Reading etc.

Look, the Economist says I’m healthy.

“Wait for Me” by Deborah Devonshire

How many Mitfords can one girl take? The sane sister gives her take on her upbringing and relationships with her sisters. A bit like seeing how the magician’s tricks are done. She has a style that tends slightly towards listing things. There’s a whole chapter at the end devoted to all the great parties she’s been to which, frankly, could have been left out. She’s also much too sensible to be nasty about anyone so that side of her personality, which was visible in her letters, is left out. Which, though worthy, is, alas, dull. Only for the hardcore Mitford enthusiast.

“Free Agent” by Jeremy Duns[New Year’s Resolution]

This is not my kind of book at all but it was written by a friend from Brussels and my loving husband bought it for me for Christmas. I must say, it was quite thrilling and I was dying to get back to it even though I did get somewhat confused between agent and counter-agent. It’s set in the 1960s and our hero is a spy. Any further details might ruin it for you.

What is hilarious, at least for me, is that the author is so utterly unlike his anti hero. I was emailing him back and forth about the book and he commented that his daughter was sitting near him watching television while eating a jam sandwich and refusing to get dressed while he was mentally preparing for another day of researching secret weapons.

“The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell

I am coming to this somewhat later than everyone else on the planet and maybe because the internet has changed so many things in the past ten years or maybe because the ideas are now mainstream, I am distinctly underwhelmed. There’s a lot about Sesame Street for aficionados. There’s a whole chapter about smoking that was clearly written for something else and is shoehorned in at the end. It’s alright, I suppose.

“Pigeon Pie” by Nancy Mitford

I thought that this might be another name for “Wigs on the Green” which is a roman à clef and given my doctorate level knowledge of the Mitfords due to incessant reading over the past couple of months, I think I have the clef. Alas, it is not and, I realised, as I read, that I had read this before and not enjoyed it much. On re-reading, I wasn’t overly impressed. It’s alright but just a bit slight. Very mildly amusing in places. Sigh.

“Noblesse Oblige” edited by Nancy Mitford

It contains the famous “U and non-U” essay. If you need to know who said mirror and who said looking glass in 1955, this is the book for you. Oh, it’s alright and of mild historical interest, I suppose but it’s not worth a re-read.

“Mothers and Sons” by Colm Toibín [New Year’s Resolution]

A collection of short stories on this theme. Some are better than others. I think this collection suffers somewhat from the William Trevor phenomenon where all the stories feel like they are from the 1950s regardless of when they purport to be set. He’s a good writer though. He really is.

“The Ruby in the Smoke” by Philip Pullman

This is a detective novel for teenagers set in Victorian London. It was seriously recommended to me by someone at a party before I was married and I have been meaning to read it ever since. It probably wasn’t worth storing up for 11 years but it’s perfectly acceptable aside from the author’s tendency to lecture about the rights of women. I am all for the rights of women and I would describe myself as a feminist but I feel slightly hectored by Mr. Pullman.

“The Shadow in the North” by Philip Pullman [New Year’s Resolution]

More of Ms. Lockhart, Victorian London’s most liberated young lady. I am now officially tired of Mr. Pullman hectoring me about the rights of women.

“Testament of Youth” by Vera Brittain [New Year’s Resolution]

and

“Letters from a Lost Generation” Edited by Alan Bishop and Mark Bostridge

It turns out that Vera Brittain and Vera Lynn [Blue clouds over the White Cliffs etc.] are completely different women. You knew that didn’t you? I read these two books in tandem. “Testament of Youth” is far superior as it has a voice from the 30s, a surprisingly modern voice, describing the events which are covered in the collected letters and frankly, some of those letters deserve to be cut as Vera Brittain has done in her book. For example, as far as I can see, the bulk of Vera’s brother Edward’s letters in 1918 deal with his lost valise and lost luggage was about as interesting then as it is now.

What is interesting about the letters book is that it quotes from letters which Vera Brittain did not have access to for copyright reasons and includes photographs and copies of original documents. So, we see Victor Richardson’s application for a commission in the Territorial Army which asks – question 1 “Are you a British subject by birth or naturalization?” followed by question 2 “Are you of pure European descent?” Other less vital matters follow. The letters book also provides more general information that Vera Brittain’s clearly could not, for example it states that “In 1934, the year following the publication of Testament of Youth, Vera made the discovery that, shortly before the action in which he was killed, Edward [her brother] had been faced with an enquiry and, in all probability, a courtmartial when his battalion came out of the line because of his homosexual involvement with men in his company.”

Both books do convey the misery of war, particularly the dreadful uncertainty but to me the startling thing is how the first world war seems to have really ushered in the modern age. Apparently, it’s true, wars do speed up social change. Early in her book, Brittain comments on clothes for young women before the war:

… all girls’ clothing of the period appeared to be designed by their elders on the assumption that decency consisted in leaving exposed to the sun and air no part of the human body that could possibly be covered with flannel. In these later days, when I…watch the lean brown bodies of girl-children, almost naked and completely unashamed, leaping in and out of the water, I am seized with and angry resentment against the conventions of twenty years ago, which wrapped up my comely adolescent body in woollen combinations, black cashmere stocking, “liberty” bodice, dark stockinette knickers, flannel petticoat and often, in addition, a long-sleeved, high-necked, knitted woollen “spencer.”

At school, on the top of this conglomeration of drapery, we wore green flannel blouses in the winter and white flannel blouses in the summer, with long navy blue skirts linked to the blouses by elastic belts which continually slipped up or down, leaving exposed an unsightly hiatus of blouse-tape or safety-pinned shirt band. Green and white blouses alike had long sleeves ending in buttoned cuffs at the wrist, and high collar covering the neck almost to the chin and fastening tightly at the throat with stiff green ties. For cricket and tennis matches, even in the baking summer of 1911 we still wore the flowing skirts and high-necked blouses, with our heavy hair braided in pigtails..

Meanwhile, her family have gone from a large house full of servants to a flat where it is impossible to find help and her brother Edward finds himself doing the dishes when the maid is ill – mind you this is still so odd that it’s worth commenting on in a letter.

By the end of “Testament of Youth” I do begin to feel really sorry for Vera. The world has changed utterly and the people she loved most are dead. Unfortunately I find it very difficult to relate to her in her letters as she sounds a bit of a prig. There is a huge difference in the narrative which, is, for the most part, more reasonable and self-deprecating but, also, by definition, written for publication. I think she’s patronising throughout about her parents but she had a difficult time with them, I suppose.

At the end of the book, there is quite a hefty bit on after the war. The author was an early feminist and she talks with considerable enthusiasm about carving out a career for herself. Then, she met another man

Marriage, for any woman who considered all its implications both for herself and her contemporaries, could never, I now knew, mean a “living happily ever after”; on the contrary it would involve another protracted struggle, a new fight against the tradition which identified wifehood with the imprisoning limitation of a kitchen and four walls, against the prejudices and regulations which still made success in any field more difficult for the married woman than for the spinster and penalised motherhood by demanding from it the surrender of disinterest intelligence, the sacrifice of that vitalising experience only to be found in the pursuit of an independent profesison.

Are you listening Oliver James?

She goes on to say:

Today, as never before, it was urgent for individual women to show that life was enriched, mentally and spirtiually as well as physically and soically, by marriage and children; that the experiences rendered the woman who accepted them the more and not the less able to take the world’s pulse; to estimate its tendencies, to play some definite, hard-headed, hard-working part in furthering the consturctive ends of a political civilisation.

Would you say that this has been achieved? No, really?

There is a lot of detail about the early days of the League of Nations which the author ardently supports. However, it makes for heavy going especially when the events are not as clear as they would have been to a contemporary reader – the following paragraph is typical:

“In the opening days of the Assembly, Mr. MacDonald and M. Herriot…had made “Arbitration, Security and Disarmament” the triple slogan of the hour; they had wrung one another’s hands in public, had been photographed together, and now had left Geneva to simmer pleasantly in a consoling atmosphere of peace and goodwill very different from the hectic antagonism aroused by the Corfu dispute of the previous Spetember.

You need to be strong to get through a lot of this stuff.

Anyhow, I think that both these books are too long. In my view, by far the best book I’ve read on the first world war is Robert Graves’s “Goodbye to all that” [in college at the same time as VB and rates a couple of mentions] which I think I will reread and which, if memory serves me, is also quite a bit shorter.

“Gone” by Michael Grant

Very enjoyable sci-fi teenager thing, if that’s you’re thing. Everyone over 14 disappears. Everyone left is trapped in an area with a diameter of 20 miles. And there are mutants. Great stuff.

“Hunger” by Michael Grant

Three months later and the kids in book 1 are running out of food. Not as good as volume 1 but there you are – still very pacy.

“Lies” by Michael Grant

Volume 3, very put downable.

“Plague” by Michael Grant

Volume 4 and we’re back on form – nasty illnesses strike the abandoned children. Not for those who don’t enjoy reading about parasitic insects.

This evening I was the lucky recipient of an email from a PR firm asking me to promote a number of products. The details of the one that caught my eye are as follows:

My Beautiful Mommy: Must Have for Mom’s Undergoing Plastic Surgery

Young children are naturally curious – they’re full of questions and excited to learn about the world they live in. However, as times change, children’s curiosities have addressed more complex and sensitive issues, often at younger ages. In today’s American culture, more than ever, answers can increasingly be found in children’s books. Everything from divorce and global warming to potty habits and how to deal with a death in the family, children’s books have tackled it all. Dr. Michael Salzhauer, a Miami board-certified plastic surgeon and father of four, has taken the reins on a very hot topic and wrote [sic] “My Beautiful Mommy,” the first ever children’s book that addresses plastic surgery. To learn more about the book , you can visit: www.mybeautifulmommy.com

Where will it all end?

On the other hand, this is more appealing.

“Greenwitch” by Susan Cooper
“The Grey King” by Susan Cooper
“Silver on the Tree” by Susan Cooper

So, I persisted with “The Dark is Rising” series – it’s alright, I suppose, but I think that there was something deeply appealing about the first book that is missing in the others. The author does have a great sense of place and that comes across in the settings of all of the books. I also like the way that she inserts Welsh phrases into “The Grey King” without translation or much by way of explanation. Nice touch. But for me, I think I am just too old to enjoy these properly. The nice thing about children’s books though, is how they respect the rules. In Greenwitch, the children are fighting the dark for the survival of mankind but they can only do it in the Easter holidays and our hero is worried that the week provided by the school authorities won’t be long enough. Well, rules are rules, even if evil is about to take over.

I thought the last book which was largely set in fantasy land was the weakest of the bunch. When she talks about England and Wales and an idealised landscape she is really quite unbeatable. The “Lost Land” is just tedious. But maybe not if you’re 13 which is probably when I should have read them.

“The Memory Chalet” by Tony Judt

A series of autobiographical essays, vaguely reminiscent of W.G. Sebald, except that I enjoyed them. The essays are full of nostalgia for the 40s, 50s and 60s which I found very appealing. They are very readable though about hard ideas so they make you feel clever. Always welcome. The one about French intellectuals is the best.

“Decca, The Letters of Jessica Mitford” edited by Peter Sussman [New Year’s resolution list]

Lads, this is a massive book. 700 odd pages. Why, oh why are American books so bloodly long?

Once you are sucked into the world of the Mitfords, you never really leave. Last summer I read “The Mitfords: Letters between Six Sisters” which was a collection of the sisters’ letters edited by Diana Mosley’s daughter-in-law Charlotte Mosley. I enjoyed it very much.

What this book suffers from by comparison is that it is all one voice. Only Jessica Mitford’s letters. The early letters are pretty dull but as she gets beyond her 20s, they are a lot more interesting. She becomes a much more compassionate and appealing person (I suppose we all do). And although she was doing very interesting things in her 20s, somehow she fails to convey much. I feel that she was probably putting up a brave front and that makes for a dull read.

If you are steeped in Mitford knowledge, then you will be aware that Jessica (or Decca – the nicknames, Lord, the nicknames – here’s a selection of the sisters’ nicknames for each other – Sooze, Cord, Honks, Bobo, Woman, Hen) is the second youngest, that she eloped to Spain with her cousin, Esmond Romilly; moved to America; stayed there when he died; married a radical lawyer and wrote about the American funeral industry. What I found really interesting was her life after Romilly’s death. This doesn’t really get a great airing in most of the accounts I have read. She was a committed communist, very happily married to a radical lawyer for the rest of her life. And she knew EVERYONE. Random example – Hillary Clinton was an intern in her husband’s office. They really were an extraordinary family. Each of the 6 daughters, other than Pam, did very, very unusual things. Jessica fell out with them all when she eloped with Romilly. As a dedicated communist, she was peeved with her sister Diana who married Oswald Mosley and didn’t see her for 34 years. There is a rather funny letter where she describes meeting Diana while weeding in her sister Nancy’s garden. When Diana asks what she is doing, she says that she refrained from saying that she was giving the irises lebensraum.

For someone so unconventional, she does seem to have been unhappy about her daughter living in sin. Not so much for the sin but because, I think, she felt that it made for a somewhat unstable relationship. She was a veteran of many anti-racism campaigns. She used to front to buy houses for black families in white neighbourhoods. In response to the regularly asked question “Would you let your daughter marry a negro?” she answered “Rather!” Her daughter’s partner was black.

I find myself veering wildly in my opinion as to whether I would like to be around her. At times her letters are so funny and loving and she bore all sorts of deprivations very cheerfully. But, my goodness, she was quarrelsome and not at all inclined to just let things go. In the end, I think this made her what she was but she could be difficult, I feel.

I did enjoy this book but it was just too long and I am already steeped in Mitford knowledge (though considering re-reading Nancy’s novels and “Hons and Rebels” after this). If you fancy getting into the Mitfords, and there’s plenty of material to go around, Charlotte Mosley’s book is just much better. If you’re there already, then this is worth a read. Perhaps more fun for an American audience than a European one as dramatis personae presumably better known.

“A Soldier for Eden” by James Congdon [New Year’s resolution list]

There is potentially excellent material here. This is the story of a young American boy who ends up joining the fedayeen by accident and proves himself an outstanding recruit. Unfortunately, the author has a gift for making everything dull. Not recommended.

I saw this before on Librarything and then it turned up on facebook (what is this facebook people speak of?) and felt I had to do it because I know I will triumph as I always finish everything.

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. I’ve read 62. Ha. I knew, one day, I would be glad that I had read all of “A Hundred Years of Solitude”. I have bolded the ones I have read. Should you wish to do likewise, don’t let me stop you.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier [I heard the audiobook – does that count?]

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot (TWICE, I read it twice and I didn’t like it the first time – long story)

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis

34 Emma-Jane Austen

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel

52 Dune – Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses – James Joyce

76 The Inferno – Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal – Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession – AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry [I’ve read “Such a Long Journey” – that must count for something, it nearly killed me.]

87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom [Please note, this may be one of the worst books I have ever read. I bought it in an airport; it was recommended by the bookshop staff.]

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

94 Watership Down – Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo