel than an Austen one, until the end when things right themselves with an engaging neo-classical neatness, leaving one feeling that perhaps one had been reading a mock-gothic novel more akin to Northanger Abbey or Nightmare Abbey after all. Utterly bizarre but well worth your time, and far and away the best Austen sequel I have come across.

Mary on the Houses of Parliament - a guest post by Roberta Wedge

Roberta Wedge has been campaigning for sometime to get the first memorial to Mary Wollstonecraft erected. As a teenage fan of Mary I think this is a wonderful idea. MW's views on women and on education formed the basis for some of my earliest grown-up thinking.

Roberta explains how the campaign is currently going:

There is so much going on that I hardly know where to start. Mary Wollstonecraft will be beamed across the Thames onto the Houses of Parliament in the early dusk of November 16. The rumour that I quashed about the abseiling lesbians and the whisky chocolate cake is as nothing to the glorious truth: a gigantic projection will wow the crowds from 4-6pm on Wednesday, and will pop up all over the media in the days to come. This is the kick-off to serious fundraising for the Mary on the Green campaign I wrote of last month.

Another piece of good news is that the NatWest CommunityForce scheme has, as a result of your support, awarded £6275 to the campaign to raise a memorial to Our Lady. That is a serious kick-start.

My address to the Fawcett Society last week went well, and next week will be adapted for the Newington Green Action Group's annual Friends Evening. All welcome! As indeed all are welcome to the Girlie Show, a Mary on the Green fundraiser to be held at Snooty Fox, a pub in Newington Green. Somehow I think the overlap between the two events will be ... choice. Possibly only me. That's OK.

If you recognise Mary Wollstonecraft's contribution to the life you lead now, I invite you to consider whether and how you might wish to get involved in the campaign to create a sculpture in her honour.  Remember, there is no substantial memorial to her, anywhere in the world.  (There is a lecture, a lecture hall, a hidden house, and several plaques, but nothing really big and tangible.) Your contributions would be valuable. If you can, please donate. Aside from money, there is much else to do: we need lots of people to spread the word, for example. (On Twitter, look out for and use the hashtag #marybigben.)  If you have other ideas of how you might help, please let me know, in the comments or by email.

You can read Roberta's blog here and follow her on twitter here.

Libraries Will Survive

Despite their inability to dance in time, I'm sure they're darn good librarians and we'd all endorse the sentiments...

Via @Lutonbookworm on twiter.

Shakespeare First Folios: on display in Washington DC, Stratford-upon-Avon, London and ... Skipton

Strange but true: our little market town has one of only four publicly displayed Shakespeare first folios. Though they've had it for many years they have only recentl got the funds to deal with the delicate task of displaying it. Our local museum, Craven Museum, has put up some film about it after Sir Patrick Stewart visited Skipton's Shakespeare First Folio last week and I thought you'd like to see:

New for the TBR pile

Congratulations to Gaskella on her blogaversary and thank you very much Annabel for the copy of The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt which was part of her anniversary giveaway.

 

 

 

Next in is a review copy of The Red House by Christopher Bowden. I very much enjoyed his previous books The Blue Book and especially The Yellow Room and so I am  very much looking forward to this.

How to make time for reading Leslie Caron style

RobAroundBooks has a post on his five reading rules which help get the most out of the teetering TBR pile that most of us have. One of his rules is to make the most of every opportunity to read. This reminded me of one of my favourite film moments: Leslie Caron reading whilst doing ballet in An American In Paris . This is not something, sadly, that I am able to replicate though I did gamely have a go at the splits  (without the book) after last watching the film. Needless to say that, pushing 40 and over 20 years after I last tried I couldn't do them, and actually I was just relieved to have received no permanent injury from the attempt!

Anyway, here's the lovely Leslie Caron. For the impatient, the reading bit starts about 1m30s into the clip. I love the way she idles against the pillar with one foot above her head...

BTW, I couldn't find an embedable clip with the proper soundtrack unfortunately.

Like Bees to Honey by Caroline Smailes

Gosh I don't think I have a font size big enough to do justice to just how lovely this book is. Bereaved and depressed, Nina leaves her family in the UK and goes home to Malta. Having become pregnant out of wedlock years earlier her Maltese family have cut her off. She goes to make peace with, quite literally, the ghosts of her past.

The basic mechanics of plot are quite simple so this review is confined to the sumptuous interiors: of Nina, of Malta, of the Maltese houses and churches, and of the ghosts that haunt Nina. Nor am going to quote anything as this book is a meal not a snack.

In Like Bees to Honey Caroline Smailes has written a sweet and emotional book that manages never to be sentimental or cloying, and when your themes are death, redemption, love, homecomings and food, that's quite a trick to pull off. It is beautifully written with luscious descriptions of food and buildings, mixed with fluttering ribbons of Maltese speech, and layered with the psychological detritus of letters and memoir and flights of fancy. Throughout there is word and syllable level repetition that gives the otherwise limpid narrative a reassuringly solid and material form balancing dark and light as beautifully aurally as the twists and turns of the narrative balance thematically. Every page is quite the most gorgeous experience.

This is the kind of book that makes you want to rush out and buy eight copies to wrap in tissue and ribbon and place on plates as place setting at Christmas. It is that gorgeous. The food would probably go cold though. Enjoy!

You can visit Caroline Smailes' website here  and her twitter profile here.

Books wanted

Getting back into reading reviews on blogs has started the wish list growing again. I thought I'd share a few with you:

 Straight Man by Richard Russo reviewed as part of a rather nice meme by Yvette.

The Heat Of The Day by Elizabeth Bowen reviewed by Harriet.

There's lovely reminder of Richmal Crompton's William series over on Stuck-in-a-Book. I usually have a copy or two in stock but not at the moment so any re-reading will require a purchase. If, like me, you are looking to buy a Just William book can I recommend the equally lovely Stella and Rose's Books or Peakirk Books.

Have you any blogging reviews you'd recommend?

 

Skipton Puppet Festival 2011

In a few weeks it will be time for the 4th international Skipton Puppet Festival. This is a wonderful weekend of art, drama and fun. The paid-for shows are mainly aimed at family audiences though there are some adult shows in the evening too, and throughout the weekend Skipton town centre is buzzing with free shows and events from the Friday onwards. The atmosphere last time was amazing.

 

There are 70 performances in 8 venues over 3 days, various workshops, an exhibition of exquisitely carved puppets and for the first time a Community Parade. The performers come from all over the UK as well as France, Finland, Hungary and Germany. The puppet exhibition is in the Town Hall which is also home to a Shakespeare First Folio. The free shows include the traditional Punch and Judy as well as the more avant-garde.

If you are anywhere near Yorkshire on the weekend of 23rd-25th September then you should book yourself some shows (many shows sell out in advance), borrow a child if you have to, or just come and sample the atmosphere. The workshops are £1 and the ticketed shows are mainly £5 (though there are some at £2.50) which together with all the free shows means that it is a really value for money day out.

 

You can download the festival programme and find a booking form here and follow them on twitter here.

 

Reading Round-up

So what have I been reading whilst up to my eyes in work and rampaging 7 year old girls on their school holidays? First up is the delightful Nimrod's Shadow . Part of the Fiction Uncovered promotion, which is how I spotted it, it is a satifyingly enigmatic read. The time slip narrative moves between the Edwardian and present day and begins in realistic enough fashion before tumbling you into flights of melodramatic maddness. Chris Palling pulled off the trick of making the historical part seem solid and real and modern part ethreal and elusive. Taking the "now" and defamiliarising it to such an extent brings the Edwardian artist closer to us in a way now ammount of realistic historically accurate writing could have done on its own. The lovely story, delightful dog, and fantastic narrtive fireworks, all mean this has gone straight to my re-read pile.

Passion by Jude Morgan was even better than the wonderful The Taste of Sorrow. Like The Taste of Sorrow it is a multifaceated fictional treatment of intertwining literary lives, in this case Lady Caroline Lamb, Augusta Leigh, Mary Shelley and Fanny Brawne, the WAGS of the Romantics, so to speak. Like the Bronte inspired novel Morgan again amazes with his ability to keep so many complex characters both real and different. Caro Lamb is rendered Mad, Bad and Dangerous to know through a wonderful and increasingly rambling and self-deluded first person narrative. Fanny Brawne is as strong pert and 'minx' like as you could hope and her relationship with the doomed Keats is nonetheless tragic for knowing what will happen in the end. I willed Keats to live as I always do but as poor Fanny discovers will alone is never enough. Mary Shelley suffers long and hard and I got lots of enjoyment from disliking Shelley. Augusta Leigh, Byron's half sister and possible lover, was the one I knew least about, but she was perhaps my favourite by the end.

Despite the huge undertaking of creating realistic psychological portraits of four extremely different women Morgan further excels himself with strong supporting cast: the poets themselves are beautifully drawn, William Godwin is neatly knocked off his Radical pedestal, Annabella Milbanke is not so much a portrait as a chilling self-focused carving in marble. Most delightful of all are the childhoods of the four women, where the earlier Romantic poet showed the "Growth of a Poet's Mind" from his childhood environment in The Prelude, Morgan shows how the women of these later poets were equally formed by their early lives. Utterly enchanting from start to finish I have not the teeniest quibble with a single syllable of Passion.

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Conan Doyle was also one of my summer reads. Rather a murky misty atmosphere and hardly a beach book but apt for the damp and chilly place yorkshire has been over the last month. Spending time with Mr Holmes is always a pleasure despite the many and varied faults and I enjoyed this immensely. The dog, needless to say, is less engaging than little Nimrod above. I read it in Leopard's Collected Editions with an introduction and an afterword by John Fowles. I am not knocked-out by Fowles' fiction but his critiques here were spot on. Amazon's page say in the "Product Description" that the introduction is by Trevor McDonald. Ignore them they know nothing! 

Hopefully normal blogging service is about to be resummed

It's been so long since I blogged that I had almost forgotten my login details. The school holidays plus being away plus the annual stock take have taken their toll on my time and I haven't even been reading blogs never mind writing my own posts. I daren't turn my blog reader on; it will be swamped. Daughter is back at school on Monday however, the stock take is finished, and so I hope I will be much more sociable from now on. I will try to catch up with all my blogging friends' posts over the next week, and I apologise for my lack of responses in the comments below.

It hasn't been all work. I have been reading this. I have also been watching this in preparation for going here next month.

Juxtabook's versions of Famous for the Wrong Book

There's a very nice piece on The Guardian by John Self called Famous for the wrong book. It points out that many authors are famous for a book that is not necessarily their best. A key example being, "why has a title like Louis de Bernières' Captain Corelli's Mandolin risen to the top, overshadowing his much better earlier novels such as Senor Vivo & The Coca Lord ?" Something with which I would agree entirely.

I am tempted to get controversial right away by suggesting that Joyce's short story collection Dubliners is far better than anything else for which he is better known, but that might be my anti-modernist prejudices so let's not go there. Mrs Gaskell however is so very much more than Cranford - Wives and Daughters is my favourite though as she did not finish that maybe it does not count. North and South is superb too.

At the other end of the literary scale, fond though I am of Stephenie Meyer's sparkly vampires, The Host is a better book than any of the Twilight series. It is psychologically fascinating and deals with the problems caused by a society being too perfect, not Stepford Wives exactly, but lacking the anger and selfishness that makes the human world interesting. Where would fiction be without conflict? The Host would make a great holiday read.

The premise works with poetry too. Whilst Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" is great for a dramatic reading to a class of 15 year olds it is by no means her best work. I much prefer "Morning Song" (the one that begins "Love set you going like a fat gold watch".) Similarly Larkin's much quoted This Be the Verse is far from his best, though as I have a reputation to maintain as Larkin's most ardent disliker I daren't offer an opinion on what is his best. If anyone would like to recommend something really, really, really good by Larkin you could ruin my 20+ years loath-affair with his work, a loathing which has given me enormous pleasure. Disliking Joyce's best known works, by comparison, is quite boring!

It occurs to me that, as many of us are put off an author after reading the best known work, perhaps we could share some lesser known highlights from well known authors. For me Anita Brookner fell dismally with Hotel du Lac. Is this really her best or can you recommend something else? Similarly I've twice read The Ghost Road by Pat Barker trying to get the point. Is there a better Barker than her Regeneration triliogy? Any thoughts there? And which writers do you think suffer for being famous for the wrong book?

Agent 6 by Tom Rob Smith

I am new to Tom Rob Smith's Russian thrillers. The initial subject matter, the murder of children, had put me off but once I got past the opening scenes in Child 44, Smith's opener to this trilogy, I was hooked. The conundrum is how you investigate a crime when officially that crime cannot exist. In Soviet Russia such violence was something that might occur in the uncivilised west but not in the equitable USSR. The hero Leo is initially involved in the cover-up of a child's murder but as events crowd round him he moves on and discovers the unthinkable. His transformation from willing agent of the state to unofficial-detective-on-the-run is philosophically fascinating and without doubt is one of the most exciting books I've read. That was Child 44 but the book I am reviewing here is Agent 6, the last in the trilogy which came out last week.

Agent 6 is set some years after Child 44. Leo and his family live a settled life. Leo has put his morals before his career and as a result his wife, a teacher, is the one whose career has taken off. In the early chapters of the book something terrible happens to Leo that shapes the rest of the book. This is less of a page-turner than Child 44, it is more studied and less driven as we watch Leo almost anaesthetised by the shock. To find peace he must find Agent 6 and to find Agent 6 he will have to get to the USA. How's an ex-secret service officer to do that during the Cold War? Well, it takes him decades. The central section of the book is set during another European attempt to invade Afghanistan. The Russians in the 1980s found the local Afghan population very hard to subdue. Can Leo get out of Afghanistan to the west before the Russians or the Afghans kill him?

This central setting is the strength of the book. Afghanistan in the 1980s is nicely realised. The tensions for the locals between the demands of their religion and those of communism are effectively realised through Leo's side-kick, a junior officer being trained by Leo. In the end Leo must save them both before at last getting Agent 6 in his sights.

Agent 6 is about different kinds of totalitarianism, about fanaticism on all sides, and what the west turns a blind eye to in its dealing with non-democratic regimes. Stylistically it is very different to Child 44 and the style suits the subject. Leo is not the handsome career soldier he once was. He is older, slower, suffering from mental health problems, but experienced in the manoeuvrings of governments and secret service departments like a chess grandmaster. Agent 6 is not so much a thriller (and I think you might be disappointed if you read it as such) as an intricate game, a history lesson, philosophy in action.

Agent 6 is quiet but truly engaging where Child 44 merely excites. It is a more mature work with a more mature hero, and a very brave ending. I loved it.

An Awfully Big Blog Adventure Online Literary Festival

This weekend sees the third birthday of An Awfully Big Blog Adventure and to celebrate they're having a literary festival with a difference.

"July 9th and 10th will see us celebrating the third birthday of An Awfully Big Blog Adventure in a big way! We will be hosting the very first online literary festival organised entirely by children's authors."

They do have a good line-up and I am particularly looking forward to Lucy Coats and Adele Geras
 on the Saturday and Kath Langrish on the Sunday. You can see for yourself here. You can also follow comments on twitter using the #ABBAlitfest hashtag.

Round and About

Juxtabook is moonlighting over at the Faber blog on The Good of the Novel  (a collection of essays). There's debate from Elizabeth Baines and Paperback Reader too.

Book lovers may well be dismayed by the apparent purchase of The Book Depository by Amazon. Jane Badger has written two excellent blog posts on the subject which you can read here and here. The Bookseller reports that the OFT are inviting submissions about any competition or public interest issues and if you're concerned about the shrinking of competition you might like to comment.

lastly for lovers of children's books Peakirk Books have a 25% off code for you to use at the checkout on their own site. A good way to support an indie bookseller and have some summer reading for yourself, your children or your grandchildren. They also specialise in books on the poet John Clare.

New Books: New in Stock

I have been a busy bee sorting through the enormous number of new books we have now have in stock. I have made a start on cataloguing and thought I'd show you what we've got:

Lots of Ford Madox Ford

 

Lots of classic criticism including works by William Empson, Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Northrop Frye, F. R. Leavis etc.

 

The F. R. Leavis books include For Continuity which, as it has never been republished, is quite hard to find.

 

I have lots of books on David Jones, the poet and artist

 

And by or on Donald Davie, poet and critic

 

And lots of books on or by C. S. Lewis

 

And lots and lots of books on Thomas Hardy

 

We will also have lots of books about Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh available with more catalogued every day, plus more general books on catholicism in literature.

 

When I have catalogued the sea of books on the bookroom floor then we will have an enormous selection of books on modernism and Victorian literature in stock so if you are looking for anything please ask!