Monday 1 January 2024

Happy New Year

It's been a mixed sort of year. A permanent job (I've been temping forever) with a better pension and more money. Some great holidays both with other people and by myself, but I also lost a cousin this year who was still in his 50s, and his stepdad had a heart attack shortly afterwards and is waiting on an operation in mid-January. We also had a health scare for one of my aunts but that was stabilised, thankfully, with medication.

I've done quite a lot of decluttering - I counted items in and out (not food or toiletries but things that must be kept and cleaned and given permanent house room) and more than twice as many things went out as in, which is good. It also encouraged me to read the books already on my shelves and let some go once read or if I knew I wouldn't get round to them. 

As usual though, here is the list of books I did read:


The Stoat - Lynn Brock
To the Holy Shrines - Sir Richard Burton
Agatha Christie - Lucy Wolsey
Sound - A Story of Hearing Lost and Found - Bella Bathurst
A Surfeit of Suspects - George Bellairs
The Kiss - Anton Chekov
Techniques of Persuasion - J A C Brown
Appointment with Death - Agatha Christie
Everything is Washable (almost) - Sali Hughes
Lonelyheart 4122 - Colin Watson
Charity Ends at Home - Colin Watson
Still More Commonplace - Mary Stocks
The Flaxborough Crab - Colin Watson
Broomsticks over Flaxborough - Colin Watson
Littlejohn on Leave - George Bellairs
How to Run Your Home Without Help - Kay Smallshaw
Deadly Company - Ann Granger
Snobbery with Violence - Colin Watson
Tribes - David Lammy
The Aspern Papers - Henry James
How to Be Alone - Jonathan Franzen
The Naked Nuns - Colin Watson
Novelist(a) - Claire Askew
Murder in the Falling Snow - Various
Christmas is Murder - Val Mc Dermid
Orchids on Your Budget - Marjorie Hillis
Death at Dykes Corner - E C R Lorac
Blue Murder - Colin Watson
Plaster Sinners - Colin Watson
Whatever’s Going on in Mumblesby - Colin Watson
Music - W H Hadow
Reality is not what it appears - Carlo Rovelli
A Deadly Affair - Agatha Christie
Mr Bazalgette's Agent - Leonard Merrick
Camera Lucida - Barthes
The Detective's Daughter - Lesley Thomson
Poirot - Anne Hart
Hercule Poirot's Christmas - Agatha Christie
The Adventures of Dr Thorndyke - R Austin Freeman
A Kind of Vanishing - Lesley Thomson
Size Matters Not - Warwick Davies
The Big Four - Agatha Christie
The Pilgrims - Mary Shelley
Content With What I Have - C Henry Warren
The Empty Space - Peter Brook
Literature, Money and the Market - Paul Delaney
Death of an Author - E C R Lorac
Death of Jezebel - Christianna Brand
Checkmate to Murder - E C R Lorac
Cross River Traffic - Chris Roberts
Goodbye Things - Fumio Sasaki
Lions and Shadows - Christopher Isherwood
The Ice Age - Margaret Drabble
Evil Under the Sun - Agatha Christie
The Mystery of Three Quarters - Sophie Hannah
The No-Spend Year - Michelle McGagh
The Devil and the C I D - E C R Lorac
Ghost Girl - Lesley Thomson
The Practice of Writing - David Lodge
Pall for a Painter - E C R Lorac
Artists in Crime - Ngaio Marsh
Murder having Once been Done - Ruth Rendell
Photo-Finish - Ngaio Marsh
And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie
Pereira Maintains - Antonio Tabucchi
Sparkling Cyanide - Agatha Christie
Rock Crystal - Adalbert Stifter
Glimpses of Bengal - Rabindranath Tagore
K is for Killer - Sue Grafton
The Murder on the Burrows - E C R Lorac
The Hopkins Manuscript - R C Sherriff
The Assault on Jerusalem - Steven Runciman
Selective Memory - Katherine Whitehorn
A Backward Glance - Edith Wharton
Nightwalking – John Lewis Stempel
You Should Have Left - Daniel Kehlmann
Do It Yourself Doom - Stephen Prickett
Dead Famous – Greg Jenner
The Art of Travel - Alain de Botton
Anaximander- Carlo Rovelli
The Unpunished Vice - Edmund White
Unnatural Death - Dorothy L Sayers
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club - Dorothy L Sayers
A Sentimental Journey - Sterne
Great Granny Webster - Caroline Blackwood
Gilbert Keith Chesterton - Maisie Ward
The Fashion in Shrouds - Margery Allingham
What Katy Did Next - Susan Coolidge
Clover - Susan Coolidge
Tokyo Express - Seicho Matsumoto
Games Without Rules - Michael Gilbert

91 books read in total, as ever a lot of crime - 43 murder mysteries and three crime adjacent books, being biographies of Christie, Chesterton and Hercule Poirot. 56 fiction books overall, and 35 non fiction. 

Six books in translation, which is fairly good for me, especially since I made no real effort to seek books in translation this time. 

This year we also have an even split between men and women, and just one anthology containing both. 

Standout books include Games Without Rules by Michael Gilbert. Gilbert wrote Smallbone Deceased, one of my favourite of the British Library Classics. Games Without Rules is written and set later, and is a low key but very engaging and inventive series of short spy stories - I'm sure I've read the last of these before in anthologies, but it's much more effective as the culmination of a series when you've got fond of the characters.

I also really enjoyed A Backward Glance by Edith Wharton and Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood. Lorac is consistently entertaining, although some of her books are better than others, and the same might be said for Colin Watson, who I mainlined early on in the year. I also loved Pereira Maintains and You Should Have Left. 

Conversely The Big Four was every bit as terrible as I remembered (I don't normally diss books here, but given how much I love Christie, and her phenomenal success, and the fact she's not alive to be hurt, I'm making an exception), and although Nightwalking had some interesting ideas and is an attractive physical object it felt terribly padded. There's really not much original material in the book.

And that's me. I haven't made any plans for next year except to continue reading from my shelves a bit more and get the ones I likely won't read again out to the bookswap, and to hopefully read a full book in Italian - even if it's just a very short one or a child's one - by this time next year.

So here's to 2024. 



Wednesday 18 October 2023

Do It Yourself Doom - Stephen Prickett. For the 1962 club.

I'd never heard of Stephen Prickett before I got this book, but a bit of googling has turned up some information and he seems to have been well thought of in his chosen career in academia, writing many respected works about English literature and religion and romanticism. 

This book however is his one, youthful, punt at fiction and in theory a murder mystery. Spike, the courier of a couple of narrow boats used for holidays on the Shropshire canal, has found a dead body in the dining room. We're told this in retrospect, because the first chapter is Spike's tangled, internal, stream of consciousness as he steers the boats through the locks, deals with someone dropping keys in the river, and wonders when the body will be found. 

The problem is that this style of writing was intended by the modernists to get closer to the way people actually think and make writing less artificial, not more. It doesn't function here for a number of reasons, but mostly because our writer doesn't have the experience or ability to pull it off, and certainly not against genre and while trying to stuff as many literary quotes and allusions into his characters speech as is (un)feasibly possible. 

I feel mean, because he can't have been much past 21 when he wrote the thing, and it's not a terrible first novel - but it is a first novel that should either have had a good trim and suggested rewrite by a competent editor, or been seen as a trial run for a better, tighter book, and slipped quietly in a drawer without publication. 

Also, despite all the lunacy and meandering and the points where it is patently impossible that any group of people would behave as this group of people are behaving (I think Prickett might have been a fan of Edmund Crispin, but without Crispin's talent for maintaining that thin thread of plausibility or the knack of making us care about the characters), the final solution does kind of make sense, the person whose point of view we see the most of does have flashes of something like three-dimensionality, and the shifts between point of view don't jar as much as they could. 

Thanks as ever to Simon of Stuck in a Book and Karen of Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings for running these clubs every six months. Do check out their blogs for posts linking to other reviews. 








Tuesday 26 September 2023

The Murder on the Burrows - E C R Lorac.

I should start by saying that I don't know how available this book actually is. I apologise in advance to anyone who reads this review, fancies judging for themselves (or even just seeing MacDonald's first sally)  and then finds it impossible. It's not one of the books republished by the British Library, and doesn't seem to be available at any of the usual second-hand sources. In fact there is at least one retailer online urgently seeking it. If it does turn up I suspect it will be as gold-dust and priced accordingly.

It is available at the British Library to readers, which is how I got my grubby paws on it, but I realise that's not helpful to most people. 

That said, on with the review:

The Murder on the Burrows was Lorac's first book and as debuts go it's pretty good - it starts with two mismatched holidaymakers who've decided to go for a walk, get caught by the rain, explore a car that's parked up and find a body. Some of the phrases used by the smaller of the two (described as the 'little cockney') seem to belong to wildly different social classes, but that's a minor quibble, and as always Lorac hooks you in quickly. You want to read on. 

The story itself is middling. The main thing that struck me about our sleuth, compared to the later books I've read, is that MacDonald seems posher in this one - more of the gentleman 'tec and less of the police officer, chatting up society ladies but bored by it, complete with a manservant to look after him and an Oxbridge background (the war intervened before he completed his studies, alas!). 

Other characters are, as usual, interesting and varied - the famous pianist and her long suffering neighbours, the dead man himself, a communist who has spent time in Russia and taken a Russian name but was born plain old John or Bob or Fred something, the young lady who was sent down or removed from Oxford because of her relationship with him, and then married a much older man because she was unhappy at home - MacDonald's natural sympathy for people and their circumstances is already firmly established in this book. 

That said there were bits around AA scouts and roads that made me glaze over. Possibly it's me - I'm the same when Wimsey starts playing cricket or if there's anything in a book around railway timetables. There was a mild snob element and of course the gender politics have changed, but nothing odd for the time. If anything more liberal than you'd expect. So I'm slightly surprised it hasn't been republished - it may not be the best, but it's perfectly good, and I think there would be a market. 

Saturday 2 September 2023

Short Reviews from A Brief, Unplanned, Foray into Translated Works

 Pereira Maintains – Antonio Tabucchi (tr: Patrick Creagh)

The last summer of peace before the Second World War. Pereira is a journalist - head of the culture section for The Lisboa, a small unimportant newspaper, with a small scrappy office of his own where it constantly smells of frying food and he suspects the housekeeper of being a police informer. Widowed and having fallen into an unhealthy lifestyle, regretting never having had a son of his own and the younger, fitter self of his youth, he decides to go to a health spa for a week and takes on an assistant – a young man who writes obituaries for him that are too infused with politics to publish.

Despite rejecting all his work Pereira goes on paying and befriending him anyway, buying him dinner and keeping in touch with his girlfriend when he’s out of town. Not quite sure why, still figuring out what his own state of mind is, and the state of Europe too. ‘Pereira maintains’ is a recurrent line in the book, and often it means Pereira maintains that he doesn’t know why he did such and such a thing, but like Pereira himself it gradually evolves from something very passive to an action in itself. That of bearing witness.

This is a book that gains something from historical knowledge – for example Pereira’s doctor is leaving for France, but the reader will know (as of course Tabucchi knew in the 90s when he wrote it) that France wasn’t, at that point in time, going to prove a safe refuge.  

It also has sprinklings of details about Italian and Portuguese literature which I rather enjoyed and may well lead down a rabbit hole of other books. It has certainly made me want to read more Tabucchi, who himself was Italian, and a translator of Fernando Pessoa as well as an author in his own right.

 

Rock Crystal – Adalbert Stifter (tr: Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore).

This is a brief Christmas tale that would probably be unpleasantly sentimental if it weren’t for the glorious descriptions of the mountain itself. There’s a real sense of place – a place not untouched by the outside world (artists and mountain climbers are frequent enough visitors, and the local shoemaker’s excellent mountain climbing shoes are a local export) but with it’s own identity and a local unity that can make someone even from the next town a foreigner.

Interesting sidelight – Christmas presents in Germany were supposedly brought by the Christ-child, not St Nicholas.

 

Glimpses of Bengal – Rabindranath Tagore (tr: Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson). 

This really was just a glimpse of glimpses, both of Bangladesh and Tagore himself as a young man, in letters written mostly to his niece. The letters themselves are not complete – there’s a focus on philosophy and the natural world, a smattering of agreeable humour, but little personal detail, and no sense of a day to day progression or who they were written to. I’d like to read the longer book and fill in the gaps.

Sunday 20 August 2023

In the Bookswap Bag

Literature, Money and the Market – Paul Delaney (from Trollope to Amis)

I feel like I’ve gleaned random facts from this book but not much else. For example it led me on to two other books – The Ice Age by Margaret Drabble, and The Information by Martin Amis, which last is mentioned both because it is about writing, but also because of the size of the massive advance Amis got, which I do dimly remember there being a bit of a ‘the end is nigh’ flutter about at the time, even in the national (non-bookish) press, although I couldn’t have told you the name of the book and would have assumed it was London Fields. It’s amusing to me that his real big hitters were not the ones he got the most money for.

That incident is also mentioned by David Lodge in the last read book on this pile. Lodge’s take is that you can’t really blame Amis for taking the money. He also describes Amis (this is in the 90s) as being ‘famous for not winning the Booker’ which sent me off to Wikipedia to check – and astonishingly (and I say this even though he’s not really my cup of tea and I’ve only read 2 of his books) Amis never did.

I’ll let you know what I think of The Information. I'm cat sitting at my Dad's this week, so will take this one along. 

 

The Ice Age – Margaret Drabble

This is the other book mentioned in the Delaney above. Written in the mid 70s, the height of the energy crisis, with the property market having collapsed and inflation running at 25%.

Anthony Keating (described on the back of my 1979 copy and in several places in the text as ‘middle-aged’ despite being in his 30s) has recently had a heart attack. And well he might do, frankly, even at that age. A business associate is in jail for fraud, the country property he bought for a fortune is worth a fraction of the price he paid for it, the London house can’t be offloaded and has squatters in it, and the riverside location he and his friends bought for development is a white elephant. Oh and a friend has recently died in an IRA bombing and his step daughter been arrested behind the iron curtain for a traffic offence.

This book is almost entirely backstory – how did Anthony, his ex-wife, his friend in jail, and everyone else in these pages get where they are now when the 60s looked so bright?

It manages to avoid being a misery though, through humour and an awareness that at least part of the reason it’s hurting so much right now is how spoilt everyone has been up to this point. Drabble has a knack of making the reader empathise with people they might not really agree with, and this is of course a fabulous snapshot of a point in time.


Death of Jezebel – Christianna Brand

Checkmate to Murder – E C R Lorac

Both the above are covered in my post here: Briefer than Literal Statement: Brand and Lorac. I was in two minds about whether to let Checkmate to Murder go, but I'm determined to get the double shelving down and there are so many books out there. 


Death of an Author – E C R Lorac

This book is reviewed extensively and well on a number of blogs I follow and read. You don’t need my take. Very entertaining, but I won’t read it again.


A Natural Curiosity – Margaret Drabble

I started this after The Ice Age but its not working for me. It was under £1 in a charity shop, so I’m not going to fret about it.


The Practice of Writing – David Lodge

This is a book of essays and reviews over a period rather than a consistent book about writing or a book about how to write. I do find Lodge a tad academic at times (unsurprising since he was a lecturer in Birmingham) but his awareness of it is very disarming. He also sends this up beautifully in his campus novels.

This was most interesting when he was writing about adapting his own novel for tv, and adapting Martin Chuzzlewit, or casting and tweaking and finding a place for his play. 


The Empty Space – Peter Brook

This is about the theatre and different theories, or perhaps it would be true to say different kinds of theatre.  It’s a nice length for this sort of book – short enough that the lay person doesn’t get bogged down. 


Content With What I Have – C Henry Warren

This was a rather charming book of vignettes of rural life in the 60s and concerns about what was being lost. 


Strange Journey – Maid Cairnes

Another from the British Library, this time their Women Writers series. Arguably this book is a fantasy book, given the bodyswap element, but there was also humour and middlebrow is probably as good a genre to file it under as anything. 

I enjoyed it but couldn’t read books like this the time, any more than I could Amis’ oeuvre or constant spy novels (although I’ve read and enjoyed Amis and Buchan occasionally). I do wonder, if I hadn't gone in expecting it to be the kind of book it was, with the nice cover and the genre it's placed in, whether there might have been more tension to it. As it is there's more comedy of manners than any fear something more sinister is going on. 


Lions and Shadows – Christopher Isherwood

Isherwood advises the reader to read this as fiction, which I did my best to do, even though the central character is called Christopher, and has a life not a million miles from the author, starting with his school career, then sabotaging his university years, then trying to write a book while also trying to find something to do for a living. Overshadowed by something he describes as 'the Test' - the expectation boys of his generation had that they'd be growing up into a war, which then ends before they get there, leaving them with a feeling of displacement.