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2 January 2006

• Gertrude Jekyll was a well-known British garden designer and writer in the last half of the 19th century and the first part of the 20th. I've come across her ideas (particularly about color) in other gardening books and found them attractive enough to investigate further, which I did by reading a collection of her garden writing, The Gardener's Essential Gertrude Jekyll (selected and introduced by Elizabeth Lawrence). This is an excellent collection, taken from many of her books and organized by theme, so that one gets a good sense of the depth and breadth of Jekyll's plant knowledge and design theories. Really, the only thing that was missing was illustrations, so after finishing The Gardener's Essential Gertrude Jekyll, I turned to Richard Bisgrove's The Gardens of Gertrude Jekyll. Full of lovely photographs and excellent illustrations and plans of Jekyll's gardens, in England, France, and the US, this was the perfect companion to the other book, showing in great detail just how Jekyll put her theories and knowledge to use in her design.

Books read: 2

3 January 2006

• Having finally seen the new movie, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, I decided to reread C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, for the first time in years. (If you're interested, here are George's thoughts on it, with which I largely agree.) The books, in publication order (which is how I strongly recommend they be read the first time, at least), are: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader", The Silver Chair, The Horse and His Boy, The Magician's Nephew, and The Last Battle. I find that although I still enjoy them, these haven't worn as well over the years as Tolkien (the inevitable comparison, given that he and Lewis were friends and belonged to the same writing group). There's much to enjoy and wonder at in Lewis's world (especially in my favorite of the series, The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader"), but the world simply isn't as deep as Tolkien's, and so for me, Narnia doesn't have the same continuing appeal as Middle-Earth.

Books read: 2

6 January 2006

• I seem to be reading a lot in wodges this month; here's a wodge of P.G. Wodehouse, plus a biography. The three Wodehouse novels I read are: The Code of the Woosters, which with its gorgeously intricate plot might be the best of the Wooster and Jeeves books; Pigs Have Wings, an entertaining late novel about Lord Emsworth, Blandings Castle, and the prize pig Empress of Blandings; and Leave It to Psmith, which was so good with its insouciant, intelligent, take-life-as-it-comes hero, that I wondered where it had been all my life. After finishing these, I read Robert McCrum's marvelously readable and well-balanced biography, Wodehouse: A Life, which I highly recommend to lovers of Wodehouse or just lovers of good literary biography.

Books read: 4

• Here are another couple of related books: E.M. Delafield's The Way Things Are and R.M. Dashwood's Provincial Daughter. E.M. Delafield wrote the well-known Diary of a Provincial Lady books, and R.M. Dashwood is Delafield's daughter, whose Provincial Daughter is written along the same lines as Diary of a Provincial Lady. I'm not sure it's quite as good, but it's certainly very funny and well worth reading if you like the Provincial Lady.
  
  The Way Things Are has several elements in common with Diary of a Provincial Lady: both are about a wife and mother struggling to balance her domestic life with her emotional life and her literary aspirations. I was startled in reading the Introduction (after I read the book, in case of spoilers) to find that it's considered one of Delafield's funniest books, because although I certainly found it witty, I didn't find it nearly as funny as the Provincial Lady books. Perhaps I was simply too overcome by the subtext, by Delafield's poignant portrayal of a woman striving to find herself as something other than wife and mother; certainly this is the same theme as the Provincial Lady books, but I found it much nearer the surface and more disturbing in The Way Things Are. I may be making it sound as though I didn't like The Way Things Are, and that's not so; in fact, I liked it enough that I'm sorry it's out of print and rather hard to find, because Delafield should be better known for her books outside the Provincial Lady series.

Books read: 2

8 January 2006

• In his new historical novel, Arthur and George, Julian Barnes examines the confluence of the lives of two men: one, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, famous as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, the other an obscure (but equally historical) half-Indian solicitor, George Edalji. Barnes traces his protagonists’ lives in parallel narratives from childhood, showing George’s sheltered life with his parents, his education, and his beginnings as a solicitor, alongside Arthur’s bond with his family, his training as a doctor, and his unhappy love life.
  
  The dual narratives come together when George appeals to Arthur (now Sir Arthur, celebrated all over the world) for help with his case. From an early age, George has been the victim of unpleasant pranks and anonymous letters. Eventually, the pranks turn into something more threatening: a gang of criminals begins to mutilate animals, and George is framed and wrongly brought to trial.
  
  Though their lives are outwardly very different, similar themes twine through them. Both men have an interest in justice, which leads George to become a solicitor and later Arthur to take up his case. They share an concern for truth which informs their religious beliefs; George’s orthodox Christianity, engendered by his vicar father, is severely tested by his ordeal, while Arthur becomes fascinated with spiritualism and life after death.
  
  Arthur and George was shortlisted for the 2005 Booker Prize in Great Britain, and it’s no wonder. Barnes tells the shocking story in lucid, elegant prose and a tightly controlled, masterfully woven narrative. The suspense builds smoothly from the mysterious happenings of George’s childhood, through his trial, to Arthur’s battle on his behalf. Through it all, Barnes imbues his tale with recurring, haunting themes, of truth and justice, of spirituality and religion, and of what is real and what is not.

Books read: 1

9 January 2006

• In The Glass-Blowers, Daphne du Maurier reaches into her own historical background, as she did with Mary Anne, to tell a story of a family of glass workers during the French Revolution. Unfortunately, also as with Mary Anne, although she tells an interesting story, she fails to make it emotionally engaging. The characters are often flat, even the narrator, and even the atmosphere and the sense of place, usually a strong point for du Maurier, aren't compelling. The story was just interesting enough for me to finish the book, but I was disappointed overall. It occurs to me to wonder whether, when writing historical fiction based closely upon research and facts, du Maurier felt so tied to the historical facts that she couldn't fictionalize it enough to make it interesting. Frenchman's Creek is historical, yet not based on historical characters, and it's much better than either The Glass-Blowers or Mary Anne.

Books read: 1

16 January 2006

• Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading is a wide-ranging collection of ruminations on the history of reading. Expecting it to be organized chronologically, I was initially taken aback by the more thematic organization, but I soon grew to appreciate it; it turned the book into a marvelous bedside book, which I happily dipped into a chapter or two at a time. Manguel speaks eruditely yet engagingly of topics from the making of books from clay tablets to CD-ROMs to the creators, readers, translators, and even thieves and burners of books. Anyone who is a passionate reader will recognize Manguel as kin and appreciate his journey through the history of reading.

Books read: 1

17 January 2006

• Kiss Me, Annabel is the second (following Much Ado About You) in Eloisa James's series of Regency Romances about the beautiful Essex sisters, orphaned by the death of their profligate father. The first sister, Tess, having married, the focus here shifts to the second sister, practical Annabel, whose greatest wish is to marry a rich man and never have to live in poverty again. After being dragged into her sister Imogen's affairs, though, Annabel becomes involved with Ewan, a Scottish earl who is rumored to be poor and has come to London in search of a wife. The conflict, which revolves around Annabel's fear of poverty, is a little weak, but I loved Annabel and Ewan's developing relationship and James's sly wit.

Books read: 1

18 January 2006

• A Sudden Wild Magic was, I believe, Diana Wynne Jones's first formal foray into adult fantasy (though of course many of her young adult and children's fantasy appeals to adults as well). This is my third or fourth reread of it, and although I enjoy it, I still don't think it works as well as most of her other books.
  
  The story takes place in two universes: our own, and the universes of the Pentarchy, whose mages are creating environmental havoc on Earth in order to learn from Earth's mages' responses to the crises. When the Earth mages learn this, they send a group of their own to the Pentarchy to stop their operations. There are plenty of laughs and lots of interesting characters, but there's a multiplicity of plotlines and of viewpoints which doesn't quite work for me; the ultimate villain isn't even onstage for the majority of the book, and it makes the ending feel a little unconnected to the rest of the book. If you want to try some DWJ targeted towards adults, I'd recommend Deep Secret over A Sudden Wild Magic.

Books read: 1

19 January 2006

• In The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, Tim Pratt mixes fantasy with Westerns to come up with a weird and exciting ride. Marzi McCarty works at a Santa Cruz coffeehouse, but her real interest is her comic book series The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, featuring a sharpshooting heroine who lives in a fantastical Wild West. When Marzi's friends and customers start acting strange, though, and a mysterious force inhabits the coffeehouse, art intersects with life as Marzi is drawn into her own artistic imagination. The story is told mainly from Marzi's own viewpoint, but Pratt moves deftly between her, her friends, and even the antagonists to create well-rounded, vivid characters. There's an excellent sense of place, both in the real world of Santa Cruz and in the bizarre world of Marzi's imaginings, and the plot moves along at a good clip. I think most readers of fantasy would enjoy The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, and I'll certainly read Pratt again.

Books read: 1

20 January 2006

• Ruth Rendell is well-known as a master of psychological suspense, and her 1993 novel The Crocodile Bird bears out her reputation. It starts with a bang, as 17-year-old Liza is told by her mother Eve that she must immediately leave the small gatehouse where she and Eve have always lived in isolation. Liza must leave because Eve has killed a man and knows that the police will soon be coming for her. Liza runs away to her secret lover, and dual narratives unfold, as Liza tells her lover the story of her upbringing with Eve and learns to live in the real world. The suspense grows as Liza reveals more and more of her past, and Rendell keeps it going masterfully until the final pages. The characters are marvelously delineated, particularly Liza herself and her mother, and I was absorbed from beginning to end. I'm still fairly new to Rendell, but along with Going Wrong, I'd call The Crocodile Bird one of my favorites.

Books read: 1

22 January 2006

• Here's a slew of Regencies by Eloisa James: Duchess in Love, Fool for Love, A Wild Pursuit, and Your Wicked Ways, which form a loose series about a group of aristocratic friends and their forays into romance. Besides the ongoing characters, a couple of themes also link the books: reconciliation with estranged spouses, and children and childbirth. The plots, unfortunately, largely don't live up to the vivid characters and witty dialogue; there's a double whammy involving a faked love letter and the heroine's disability in Fool for Love which really gobsmacked me. Still, though I think James's current series is better, these made decent light weekend reading.

Books read: 4

23 January 2006

• Vicki in Venice and The Secret are the last two books of Lorna Hill's Sadler's Wells series. I read the two immediately preceding them (Back-Stageand Dress Rehearsal) in October and liked them enough to seek out these two. (Girls Gone By reprinted them a couple of years ago, but they're both now out of print and required some searching.)
  
  Vicki in Venice involves Vicki Scott, a recurring character from earlier books, who goes on a holiday to Venice and becomes involved with the queen of the (imaginary) country of Slavonia, whose life is threatened by assassins; it's not deep, but it's good fun and resolves the ongoing romance between Vicki and Jon Craymore. The Secret starts a few years earlier than Vicki in Venice, when an earthquake in Slavonia kills the daughter and son-in-law of Sir Gerald and Lady Waterford; they leave behind a baby, but it's one of two rescued after the earthquake and has no identifying marks or papers. The Waterfords choose one baby to bring up as their grandchild and foster the other out to a local family. The main plot of the book takes place as the children are growing up and naturally involves the finding out of the secret of which is really the heir of the Waterfords. Apparently Hill had planned a sequel which she never wrote, which is too bad, as the outline (provided at the end of this book) sounds interesting; her characters are nicely delineated, and it would have been nice to see them through the second book.

Books read: 2

24 January 2006

• When John Perry turned 75, he visited his wife's grave; then, he joined the Colonial Defense Force and began a new life in interstellar space. John Scalzi's Old Man's War is the story of John Perry's new life and new friends, of his military training and of his battles on alien planets, and most of all, of his growing questions about the nature of a human. This is a fast-paced book, and a witty one -- I frequently laughed out loud -- but it's also a thoughtful one; the comparisons with Heinlein are well-deserved, I think. I enjoyed Old Man's War enormously, and I'm looking forward to Scalzi's next book.

Books read: 1

25 January 2006

• A Time to Dance, No Time To Weep is the first volume of Rumer Godden's autobiography; since I'm fond of her novels, I thought I'd be likely to enjoy her autobiography, and I did. This volume covers about the first forty years of Godden's long life; she died in 1998 at the age of 90. Godden grew up in India with her parents and three sisters and spent much of her later life there; as in many of her novels, she evokes it splendidly here in her autobiography. She describes her growth as a writer, from early stories to her first successful novel, Black Narcissus, the story of English nuns living and working in India. Though her life in this period was frequently unhappy -- an awful boarding school, an unsuccessful first marriage -- Godden's resilience always shows through, and the memoir ends as she returns to England from India, a manuscript under her arm and hope in her heart.

Books read: 1

26 January 2006

• Broadway: The American Musical, by Michael Kantor and Lawrence Maslon, is a companion to the PBS series of the same name. After watching the first episode of the series on DVD, I knew I wanted to read the book too and got it from the library (as it's massive and expensive). Well, now I have to buy my own copy anyway, because it's a marvelous book. It covers the history of Broadway from the late 19th century to today, with lots of photographs, profiles of Broadway artists, essays about the relationship of Broadway to other things such as television and radio, in-depth looks at particular shows, and even analyses of song lyrics. I haven't read much about Broadway, though I'm a longtime fan of musicals, but I'd say that this is an essential book for those interested in the Great White Way.

Books read: 1

27 January 2006

• Donna Tartt's The Secret History is on my favorites page.

Books read: 1

29 January 2006

• After reading Arthur and George, I became interested in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and decided to read The Lost World, which has been sitting unread on our shelves for years, and a biography, Daniel Stashower's Teller of Tales: The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which I got from the library. The Lost World is a stirring adventure tale, of a group of Englishmen who journey to South America to explore a mysterious region where time has stood still, a place of deep forests and swamps, of primitive men and dinosaurs. It's vividly told and full of great descriptions of the setting and of the characters; the irascible Professor Challenger is particularly remarkable (so much so that Doyle wrote about him several more times).
  
  Stashower's Teller of Tales was equally absorbing. Conan Doyle is of course best known as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, but he would much rather have been remembered for his historical fiction and for his efforts on the behalf of the Spiritualist movement, in which he believed deeply. It's difficult to reconcile the creator of Holmes, one of the most logical, reasonable characters ever written, with the man who believed in life after death. Stashower presents Doyle in a sympathetic, perceptive fashion and examines his beliefs objectively and carefully, neither debunking his beliefs as ludicrous nor erring on the side of credulity. It's a difficult line to walk, and Stashower does an admirable job.

Books read: 2

30 January 2006

• When film critic David Denby became interested in the debate about the western canon, which works of "great" literature should be read in colleges, he decided to return to Columbia University, to take their core courses in Western Civilization and to read or reread some of the books at the center of the controversy. Great Books is the story of his year in these courses, of his engagement with authors from Homer to Virginia Woolf and of the teachers and students who surrounded him. Denby slips back and forth between observations on the classes themselves, analyses of the texts, and personal reminiscences with ease, creating a narrative which I found absorbing even when he was discussing a book I hadn't myself read. Great Books is an intellectually engaging, fervent examination of what makes particular works of literature great; I highly recommend it to those interested in the canon debate or those simply interested in reading great books.

Books read: 1

31 January 2006

• I spent a lot of January reading Daphne du Maurier; I've run out of time and energy to do individual posts (except for The Glass-Blowers, which I've already logged), so here's a roundup.
  
  du Maurier is most famous for her psychological thrillers, so I started by rereading some of those: Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel, and The Scapegoat. Rebecca is justly famous, and you're doing yourself a disservice if you've only seen the movie; du Maurier's novel is far more powerful and less romantic. My Cousin Rachel is also reasonably well-known, and I think it's just as good; the tale of two men's obsession with a mysterious woman is taut and suspenseful, and it ends on an interestingly ambiguous note. I hadn't read The Scapegoat in years and had forgotten that I liked it so much. Here, an Englishman is tricked into switching places with his double, a French count, and must take over the count's life, work, and family; du Maurier does some interesting things with identity here.
  
  She also wrote many historical novels; I've previously logged The Glass-Blowers, Frenchman's Creek, and Mary Anne. This time I reread The King's General and The House on the Strand. Like The Glass-Blowers and Mary Anne, I find The King's General somewhat stodgy; though it takes place during the explosive time of the English Civil War, du Maurier is bound too much by the historical facts she wants to work in and doesn't allow her imagination to add enough emotion. Oddly, of her historicals, Frenchman's Creek works best for me, even though (or perhaps because) it's atypical of her fiction.
  
  The House on the Strand is an interesting experiment in blending thriller and historical novel. The narrator, Richard Young, is staying at Kilmarth, the Cornish house of a friend, Professor Magnus Lane; he has promised to test a chemical potion Lane has created and finds that it has the power to return him back in time to the fourteenth century. The fourteenth-century sections are based on the real history of Kilmarth (the house du Maurier herself lived in during her later life) and are more emotionally gripping than much of her other historical fiction. However, it's the present-day sections which are truly thrilling, as Young becomes more and more addicted to the potion, and as the events he experiences in the past begin to have an effect on the present. I find the narrator himself unattractively self-centered, but the interaction of past and present are indubitably thrilling.
  
  As is my habit, I also read a slew of biographies and criticism. Of those I read, I would consider Margaret Forster's excellent biography, Daphne du Maurier: The Secret Life of the Renowned Storyteller, essential reading for du Maurier investigators; it's well-researched, well-told, and sympathetic yet objective. Daphne du Maurier: A Daughter's Memoir, by du Maurier's younger daughter Flavia Leng, shone an interesting light on du Maurier's home life and on her life in her beloved Cornwall; Leng shows a talent for evoking a place similar to that of du Maurier herself. I also read Nina Auerbach's Daphne du Maurier: Haunted Heiress; although my tastes in du Maurier are obviously different from Auerbach's (she dislikes Frenchman's Creek for instance) and I thought she spent too much time on Daphne's grandfather George (the author of Trilby), it was worth reading for its insights into the themes linking du Maurier's novels.
  
  Myself When Young: The Shaping of a Writer and The Rebecca Notebook and Other Memories are both autobiographical works by du Maurier herself. The former covers her formative years as a writer, up until her marriage to Tommy Browning and provides interesting insights into her reasons for writing and early inspirations for her books. I found the latter less interesting, unfortunately. It begins with some early notes for Rebecca, which are mostly interesting in how they're different from the novel as it was actually written. Then there are some early stories, which I skipped, having just read "The Birds", which I found so terrifying that it put me off her short stories for now; I suppose this is a testament to the power of that story, at least. There are some memories of her grandfather George and her father Gerald -- I wondered how much these duplicate her full-length memoirs of her family, as I didn't find them especially gripping -- and there are a couple of poems. Altogether, it feels like a group of non-related bits and pieces pulled into book form for the sake of having something to publish; some of the bits and pieces are interesting, but not enough for me to be able to recommend the book as a whole.

Books read: 10

Total books read this month: 45
Total books read this year: 45

Last updated 22 February 2006. All text and photographs © George Mitchell and Margaret Johnston, unless otherwise noted Comments, questions, suggestions to margaret@lonelymountain.net.