Books on Shelves – and elsewhere

I don’t remember what bookcases I had as a child. I must have had them, because books must live somewhere and we were in a rented property where we weren’t supposed to drill, but they don’t seem to have stuck. I remember the wooden pelmet over the window when we first moved to Cobham, wide enough for a small pile of books and easy to reach from my upper bunk (I had to take the upper, my brother used to fall out of bed), and the row of Jane Austens and the big green book of the Bronte sisters that lived on the sideboard for years (Do people still have sideboards with drop leaf drinks cabinets and shallow shelves for ornaments? They seemed so sophisticated when I was a child, and so dated now.).

I don’t remember any other books in that first flat. Paperbacks - old Fontana Agatha Christies with wasps and apples and dripping blood on the covers, were kept in the cupboard under the stairs, along with the meter and a pile of 50ps to feed it, but that was a little later and I had my own bedroom with woodchip walls and a lampshade and curtains in the same shiny pink material, and an unused metal fireplace which had my radio cassette on. 

But where were my books? I had them – four of the fairy books, although I remember the pink best, an anthology of poems (It had the one which begins hurt no living thing, ladybird nor butterfly), all the Narnia books, most of the flower fairy ones including an wall alphabet which concertinaed, the Wizard of Oz, a big green book of the hobbit I think my brother borrowed, again with illustrations. There must have been thirty Enid Blytons, acquired one by one, some second hand and some new, the famous five and the secret seven and one with a character called fatty whose real name was Frederick, and a dog who closed doors behind him.

Mr Pink-Whistle and The Last of the Dragons and some others, Mrs Pepperpot and The Phoenix and the Carpet. The Last Legionary Quartet, Grinny, Star Wars, the Stainless steel rat, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Elidor and the girl guide annuals one of the other kids in the street kindly brought in for me when I got knocked down and couldn’t go out.

They all fell apart under the pressure of my hot little hands I expect, read in the bath, in the cloakroom at school while the rest of my year were watching Smokey and the Bandit in the main hall for the umpteenth time, read in bed and on car journeys. Many I outgrew and weeded out. There’s no mystery about where they went, only where they were housed when I had them.

I remember the second bedroom I had to myself had white curtains with blue flowers, and between the windows was the doll’s house I broke over the years – climbing on it (or keeping, now I think back, books in it, but surely I had shelves as well?) I remember having a clock radio with green glowing digits, and a pink electric blanket, and a chest of drawers with doors beneath, formerly white and now painted grey.

And now I do remember a bookcase that I tried to decorate with varnish and cut out bits of wrapping paper, a technique I later learnt was called decoupage. It must have looked awful..

I’ve no idea what happened to it. Perhaps it ended up in the shed when we moved again and I put up my own shelves - two pink ones on brackets and then three or four long boring brown ones on bronze coloured wallbars, the top row high to reach unless I stood on the bed, accidentally dusted with mauve and duck egg dots, like everything else in the room, after I stencilled dragonflies up the walls and onto the ceiling and chased them with a waterspray bottle of the same paint.

I don’t remember if I owned any books I didn’t read. I don’t think so - but since I recently tested how many of the books I own now that I’ve actually read (by the simple method of moving all the unread books on my current bookcases to the right of the shelves) - and found that I have only read ‘most’ of them if by ‘most’ I mean ‘slightly more than half’, I’m not as confident about this as I was.

Current bookcases are 4 narrow ‘Billy’ bookcases, one wide one, a stepped cream coloured case from Laura Ashley, and a largish bookcase with wire legs, so this really is quite a lot of unread books. And that, now I’m aware of them, seems a shame. If I’m not going to read them I should probably pass them along to someone who will.  

I’ve had this thought before - there is a pile of penguin travels stacked up at the moment as the plan (about 2 years ago) was to read them one by one and decide whether to keep them or give them away. I did start – and that put me on to The Innocents Abroad, by Mark Twain, so it wasn’t entirely wasted - but I completely forgot the original plan. 

There is also a pile of books waiting to go to the bookswap which I’ve mentioned already, with the addition, now, of The Flight from the Enchanter, by Iris Murdoch, which I gave up on after 100 pages.

It’s a start.    

One bookcase,

 with unread books sorted to the right.

Fiction by Genre as Opposed to Genre Fiction..

..because to me the two are not the same. 

'Genre Fiction' is fiction written to fall into a specific genre and therefore with a specific target audience. Books not written with that goal in mind may be sorted into genre to make it easier for the reader to find more of the sort of thing they like, or so the bookshop knows where to shelf it, or even so the marketing department don't have a nervous breakdown, but that doesn’t make it genre fiction and doesn’t mean any specific reader falls in or out of the target demographic.

This is why it makes little sense to debate whether Jane Austen wrote romance novels or comedies of manner. There's nothing inherently wrong with the question - it makes little difference to the books and none at all to our author, and it contributes to lively discussion - it's just unfortunate that the answer may mean half the reading population won't pick them up. 

Another example of the dangers of allocating books to genre might be the Portrait of Mr WH, which if it hadn't fallen into the ‘classics’ net by virtue of age, would probably be filed under ‘gay interest’, where 90% of people would walk on by because they fall out of that particular demographic.

All of which goes some way towards explaining why snotty remarks about adults reading young adult fiction give me a pain in the back of my neck, I look slightly askance at the ‘classic’ shelf in the library and the release of Jane Austen in pastel covers that subliminally scream ‘chicklit’ wind me up.

It’s all designed not only to lead readers to more of the sort of thing they've read before, but to subdivide them so that they can be better marketed to. Presumably the next step (if it hasn't happened already) will be publishing houses dictating what kind of things authors should write in order to cater to specific parts of said market.

So in the spirit of proving there is good stuff in all and any genres you could possibly think of I will be blogging, over the coming weeks, looking at each in turn. It’s a personal view, the list is not definitive, and I’m sure I’ll put some of the books into categories others would not. But that, to recap my point above, is because these are no hard and fast rules. Read wide, read old and new, but most of all, read what you like. Not what you're told to.

edit: Oh dear this never happened did it? Too ambitious a project... One day, maybe, and my last sentence still stands. 

Moaning about the weather...

..is something I refuse to conform to stereotype and do.

But it's not been as warm as it was and I've been spending more time indoors reading than out wandering around.

This is a small pile of the books I've just read or am just starting to read. The red hardback is Studies in Literature by Quiller-Couch, which is a logical progression from Q's Legacy (the Hanff you can see without it's title shown.)

They were all good, but I'll start with the one I picked up last, The portrait of Mr W.H. by Oscar Wilde.

Beguiling is the word I think. I doubt I’d normally be able to care much about any theory regarding who Shakespeare wrote his sonnets to/about but the framework of the story and the obsession and the writing pull you along in the enthusiasm and you begin to see why the anonymous narrator believes in it (and why he wants so much to believe. No wonder Wilde was advised not to publish, it’s too personally revealing)*.  

The book I read just before it was E M Forster's Aspects of the Novel, which was originally delivered as a series of lectures. The first chapter should be compulsory reading for certain journalists and other compulsive writers of pointless lists of pointless facts. I don't agree on all points with what Forster thinks a Novel should be, or even on what it is, but that's not the point. The point is it got me thinking about, and gave me a better understanding of, authors I can't enjoy as well as those I can. 

The Quiller-Couch is also a series of lectures. The first of which is about Byron, who seems to be having something of a low ebb in popularity when the lecture is given. (The book was first published in 1922, and there’s a rather touching foreword apologising for the roughness of the lectures but thanking Heaven for the reason – the ending of the first world war and the 'refluence of youth' back to the universities).

I do wonder how much of the appeal of these kind of books for me is literary and how much based in my interest in history. Q was brought alive for me by Helene Hanff.  Wilde and Byron are known, of course, by people who never intend to read their work. 

Q has his own criticisms of Byron but takes exception to his being vilified for being ‘An evil man in an evil age’ and quotes Macaulay on the occasional fits of public morality that make a scapegoat of a man no worse than many others. 

I was curious about whether he had anything to say on Oscar Wilde, but a quick google shows reminiscences of them often meeting for lunch in La Belle Sauvage, and working in parallel if not together, so perhaps that would have been inappropriate, or even dangerous.  

Avoiding the obvious parallels of public adoration, reaction, and early death that haunt the histories of Wilde and Byron (which I’m sure someone somewhere has written a lengthy thesis on and therefore need not, as Q might say, detain us here) I’m especially struck by the amount of poetry in both the books I’m reading. I don’t normally read a lot of poetry, and when I do read it I have to read aloud, or at the very least slow down and consciously sound the words in my head as if I was reading aloud, otherwise I can’t catch the rhythm. 

The next logical step in this chain of course is for me to read Byron and the Shakespeare sonnets, but that, frankly, is a far more time consuming task for far colder weather than this. 

*_{This review also posted to the Guardian books blog. So apologies for that. The internet has enough repetition without me adding to it.}

Travels with Books

I seem to have read a lot of travel literature lately, possibly in an effort to escape the rain and back to work feeling that usually permeates January. It’s supposedly the month when summer holidays are largely booked, and definitely the month when they’re pushed. I’ve had twice weekly emails from Easyjet and there were colour supplements in all the papers. It only calmed down a bit as we approached Valentine’s Day and the equally aggressive promotion that entails.

Anyway my own version of the seasonal escape fantasy has been reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s travels – courtesy of the kindle – and also Mark Twain’s. Or rather selected highlights from both, as these are not full books. The Stevenson was free from Project Gutenberg so must have been published over a century ago; the other is a slim penguin that came in a set entitled ‘great travels’.

I have rather a lot of these – bought en masse from a bookclub that did good deals until they merged or turned into something called The Softback Preview, which specialised in printings of hardback books in soft covers about 8 months before the official paperback came out, for not that much of a discount on the hardback price. No doubt somebody somewhere thought it was going to be the next big thing. I have no idea if they’re still going.

Anyway before they became obsessed with this strange new mezzanine between two stages in the usual life cycle of the book they did quite good deals and one of those was complete sets of these very slim penguins – short books all on one theme: ‘great ideas’ or ‘great voyages’ or ‘great loves’.

About 40 of which have sat on my bookshelves for the last 10 years unread. Until these last few weeks when I began to read them.

So far I’ve gone through 4 and a bit and what I’ve discovered, perhaps unsurprisingly, is a series of abridgements. For 3 of them that has worked quite well – it’s given me just enough for me to decide whether I want to read the longer book. For example I have already downloaded the full text of Twain’s ‘The Innocents' Abroad’ and have no desire to read the rest of Alfred Russel Wallace.

I have also enjoyed Kapuscinski almost being bitten by a cobra and learned that Orwell joined the militia in Spain because it ‘seemed the obvious thing to do’, regardless of the fact he had actually gone over to write newspaper articles. 

Having read a few of Orwell’s works and his account of his school days, I’ve long thought that there is a kind of tension between Orwell the writer – whose job it is to observe and note - and Orwell the doer, who prefers getting his hands dirty and seems to actively seek spiritual and physical discomfort. Not because he enjoyed it, but because he believed it had a kind of moral virtue.  I haven’t finished the Orwell yet.

I struggled also to finish ‘From the Meadows of Gold’. Unlike the others in the series (so far) it appears to be written almost as a textbook – lists of seas and kingdoms and races, extraordinarily dry.

Whether that is the case with the original – and it should perhaps be remembered that it is a scholarly work, the writer is not a novelist like Twain or Stevenson or Orwell and there may be a conscious decision on the part of the author not to let the self intrude – or whether perhaps something has been lost in translation I can’t make out.

It also suffers very much more from the abridgements, perhaps because the book was not complete in and of itself when written. There are references to Al Mas’udi’s earlier works, now sadly lost, and a feeling I’m getting only half a picture.

Ideally I would like to find another translation. Preferably one with a map so I can work out where all these kingdoms he talks about actually are.  Sadly Project Gutenberg doesn’t seem to have it.

I did find some other interesting things though. Another book on the Thames by G E Mitton, sibling of the one I own already. I’m not sure when each was published, but it’s interesting to me that these two different books with different illustrators, different prose, presumably written relatively closely together, have the same title and author. Was there no worry they might be confused?

I’ve also realised that I had foolishly pictured G E as an Oxford don, male and spectacled, bowed over his desk to write in a crabbed and faded ink as the rain dulled the little light through his leaded windows and distorted his view of mortarboards crossing the quad. In reality it seems Mrs Mitton lived in Burma, the wife of a journalist and colonial administrator with whom she collaborated on several novels.

Accordingly, there are seven books mentioned on her Wikipedia page; but she clearly contributed to more, adding the prose to my two books of the Thames, which are largely picture books, as well as those on various London Districts, a book of Cornwall and a Children’s Book of Stars. All now waiting to be read.

While I’m having my small clear out of physical books – reading my skinny little travel series and disposing of them to the Wimbledon Station bookswap – I could in theory also get rid of some of the books I have both on the kindle and on my shelves. My copy of Room With a View has an unnecessarily frothy cover (as does Maurice, but Maurice is not yet out of copyright so it won’t be leaving me until I find an edition I prefer) similarly Where Angels Fear to Tread was, I think, read on the kindle, so I have no sentimental attachment to the physical book and should probably dispose of it before I develop one.

Brideshead Revisited is a battered school hardback which I bought in Wales – one of the blessings of the kindle is now I don’t have to take books on holiday there’s more room in my case to bring back the books I’ve bought on holiday. The battered hardback replaces the nice new penguin edition I bought at the airport on the way out to see my Aunt in Italy and left there because they had no access to English TV as yet and had fallen back on reading.

The other book I left there was Bitter Lemons of Cyprus, which I also recommend but have not replaced. Lawrence Durrell is the older brother of Gerald Durrell, whose books were amongst those I rescued from the school library before they got rid of it. My shelves also hold one of Lawrence’s novels, in which I have a vaguely maternal interest largely because of Gerry’s observation of his brother’s trials and tribulations trying to get the things written and published. The novel is Justine, set a little later and written later still: the first in the Alexandrian Quartet. I barely glanced into it before but have now devoured it enthusiastically, not least because the descriptions of the city itself, while far from lyrical, are descriptions of heat and dust, sweat and sunshine. Something I have been badly in need of these last few weeks of rain and cold.

Durrell treats the city like another character, almost more alive than the people who live there. There’s a fatalism that seems to come from the place itself, and the protagonists too apathetic to escape it. It sounds affected but in fact this is quite comprehensible in the narrator. He is a thinker (some might say an overthinker) not a doer, and might well drift into affairs despite himself, analysing where he should act. And perhaps he sees that same quality in others because he’s projecting it there.

It’s a book that makes you ask yourself those sort of questions: Is it possible to love someone chiefly for their flaws, to fall out of love purely because those flaws have been cured? Is all love possessive by nature or is the narrator projecting that also?

Or, as someone put it in an amazon review, ‘with all that sex, shouldn’t somebody being enjoying it?’ Is the melancholy that gently infuses the pages the result of hindsight, or what the narrator genuinely felt at the time?

I have already bought the next in the quartet, which is Balthazar. Perhaps that will provide some answers. Or more questions. I'm looking forward to either.  

I'm not sure I agree..

Just been watching Rococo on BBC iplayer, and on talking about Canaletto's paintings of Warwick Castle the narrator Waldemar Janusczak has said that you only get skies like that in your dreams in Britain. Have to say I don't agree, you do get sunshine here. It's rare, and the transport system goes nearly as daft as when it snows, but we do get at least a few days of blue skies every year. No snow though, in 2013-14, and I'm very disappointed.

Also where is Waldemar from? He sounds so terribly British (even to the point of whinging about the weather, every Brits' prerogative.) that the name is a surprise.
Anyway, it turns out he's from Basingstoke.

Home Counties Drear, if that were only a movement.

My brother nearly decided to live in to Basingstoke once (he worked for Arding and Hobbs before they went bust and there was a big store there.) so I'm reasonably familiar with it. I think I'd take a deep intoxicating dive into the  baroque and rococo if I were from there as well. There is an old town core, with a church and so on, but sometimes that's more depressing than a new town made from nothing.  At least then they've only insulted the wheat fields by plonking an invading new town on top, not a nice little place that might have grown quite organically if it had only been left alone.

I have no clever finish to this blog entry. Write your own.

Schoenberg

Listening to Schoenberg at the moment. A composer I wasn't previously aware of, which I'm sure says more about me than him. I've recently discovered his existence courtesy of an article in Five Dials. Five Dials is a curious magazine which rather reminds me of the magazines of a hundred years ago - The early Strand and All the Year Round. An admixture of features, journalism, cartoons, short stories and articles which assume a reasonable amount of intelligence on the part of the reader. This article was on twelve tone music, and mentioned Alban Berg and Schoenberg. 

It also quoted Yehudi Menuhin talking about Schoenberg thus. ‘There isn’t great contrast – intervallic contrast – between dissonance and consonance . . . So the only contrast there could be is between sound and no sound, and that is probably where there are so many pauses.'

But the really interesting thing was the simile Menuhin used to describe this music. ‘There is a curious dis­crepancy between the gesture and the words. It’s as if you’d taken the words apart of, say, a play like Hamlet, and mere­ly strung together an arbitrary sequence of syllables that had no meaning as such, but the rhythm and the gesture of the play were copied absolutely, so that the per­son who knew the play would recognize where the love scene takes place, and the ghost, and so on.’

Because I personally think that could make a very, very good play. Somewhat challenging for the actors, having to learn lines with no meaning, although the fact a great deal of Hamlet is in iambic pentameter might give something to lock onto – just as we were taught Frere Jacques as children without being able to distinguish any one particular word.

And this is the point at which I wonder whether the use of Iambic Pentameter in the theatre was in part a device for helping actors remember long speeches. As well as a subtle hint as to mental state and/or status. 

And my own opinion on Schoenberg? That it sounds like cinema music to me, as if it needs a visual element to be complete. I'll listen to a few more pieces, but I can't see myself coming back regularly to this composer.