To Be Read - Leap Day Eve 2020

As I’ve mentioned before there are a lot of unread books already on my shelves and given that and my long history of library fines I normally try to keep the flow of books going out as well as in and not let more stack up.

At the moment however I am the proud possessor of what can only be described as two (count ‘em) TBR piles. So I thought I’d share them while I have them.

On the bottom of that first pile is The Five by Haillie Rubenhold, which I've been keen to read ever since I knew it existed and was lucky enough to get for Christmas. I’ve already dipped in and been instantly intrigued by the two versions of history described. One of course was the glitz of the jubilee, the other a homelessness crisis that has now been largely forgotten. (As an ex history student I can tell you this happens a lot with the past, especially with visual evidence. Almost no-one photographs scaffolding, roadworks, abandoned sleeping bags where someone is clearly sleeping, piles of horse manure, old cola cans and the like. Similarly most fiction and quite a lot of non-fiction is about (and generally by) the comfortably off, so unless you read old newspaper reports, death stats and the literature written by people eager to change what was actually a very hard world you can get a horribly distorted idea of times past).

Next up is the Virago Writers as Readers, which I bought with a Waterstones voucher I got for Christmas. The extremely beautiful cover pulled me in and the first chapter kept me in those toils. It’s not a book I feel I can carry about though, because that cover will get ruined in my bag, and it’s quite heavy to hold in one hand while hanging onto a yellow tube pole with the other. So here it sits, waiting for the next really wet weekend I decide I’d rather stay in. Which I don’t imagine will be far away.  

Above that is My American – Stella Gibbons. This is one I am actually reading already, and although I have started others I will get back to it. Stella Gibbons is famous of course for her cheerfully satirical fantasy Cold Comfort Farm, but this is far more of a straight novel. The story introduces two main characters (Amy and Bob) who meet once, briefly, as children, and then follows their growing up in London and America separately.

So far (I’m 303 pages into a 460 page book) it’s the London story that is grabbing me. It feels as much a portrait of a place and time as of a person. Whereas the American town Gibbons describes feels a bit like Burnet in What Katy Did, only – for a long stretch at least - without the more realised characters and serious illness that sometimes struck the Carrs.

Most noticeable of all is the way everyone keeps mentioning the depression, but there are no symptoms of a depression. No-one who wants a job seems to be struggling to get one. No-one is hungry.  The other troubling thing that’s going on is the rise of the mob, but although his cousin Helen tries to burst Bob’s bubble when he insists his old childhood friend who has been running speakeasies in Detroit and Chicago had never killed anyone, it still feels like it’s not really happening. It's all off stage. 

It’s the same with the two main characters– Amy feels more real. We see her interior world and her worries and her school and the people she lives with. Bob is seen from the outside, and when it starts to go wrong is the first time he seemed interesting to me.

Then there are my Wimbledon library reads:

The Invoice - Jonas Karlsson. This looks like a darkly funny and quirky (I hate that word but it’s the most appropriate I can think of) read.  

Deep Water – Patricia Highsmith. I don’t think I’ve read any Highsmith, but can’t be 100% sure. I read a lot of books in in my teens - detective and science fiction mostly - and completely failed to take note of most of the titles or authors’ names, so every so often I read a plot summary or a first chapter and realise I already know it.

All Passion Spent – Vita Sackville West. Not sure this needs an introduction. I love Sackville-West’s garden writing, was a bit infuriated by her in Portrait of a Marriage (mostly because I felt horribly and inexorably sorry for poor pretty, selfish Violet Trefusis who everyone wanted to protect but nobody wanted to be honest with). I haven’t actually read any of her fiction so I'm curious to see what it's like.

Duplicate Death – Georgette Heyer. I’ve read a few of Heyer’s crime novels and they’re always witty, amusing reads. I haven’t read the regency romances for which she's more famous, although I did start some previously. Both a colleague at work and blogs I enjoy recommended them, and I seem to remember Stephen Fry is a fan, but despite my best efforts something just hasn’t clicked yet.

And on top of this pile is The Language of Cities – Dedjan Sudjic. This is a very easy one for the tube (which is why it’s on top – it was actually in my bag), and was also a voucher purchase from the new Waterstones in Kensington High Street, which I notice has moved closer to the station. I don’t know if the rent is less or they were refurbing anyway and think they’ll get more foot traffic. 

Kensington High Street does seem to be condensing down, and the council have been exploring other things to draw people there besides shops. So there are some quite nice benches with planters, some crossings with Bauhaus names (near the Design museum) and Japanese art (near Japan House), although as with most urban high streets it can never be truly pleasant given that it is, ultimately, a road from one busy place to another busy place.

The second pile is mostly comprised of all these Dark Tower Stephen Kings – I’ve had them ages, and they don’t actually belong to me. I did offer to return them last year when I started my course again and stalled on book 3, and was told it was fine - but they really do need to be read and go back to my brother, who is also meant to be reading them (and has also stalled) and then giving them back to someone at work.

And on top of SK we have Umberto Eco’s Five Moral Pieces which I picked up today from Kensington Central Library. This book of essays was an impulse borrow. I first picked up Deborah Levy’s Things I Don’t Want to Know – a book of essays in response to George Orwell’s Why I Write, and Eco was sitting back to back with it and caught my eye. 

Unfortunately I didn’t get to take the Levy because an alert popped up when I was checking it out and I had to bring it to the desk as someone in Pimlico had reserved it.

And on top of Eco is Allingham's Dancers in Mourning and Ben Aaronovitch’s The October Man, both from Paddington Library. I’m actually not sure if I’ve read the novella or not but I want to make sure before I read False Value - the next full book in the series, which has just come out. 

Arguably that means that False Value is technically on my TBR pile too, even though I don’t have a physical copy yet. And so it goes on..  

London Rectangles

The Royal Oak Pub (closed) North Woolwich 

Ceiling, Banqueting House

Windowbox, Kensington

Graffiti, North Woolwich

Graffiti, Islington

Leighton House, Friday.

Libraries I Have Known

According to Google this is my hundredth post, and I've decided it's going to be about libraries.

I’m a great fan of libraries, and often surprised by other people's low expectations. My youngest aunt, for example, was surprised that I managed to borrow a great fat hardback copy of A Brief History of Seven Killings from Wimbledon Library while it was still shortlisted for the Booker.

They're also a great way to feed current obsessions, the latest being the Penguin Line books, borrowed one by one from Kensington and Wimbledon and shelved under 820 and 828 respectively.

Kensington, thankfully, labels all it's books. Merton, including Wimbledon, only bothers labelling non fiction, and if an author is better known for crime than sci-fi then their sci-fi will be mis-shelved; but this is a minor annoyance, and mostly due to the Dewey decimal lumping all English fiction in one classification (823).

Fiction, of course, is organised alphabetically by author's surname, but as in book shops, science fiction and crime tend to be separated out. Lately, with the Agatha Christie re-read, I've mostly been raiding the Crime section. I estimate it would have cost somewhere in the region of £400 already if it weren’t for libraries.

At the moment I don't have any Christies though. What I do have are these:

The large duck egg coloured book at the bottom is Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives. I actually borrowed this for an essay on Coriolanus, as it's generally agreed to be the main source Shakespeare used to write his play.

North translated from the French translation, not the original Greek, and given he was writing in the mid 1500s, he wasn't as difficult to follow as I expected. Largely because although the sentence construction is sometimes odd, the spelling is more or less as we would spell the same words now.

I haven't returned it yet because I want to read the whole thing. It's a Kensington Central Library book, part of their extensive collection of biographies, which sit like an iceberg 9/10ths beneath the surface in the stacks.

Kensington Central Library has a number of other features I like as well - the large octagonal clock in the middle of the rows of shelves, the wooden alcoves in the windows with built in benches, the reference library upstairs with it's divided desks, and the regularly refreshed 'interest' shelves near the entrance. I also like The Library Time Machine, their blog on local history. Best of all it's very near where I'm working. In fact I haven't worked this close to a library for 15 years.

That was a much smaller library, run by Camden almost under the Archway tower. I remember it as windowless, and involving a walk past a similarly low, dark pub with cardboard in the windows, which I never had the courage to go into but fondly imagined was frequented by vampires. (The discovery of Neil Gaiman and Anne Rice around that time may have fuelled my imaginings.  It was more likely frequented by carers and cleaners coming off shift at the Whittington hospital, or possibly a brothel.) 

Archway is on the Northern line, which had an asylum near the other end at Tooting (now flats) and the public receivership office, child and family court and for a while the benefits office at Archway. It's grimly unsurprising that it’s the line with the heaviest rate of suicide - and probably no coincidence that the Penguin Tube Line book for the Northern line is the bleakest I've read so far.

For myself, I had grandparents living on that line, and as Camden is on it, and Waterloo, and it was my route home for ages, and is still in easy distance, I think of it as familiar and reliable. Unlike the Jubilee line, for example, about which I think nothing at all.

The second book up in the pile is Margery Allingham's The Crime at Black Dudley. I've read a number of Allinghams, all of them with Albert Campion, but this is the first she wrote, and she writes him from the outside all through. The 'hero' of the story, the man with the love interest and through who's eyes we mostly experience the story, is Dr Abbershaw. The story is silly, and has perhaps some rather daft stereotypes, but it's also very well done and I lapped it up.

The third, slim book is A Good Parcel of English Soil by Richard Mabey, It's the Metropolitan Line in the aforementioned Penguin Tube Line series. Mabey talks about Metroland and his own childhood, throws in some history. These books are exactly the right length for people to be slightly self indulgent without becoming irritating, and Mabey manages it here.

Next is Music by Andrew Gant, which I've commented on elsewhere but can summarise as: not quite an introduction to the subject as there is some terminology and some written music, but great if you're an amateur like me.

Then we have Resorting to Murder, one of the British Library's crime reprints. I'm actually a member of the British Library now, but so far I've mostly been there for exhibitions, in the evenings.

To be honest I got a little fed up with Resorting to Murder. The anthology has never been my favourite format. I feel like I'm just getting into each story when I'm hustled on to the next. I enjoyed Silent Nights though, maybe because the Christmas theme held together better, maybe because I knew some of the authors and detectives from the first book. As you can see I've also recently taken out Capital Crimes and Crimson Snow too, but I've only read the first so far. At least one of the stories made me wince. Conan Doyle at his coldest. Another, with a lethal box of chocolates, two deadly snakes and five major coincidences all in about 20 pages, I had to grit my teeth to get through.

Of course that's part of the appeal of libraries - I don’t have to own the books. I don't even have to read the books. Whereas once a book has been bought there's a vague sense of obligation to read it (especially if you like it). Library books are much more easy going. 

There may be a class element in that. I wasn’t raised with the idea of a 'canon' set of books everyone should read, or that books are inherently improving as and of themselves – actually a relatively modern attitude anyway - witness the antipathy towards novel reading in Northanger Abbey, which parallels modern concerns about computer games (Wimbledon Library have, or had, a book with a good defence of this, exploring what the attitude might be towards books had computers and games machines been invented first, but annoyingly I can't remember the author), or the moral panic about Jazz in that era (Humphrey Lyttelton's bio is good for information on this, and of course you’ll find that in Kensington Central Library stacks).

Next up in the pile is George Orwell, A Life in Letters, which I can heartily recommend, and then another translation of Plutarch, less interesting and memorable than North, but perhaps more comprehensible to a modern reader, and lastly we have Kinsey and Me by Sue Grafton, which is from Victoria Library, where I used to go a lot when I worked at the Passport Office. Victoria Library has a very good sheet music section upstairs, but feels a bit squashed for space downstairs. There's rather a nice balcony running around though, where they keep the foreign language books.

I think I've mentioned before how I used to sit in Chertsey library and read Grafton in my teens. Chertsey was a pre-fab, a supposedly temporary structure that's still there, like a lot of our old classrooms. We had a canteen made out of corrugated iron too. It must have been there years, but it seemed solid enough to us.

The school libraries (we had two ends to the school, so two libraries) had some good books (H V Morton and Gerald Durrell, almost everything Judy Blume had written to that point), but opened completely randomly, which made borrowing books difficult and returning them worse.

Middle school was quite different. I seem to remember it as wood panelled, although in retrospect that's incredibly unlikely, and I used to go in sometimes at lunch time and read Baba Yaga and other disturbing fairy stories.

There are others, too many to do justice to really: The library in the Cobham old school building which never seemed to get any new books in and opened late one night a week when I was coming back from work. At that time the staff outnumbered the customer 2 to 1, but I expect it was livelier during the day when children were about. The mobile library we had before that, which used to park in the same place as the fish van.

Streatham Vale library, strangely well stocked with socio-political books for such a small branch.

Church Street, where I discovered Dorothy L Sayers, was another prefab, larger and more battered, hidden under an arch and a small passage from Church Street Market – another discovery that may have been cleaned up and gentrified now.

Colliers Wood, which had flooded last time I saw it, sandbags piled up outside the doors. Brixton, which was founded, or at least funded, by Henry Tate. Charing Cross, squeezed in near the statue of Edith Cavell. Marylebone, which was under Council House, where confetti and occasionally champagne flutes would be left on the steps outside. 

British Library building 

(St Pancras behind)

I’m sure there are more I could think of (I see I've left University libraries out completely)  .. and of course I don’t rely entirely on libraries. I also have a number of fairly full bookcases. But that’s another story. 

Crime novels... part 1

This is terribly late. It seemed like such a nice project and then.. well it was harder than I thought.

Some time ago I planned (and said) I would write some genre related posts – genre is a thing I’m not too keen on as a concept, largely because while it’s useful for those people looking for something specific, and for bookshops who need to shelve items in a way that lets them find them again, I feel it influences not only the way books are read, but sometimes even how they’re written (I’ve read a few ‘how to write a novel’ type books now and they’re pretty clear that you pick your genre and deliberately shape your writing to it. This may be good marketing, but I’m not sure it makes for great books.) 

But I’m in danger of repeating myself, and anyway crime fiction more than any other is I think written deliberately within genre. No-one puts a dead body in a book by accident. 

Commonly crime books are subdivided even further; into murder mysteries, cosies, golden age, hardboiled, puzzlers, the Ian Rankin sort with unrealistically mad and sadistic serial killers.. and so on. Again I think this is so readers can find the kind of murder they want (I'll admit to avoiding Rankin's after giving one - Knots and Crosses - a go. It was unremittingly grim).  

I also realised, after beginning this post back in the mists of time, that although I’d read a lot of crime fiction it was incredibly heavily weighted towards still published authors such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and Conan Doyle, and was already trying to do something about this, and had begun a reread (and gap-filling exercise) for Agatha Christie too, when I acquired a copy of Martin Edwards’ book about the Detection Club and realised I hadn’t even remotely begun to make a whisper of a scratch on the surface of crime writing in the era. 

This (with apologies for the cut and paste) is what I wrote on the Guardian TLS blog in September last year:  

The Golden Age of Murder – Martin Edwards. Which is all about what you’d expect but more specifically the Detection Club which banded together with Chesterton as president, with Sayers advocating, and with dinners and collaborations. The forerunner of the current club of which Edwards is now President. 

The book is fascinating, just small portraits of the individuals, then references to their work. Sayers comes through particularly clearly, a publicist and advocate for the whole gang, secretary of the club, a bit daunting on occasion. Christie is more elusive, not just here but in the BBC archives and even her own autobiography. All accounts suggest she was shy throughout her life, and spent much of her time daydreaming and travelling. 

 And then, more interesting still, there are the people I’d barely heard of, with their own take on the genre, their own politics, their own private lives.. 

Edwards is upfront that the book doesn’t cover the whole of the genre. There are about 35 author photographs in the front pages of this book, and these are only the members of the Detection Club elected from 1930-49. There were far more actual writers, and a wider culture of radio puzzles, magazine competitions and murder games. We get a flavour of all that, and the wider historical context, and the (to me slightly ghoulish) interest so many members had in real life murder cases. 


I’ve also, now I’m tuned into it, noticed the prevalence and popularity of crime elsewhere. In fact, everywhere. Orwell wrote an essay about the changes in crime fiction titled Raffles to Miss Blandish and when I was at Sissinghurst I noticed that Harold Nicolson’s study contained a copy of The Anatomy of Murder, the Detection Club’s book attempting to analyse and solve real life murders. (Nicolson had it in hardback, but the book is available in a paperback reprint, and more sympathetic that you’d imagine.) 

I actually own The Anatomy of Murder, but Kensington Central Library has furnished me with my recent rash of Gladys Mitchells and two of the other British library reprints. You can find a review of Death on the Cherwell here, and my comment in September 2015 on The Floating Admiral, by Christie, Sayers, Chesterton and other mystery writers now less well known was this (again cut and pasted from elsewhere, sorry): 

It's a book written in the fashion of those paper games you play as a child, where one person draws the head of a person or animal and then folds and passes it along and then the next person draws the shoulders. It gets very involved, which presumably is what would happen in a real case: The Inspector thinks, the Inspector thinks better of it. The Inspector crosses and recrosses the river and drives the long way round again and again and talks to the same people repeatedly. 

It's huge fun – not least when a new chapter starts and the new author proceeds to demolish all the clues in the last chapter – either because they don’t like them or (as Sayers freely admits) struggle to make sense of them. 


Christie doesn’t appear to have taken part in any more of these exercises, but in any case I’m going to leave Christie (as far as possible) to one side for now. As well as her crime novels I’ve been reading the five or six other fictions, some plays, the autobiography and so on, and in fact had to create a spreadsheet to keep track of what I had and hadn’t reread. Christie is a blogpost in herself. 

I will say though that in my own personal reading history Christie came before Sue Grafton, but after Conan Doyle. I was still in my teens when I read the former, but just 10 or 11 when I picked up the Sherlock Holmes stories and puzzled, as I think everyone does, about the way A Study in Scarlet has a story embedded within it in that odd, disjointed fashion that seems almost designed to break the narrative.  

Prior to the Holmes stories we can blame Blyton, whose mysteries aren’t usually considered a part of the crime genre, but do seem to me to be a part of what was happening in more grown up fiction. 
Being books for children however they tended to be about smugglers or secret plans, and the same held for other series such as the Three Investigators (purportedly written by Hitchcock but not really) and Nancy Drew (who I never thought much of). 

Sue Grafton was a find from the age of 13 or 14 when I started bunking off school and haunting the local library. Part of the appeal of the books was – and is - that her heroine so clearly does not have her life sorted out, which married up with my observation of most of the adults around me; however much they all felt the need to pretend they had everything under control and were qualified to give advice. 

Grafton’s heroine, Kinsey, is one of the most engaging characters in any book I’ve read. She has her own ideas about what she likes (small spaces) and her reasons for those things. She probably wouldn’t stand up independent of the narrative – there are precious few detectives who would – but she’s far from 2 dimensional. 

More strangely there are long periods of narration where Kinsey does her laundry or tells you what she ate. These annoyed me enormously when I began reading but they’ve grown on me over the years. There are worse ways of giving you a sense of time passing. 

Later I seem to remember I started reading Ann Granger simply because she was on the shelf next to Grafton. It made it very easy to pick it up and flick through, although that doesn’t marry up with the first book of Granger’s I read being secondhand. And I know it was secondhand because it was a copy that had come free with a magazine at some stage, with ‘not for resale’ on the back where the isbn should have been. 

However I first came across her my opinion of Granger then is my opinion now. Her books have a lot of charm and her detectives, both the amateur and the professional, are extraordinarily incompetent. Fortunately the murderers are even worse, leaving clues to be stumbled upon, giving themselves away by their behaviour and going to strangle the heroine two seconds before the police break in the door. 

It’s necessary to the narrative that they do this because there’s no trail of clues such as Christie or Ellery Queen might leave for detective and reader alike. It’s all reliant on coincidence. 

Perhaps this is why I fell out of love with Granger somewhere in the Fran Varady series. Even if (according to Martin Edwards) The Detection Club’s light-hearted motto about playing fair with the reader was only ever a guideline, I still prefer feeling that the clues are all there and the author is giving me a chance to solve the thing. In fact when I clearly can't I even feel a bit hard done by. 

Probably this is the reason why my favourite, still, is Agatha Christie. About who (and others) there will be more in my next post.

Trees

Enfield

Chigwell

Kensington

fourteen reasons I'm going get a library fine again..

From left to right:

John Mortimer's Rumpole and the Reign of Terror, which I got from Mitcham library after reading Rumpole at Christmas. I meant to wait for colder weather before reading any more Rumpole - it's an winter sort of pleasure - but I've just rediscovered him and I'm impatient. To be enjoyed with a glass of Chateau Thames Embankment (in this case Montepulciano) in my Hello Kitty glass to the right there. That's my travelling glass, a useful size for fanta, wine or water for painting. Thick enough to be tough, and not likely to tip up. I brought it in Florence.
I haven't read the book yet,

Bill Bryson's African Diary - another not yet read, this time from Wimbledon Library, and next to it Dolly by Susan Hill. I like Hill very much and she delivers reliable chills, but I don't think she's got whatever it is that makes a book a classic. She's very much of the here, now, and sturdily middle class.

The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, Jerome Ferrari (in translation) another I've not read yet but the reviews promise amazing things, and I wanted to read more work in translation.

Thirst by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, again in translation. I normally avoid fiction about war, especially recent conflicts, but I think this appealed because it promises to show both sides, not just one. I also avoid books about writers trying to write, but here I'm hoping it will leaven the bleakness of conflict. I got this from Mitcham library, which has a homely between-war facade and core with a square 1970s build wrapped around three sides of it, like one of those neck cushions people are meant to use on aeroplanes.

Moriarty by Anthony Horowitz. I read Horowitz' The House of Silk some years ago, and although I felt the sensibilities of Holmes and Watson were slightly anachronistic it was a good yarn. I've only recently started to appreciate how many 'new' Sherlock Holmes spin-off stories there have been. From Julien Symons' Sherlock obsessed actor in the 70s, to the recent TV series, to The Seven Percent Solution (a retelling in which Sherlock begins to succumb to the cocaine and have delusions about Moriarty) to the film Young Sherlock Holmes. Neil Gaiman has written Holmes and Watson into an alternate universe, and Disney has made him a cartoon mouse. With all that going on it's impossible to be precious about the canon. And it may be good.

Mathematics with Love - the Courtship Correspondence of Barnes Wallis. This is a very odd book, and a very odd correspondence. Wallis is in love with a young student at London University, and offers to help her with her studies. It's clear that if they weren't cousins he probably wouldn't be allowed to write to her at all, but as they are her father allows some flexibility. So they write the normal things you write in letters (or did, when people wrote letters), that a bee has landed on her pen because it is sticky with nougat, that he  went to the theatre, and then she lays out the mathematical puzzles that bother her because her lecturer goes too fast, and he writes back with diagrams, and she responds with formulae, and I got very lost but didn't mind.
What I did mind was the sentimental narrator who can't restrict herself to facts and says things like 'and the knight had won his lady' or 'a flood of emotion had been released in Barnes'. The book would be very much better if she kept quiet and let her readers judge for themselves.

The Green Man - Kingsley Amis. A quite short book which I should have read by now. I had an Amis binge a year or so back, but have read nothing of his before or since. I always think Amis is writing with a male reader in mind, but the fact he's not writing for me doesn't make me not want to read him. His humour is darkly amusing.

Nehru's Letters to His Sister. Kensington Library seems to have a lot of these books of letters - the above Barnes Wallis one came from them. This one was in a small display in the Central Library - they have these small frequently changed displays where things not normally on the shelves are trawled from archive and offered up, and there's almost always something interesting.
The loose connection between the books this time seems to be sibling relationships.

The next book, Cook's Tours, is a case in point. I should have returned this already since I've finished it, but I haven't yet. It's a series of letters (again) as published in the Times and temperance newspapers, sent back by Thomas Cook as he builds and promotes his fledgling company, making contacts in hotels and explaining the difference in British and American railways, and telling people what they can expect to see.
He isn't as tolerant of other cultures as you might expect from someone so widely travelled - and particularly dismissive of anything which offends his Victorian morality - but he's certainly not backward for his time, and it's completely fascinating seeing how people travelled then, and the wonderful months-on-end-long tours that were offered to those who could afford them.
The temperance side is also interesting, because it not only gives you an idea of how much people did drink, daily, but how they were expected to drink, even if they didn't want to.
This still happens of course, but it's not socially acceptable in the way it clearly was.

And Then There Were None. I've been rereading Agatha Christie for some time now and I'm getting into my less favourite ones. This is a very clever book - in many ways her cleverest book, but it's more thriller than proper puzzle.
This was also, of course, the book with the offensive name and nursery rhyme, which is why they've changed the title. A very minor change, since the play was always called this.
They've also changed the rhyme inside though and I'm less sure that's a good move. There is a point where in trying not to give offence you disguise past attitudes and pretend there never was a problem. And ultimately that serves the current crop of bigots who'd like to kid themselves that women's lib and race relations are just politically correct hysteria and there was never any real need for them.
But having said that I was considering buying a copy of Kipling's Just So Stories at Christmas for my cousin's little boy, and I checked some of the language had been changed before I added it to the 'maybe' pile - so I can't claim to be consistent about this.

A Murder is Announced - Agatha Christie. One of my favourites, and one I didn't even come close to solving the first time I read it.
There are an awful lot of people pretending to be who they're not in this book, but that's kind of the point. That the war has shaken out all the odd certainties, and you have to believe what people tell you of themselves.
Oddly the TV Marple I preferred for this one was Geraldine McEwan. It isn't usually, mostly because the changes that were made to a lot of the stories for that series didn't feel like they worked to me, but in this one she was engaged in a way Hickson simply wasn't, and it felt real.

By the Pricking of My Thumbs - Agatha Christie. This is, or was, another favourite. The paperback my mother owned had a terrifying picture of a doll with a cracked head and a dead bird (actually all those old covers were frightening. The giant wasp and the diddy little aeroplane, the apple that is actually a skull, splashes of blood and staring eyes).
Hopefully it's still a favourite, but rereading the earlier Tommy and Tuppence books (and the Bundle Brents and all) I found I didn't like them as much as I had when I was young. They're too silver screen and wisecracky.
Incidentally, this was also one of the Geraldine McEwan Marples I couldn't stand. What was Marple even doing there? Why did Tuppence have to be completely rewritten as this flaky drunk whose children patronised her as a result?

Anyway, last one..

Endless Night - Agatha Christie. As I said earlier, I'm getting into my less favourite ones now, and this is definitely one of those. I remember feeling cheated when I read it.
I was babysitting, so must have been in my teens, and I haven't read it again until now (or rather until a week ago). It's cleverly done, more cleverly that I could appreciate at the time I think, but it still leaves me cold.

So that's the library haul. I'm lucky that I live and work in places with good libraries, I can't imagine what I'd have to spend on books if I didn't.

Two Churches in Kensington

St Mary Abbots

I've never found St Mary Abbots open, but that's undoubtedly because I've mostly tried after work or in my lunchbreaks. According to the website they open three times a day for prayer, which is more than reasonable. 

Outside is very pleasant indeed, the churchyard and public gardens making a small quiet space just off Kensington High Street. On the same site is a primary school of the same name, and although you can't see it from this angle there are hopscotch squares and other children's pavement games painted just this side of those cloisters. 

The gardens look rather bare at the moment, but these daffodils 

in the churchyard caught my eye.  

The main entrance of the church is on Kensington High Street, with a flower stall outside it (actually if you walk the length of the High Street there are 3 flower stalls, not counting the one in the station arcade) and a war memorial I want to photograph but can never get a good shot of because it would have to be taken from across the road, and it's just too busy. 

The building itself appears to be a solidly built Victorian church, and was constructed in response to the increasing population in the parish. 

The old church, which was pulled down to make way for it, is pictured on the British History Online website here (you need to scroll about halfway down the page).

St Sarkis

Another church I've never been in, and in this case I don't suppose I ever will, is St Sarkis, otherwise known as the Armenian Church. St Sarkis is tucked away over the other side of Kensington High Street in Iverna Gardens. It's on the way to Earls Court (avoiding Earls Court Rd, which is much less pleasant to walk down) and that's how it caught my eye. 

Look at that sky - and it was a week before the

other photographs.

It's small for a church and was built in the 20s, to the memory of the parents of the man who put up the money, but for the use of the growing Armenian community in London at the time. A little gem in Portland Stone that I'm not sure ever opens at all.

More information at Historic England here.