Category Archives: Sunday Salon

Sunday Salon

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Reading today:

Eden’s Outcasts: the Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father by John Matteson. I’m making heavy weather of this book, mainly because I’m finding Bronson Alcott such a difficult person. I’m only reading a few pages each morning, which is about all I can put up with Bronson’s self-centred approach to life.

It will take me a while to finish this book as it’s over 400 pages long. So far, I’m up to page 118, and Bronson has tried and failed at almost everything he has undertaken in his search for perfection. His efforts at running a school have failed and he is about to embark on a new project – a self-sufficient commune, a ‘beacon of morality in a fallen world.’  This was to be ‘an earthly heaven‘, anything that came from the work of slaves was excluded, they would do away with money, shun the use of animal products and rely as little as possible on animals for work.

He asked Emerson to join him in his venture and also to back him financially. Emerson refused and wrote in his diary:

For a founder of a family or institution, I would as soon exert myself to collect money for a madman. (page 114)

I have to agree with Emerson.

There has been little yet in this book about Louisa but I’m hoping that will soon change as she is now 11 and beginning to rebel against her father, who baffles him with her stubbornness.

I’ve also started to read Perfume: the Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind. I’m not sure yet what I think of this novel. It begins well, grabbing my attention with a description of the birth of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille in Paris just before the French Revolution began. The description of the smells of Paris at that time is breath-taking in its awfulness:

The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells of mouldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlours stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber-pots. The stench of sulphur rose from the chimneys, the stench of caustic lyes from the tanneries, and from the slaughterhouses came the stench of congealed blood. People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese, and sour milk and tumorous disease.  (page 3)

Grenouille born in this stink, is not an attractive character either. Having no odour of his own but a highly developed sense of smell, he is a strange character to say the least. On the trail of an elusive but exquisite smell he tracks it down to a young girl and kills her to possess  her scent for himself.

Peter Ackroyd is quoted on the back cover:

A meditation on the nature of death, desire and decay.

I’m reserving judgement for the time being.

Sunday Salon – P G Wodehouse

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Years ago I was a Jeeves and Wooster fan and read as many of these books by P G Wodehouse that I could find in my local library. I also liked the excellent TV version with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. So when my book group decided our next book would be any Wodehouse book  I was quite pleased. I’d read the first Blandings Castle book, Something Fresh a couple of years ago and enjoyed it. I don’t own any Wodehouse books so went to the library to see what was on the shelves. I came home with Summer Moonshine, first published in 1938, Jeeves in the Offing, published in 1960 and Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, first published in 1963.

So far I’ve read Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, which I finished this morning. Bertie Wooster goes to Totleigh Towers, the home of Sir Watkyn Bassett and his daughter Madeline, who is engaged to Gussie Fink-Nottle, but under the impression that Bertie is desperately in love with her – which he isn’t, of course. When Madeline insists that Gussie becomes a vegetarian he rebels and now no longer wants to marry her. Bertie is horrified as that will mean that Madeline will turn to him. He hot foots it to Totleigh Towers, despite her father’s intense dislike of him to bring about a reconciliation.

Thank goodness for Jeeves, who accompanies Bertie and helps him out of seemingly impossible situations. The events all conspire against Bertie who prides himself on his ‘stiff upper lip’:

It’s pretty generally recognised at the Drones Club and elsewhere that Bertram Wooster is a man who knows how to keep the chin up and the upper lip stiff, no matter how rough the going may be. Beneath the bludgeonings of Fate, his head is bloody and unbowed, as the fellow said. In a word, he can take it.

But I must admit that as I crouched in my haven of refuge I found myself chafing not a little. Life at Totleigh Towers, as I mentioned earlier, had got me down. There seemed no way of staying put in the darned house. One was either soaring like an eagle on to the top of chests or whizzing down behind sofas like a diving duck, and apart from the hustle and bustle of it all that sort of thing wounds the spirit and does no good to the trouser crease. And so, as I say, I chafed. (page 152)

It’s a very easy book to read, and the slang is interspersed with many literary and Biblical references, which I enjoyed, but I didn’t find it as riveting or as funny as I thought it would be – as the Jeeves books were in my memory. I suppose the farcical nature of it all eventually wormed its way into my subconscious and by the end of the book I found myself warming to it more than at the beginning and looking forward to reading the other two books.

Sunday Salon – Current Books

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This week I’ve finished reading two crime fiction books:

and posts on these books will be on my blog this coming week.

I’m still reading Eden’s Outcast: the story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father by John Matteson. So far I’ve been reading about Bronson Alcott and his unorthdox ideas about educating and bringing up children.  It was quite a coincidence I thought, when I was reading the Daily Express in the coffee shop recently and came across a review of Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and their Search for Utopia by Richard Francis. The reviewer describes this book as a

… richly textured history of the life and times of a back‑to‑nature community in 19th-century America. It was called Fruitlands, though Fruitcakes would have been more apt.
(Read more from this review.)

I haven’t got up to this venture so far in Eden’s Outcasts. There are many entries in the index under ‘Fruitlands’ so I expect to find out much more about it. His career as a teacher was not a success and it seems that his venture into communal farming wasn’t either.

I spent other reading time this week downloading more books onto my Kindle and have read the opening paragraphs of most of them. It really is so easy to get carried away and add more books to my to-be-read lists! But I only bought one book this week, so that’s not too bad.

It’s Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose and it’s been on my wish list for a long time. I read fairly quickly and know that I often read too quickly to take in all the detail. Prose writes that reading quickly can be ‘a hindrance‘ and that it is ‘essential to slow down and read every word‘. She also contradicts the advice to novice writers ‘to show, not tell‘, when ‘the responsibility of showing should be assumed by the energetic and specific use of language‘. Using Alice Munro’s short story Dulse as an example, she says:

There are many occasions in literature in which telling is far more effective than showing. A lot of time would have been wasted had Alice Munro believed that she could not begin her story until she had shown us Lydia working as an editor, writing poetry, breaking up with her lover, dealing with her children, getting divorced, growing older, and taking all the steps that led up to the moment at which the story rightly begins.

Most interesting, I thought.

I still haven’t got used to Kindle’s use of locations as opposed to page numbers – the extract above is from Location 409 – 12. Nor have I mastered the technique of transferring my highlighted passages and notes from the Kindle to the computer!

I’m also reading The Matchmaker of Kenmare by Frank Delaney. This is an Advance Uncorrected Proof; the book is scheduled to be on sale on 8 February. It’s the first book I’ve read by Delaney, described by the publisher as a

… lush and surprising historical novel, rich as a myth, tense as a thriller …

From what I’ve read of it so far I’d go along with that description, except for the tenseness – but it’s early days yet. It’s set in 1943 in Ireland, a neutral country in the Second World War. It’s a long book and takes its time in setting the scene and introducing the characters. It promises well.

Sunday Salon – the First Books of 2011

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My reading this year has been from books I’d started in December and I’ve now finished these – Little Women by Louisa May Alcott and Just Me, Sheila Hancock’s autobiography. I borrowed Just Me from my local library. It interested me, not because Sheila is a ‘celebrity’ but because it’s about her life as a 75 year old woman, recently a widow and I wondered what she had to say. She comes across as a down-to-earth person, feisty and open about her views on life and her beliefs.

I’m still reading Eden’s Outcasts: the Story of Lousia May Alcott and her Father by John Matteson and I’m also reading a crime fiction book, Payment Deferred by Joyce Holms.

Much of my reading time this week, however, has been on my new Kindle. I’ve spent  hours learning how to use it, loading in free books, mainly classics and starting to read quite a few of them. I’ve bought one book – Ink in the Blood by Hilary Mantel and I’ll write a separate post about this remarkable little memoir in a few days’ time.

I’m enjoying the experience of reading on my Kindle but it certainly won’t replace reading printed books. For one thing I have plenty of those still waiting to be read and for another it still hasn’t got the feel of a ‘real’ book for me. That may come but for now the Kindle is another source of reading material and not a substitute.

I do like a number of things about it – the weight and ease of handling it is obvious. I also like being able to look up the meanings of words so easily – just a click and up pops a definition. I like being able to go immediately to where I’m up to and also find locations when I’ve highlighted passages. I haven’t tried making notes yet or using pdfs. I like the ease of acquiring books – too easy maybe for a bookworm like me, but so far I have been restrained – and of downloading samples. I like the customer reviews and the quick links to wikipedia and Google.

I can only think of a couple of downsides to using it and that is that the page size is a little on the small side for me – I’m ‘turning’ the pages too quickly on a larger font size and the smallest size is a bit too small for me. And it’s going to add to my TBR list very quickly!

Next up on my blog tomorrow –  Kerrie’s Crime Fiction Alphabet begins with the letter A.

Sunday Salon – Current Books

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The snow is slowly retreating with the slight thaw we had yesterday, the fir tree is green again, but there’s no green anywhere else. It’s still mainly a white world.

In keeping with the weather my current reading is Frozen Moment by Camilla Ceder. It’s set in Sweden at Christmas time – well it keeps flashing back to an unspecified season in 1993, but it’s mostly a cold, snowy scene. I haven’t read much beyond the first murder – a man is found shot in the head and he was also run over repeatedly for good measure. I know from the blurb that there is another murder and the police are baffled.

As I’ve finished the two autobiographies I was reading last week I’ve started another – Just Me by Sheila Hancock. I haven’t read much of this yet either. Sheila is trying to come to terms with the death of her husband, John Thaw and has decided she needs to keep busy. She has put the house in France that she and John loved on the market and decided to go travelling. As she writes about her current life she also reminisces about the past. So far I’m enjoying her candour and easy style of writing.

Sunday Salon – Non-Fiction

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I’m often reading more than one book at a time, sometimes as many as four or more. Sometimes I think it would be better to read just one at a time but that rarely happens. A library book may be due back and I can’t renew it so that has to take precedence, or one of the books I’m reading may be so compelling that I have to finish that one and I drop the others for a while.

At the present I’m reading two books and both of them are non-fiction, which is a novelty for me. I usually have one non-fiction on the go along with one or more fiction books, so not reading any fiction is very strange for me. Both my non-fiction books are autobiographies and are riveting and remarkable books. They are:

  • Agatha Christie: An Autobiography
  • Seeing Things: a Memoir by Oliver Postgate

I’ve written some posts already about Agatha Christie’s book and will link to those in my Author Index. I’m nearly at the end of it now, but she is only still writing about 1943. She wrote the Autobiography in 1965 and the twenty intervening years are compressed into 25 pages – as she wrote ‘Time has altered for me, as it does for the old.’ (page 525). I’ll try to write a summary post about the book as a whole when I’ve finished it.

Oliver Postgate’s book is absolutely amazing. I’m enjoying it on several levels. There are the autobiographical details of the chronology of his life, the fascinating accounts of how he created those wonderful TV films of Ivor the Engine, The Clangers, Noggin the Nog and Bagpuss, and his own philosophical thoughts.

It’s quite difficult to write about such books as a whole but I’ll try to concentrate on what I most liked about them, which in both cases is a lot.

Now, after sorting out what to buy the grandchildren for Christmas, which of course will include some books, I need to decide what to read next – I think it will be fiction for a while.

Sunday Salon – Sunday Selection

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Recently the weekend is the time when I’ve just finished a book and am deciding what to read next. This weekend is no exception. Yesterday I finished Mary Webb’s Gone to Earth, a book I first read as a young teenager. This is a dramatic romantic tragedy, first written in 1917. It tells the story of Hazel Woodus and her marriage to Edward Marston, the gentle, local church minister. Hazel is an innocent, a child of nature, wild and shy and a protector of all wounded and persecuted things. She becomes the prey of John Reddin, the squire of Undern who is obsessed by her. I’ll write more about it in a later post.

Because I enjoyed Gone to Earth so much it’s hard to find a suitable book to read next.  I have started All Bones and Lies by Anne Fine, which is the choice for my local book club. But so far I’m not sure if I want to finish it. It’s about Colin and his mother, who could complain for Britain. He has a twin sister who is estranged from her mother, making up a unhappy family who don’t get on. It’s about old age and the problems of carers and  up to now I’m not finding it at all uplifting. It paints a sad picture of the frustrations of old age and the problems of everyday life. I’ll give it a few more pages before deciding whether to finish it or not.

Other than that book, I have several library books I could read next.

  • The Beacon by Susan Hill – a short book (154 pages), examining truth, mental health and memory. Maybe that’s not right for me today as it sounds like another family with problems.
  • Missing Link by Joyce Holms – a new author for me, this book is a murder mystery a case for the detective duo Fizz and Buchanan. This one looks promising.
  • The Missing by Andrew O’Hagan – about people who disappear from society, a merging of social history and memoir. Described on the back cover as ‘elegantly written, affecting and intelligent.’

I’ll also look at some of my own books, to reduce the growing pile of to-be-read books. I started A S Byatt’s The Children’s Book a while ago. I think I’ll start that one again, or maybe look at Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride, or a shorter book such as The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch.

Although writing posts like this does help a bit to clarify my thoughts, sometimes I just can’t decide what to read next and today is one of those days.

Sunday Salon – Book Connections

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The Sunday Salon is the place to meet and blog about the books we’re reading.

This morning I read some more from Agatha Christie’s book An Autobiography. It’s now 1917 and Agatha is working in a hospital dispensary in Torquay and also studying to take her Apothecaries Hall examination so she could dispense for a medical officer or a chemist. As part of her training she had instruction from a proper commercial chemist – a Mr P, one of the principal pharmacists in Torquay. She described him as

… a rather funny-looking little man, very roundabout and robin redbreast looking, with a nice pink face. There was a general air of childish satisfaction about him. (page 261)

He once showed her a piece of deadly curare that he carried around with him in his pocket. Curare once it has entered the bloodstream paralyses and kills you. He said he carried it in his pocket because it made him feel powerful. Agatha often wondered about him afterwards. In spite of his cherubic appearance she thought he was possibly a dangerous man and years later used her memory in writing The Pale Horse.

I then picked up H R F Keating’s book A Detective at Death’s Door and started reading it, whilst drinking a cup of coffee. I had intended reading one of my own books but this library book was closer to hand than any of my own books. In this book Superintendent Harriet Martens is just recovering from a nearly fatal dose of aconitine. Her husband, John recognised the symptoms from reading their description in an imaginary Agatha Christie book, Twisted Wolfsbane – aconitine is also known as wolfsbane.  Then a few pages later I came across this coincidence – Harriet quoted the passage in Agatha Christie’s An Autobiography about the chemist carrying round a piece of curare – the same passage I’d read half an hour or so earlier.

Sunday Selection

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This morning I finished reading A Caribbean Mystery by Agatha Christie. I read it very quickly as it’s easy reading and although sprinkled throughout with lots of red herrings it wasn’t too difficult to guess the outcome. I’ll write about it later, along with three other books I’ve read recently.

I’m wondering which book to read next. I have a pile of library books – new ones I borrowed this week:

I think I’d better get on with reading Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday as that is the next book we’re discussing at the book club at the end of October. It’s a matter of timing it right so that I finish it in time but not too soon so that I’ve forgotten about it before the meeting. It’s actually a book that I’ve ignored in the past as the title doesn’t appeal to me – the idea of  fly fishing is not guaranteed to fill me with desire. I have started it, but chapter one isn’t inspiring me, with its details of migratory salmonids, the evolution of salmon parr and feeding conditions. I shall persevere and hope it improves.

Meanwhile, my mind is wandering towards the library books, even though I have two non-fiction books from LibraryThing that I feel I should read soon – why is it that books that sound so interesting suddenly lose their attraction when I start to feel the slightest bit under pressure to read them by a certain date? A hangover from my working life, maybe when I had to produce reports to deadlines.

Another thing too – why do I borrow so many library books when I have plenty of my own still to read? If I didn’t have to return books then I wouldn’t be tempted to borrow more – maybe D should go on his own to take my books back!

Back to the library books, I think I’ll look at Solar by Ian McEwan. I like his books but having read somewhere that this isn’t as good as others and I wondered if it may contain a bit too much about physics for me I decided not to buy it, but to check it out if I saw it in the library. At least, it starts off well, as Michael Beard’s marriage appears to be disintegrating and he can’t stand it – the shame  and inconvenient longing he has for his wife. It does make me want to read on.

I borrowed the other books because I like the authors – apart from The Autobiography of the Queen by Emma Tennant and Mr Monk goes to the Firehouse by Lee Goldberg. I haven’t read anything by these two authors and they are impulse loans. The Goldberg book caught my eye because of its title, which intrigued me as it didn’t convey anything at all to me. On the cover it’s advertised as being based on the Television Series – an American series, I assume, as I’ve never heard of it. If anyone knows this series I’d love to hear about it. Is it any good?

The Autobiography of the Queen attracted me when I read on the front cover that this is ‘hot on the heels of Alan Bennett’s fictional account of the Queen.’ I’ve read that and thought it was very amusing. I thought I needed something light and amusing to counter-balance the crime fiction and serious books I seem to have been reading lately.

Sunday Salon – Today’s Books

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My reading today, so far has been just a short portion of Agatha Christie’s Autobiography and some more of A Change in Altitude by Anita Shreve. AC’s autobiography is very entertaining. At the moment I’m still in her childhood, so a long way to go yet. I’m reserving judgement for a while on A Change in Altitude. I always used to enjoy Anita Shreve’s books, but latterly I’ve found them not quite so much to my liking. This one is set in Kenya, a very different location and so far it’s quite depressing. I don’t think it’s going to lighten up much either.

Anyway, I’m putting these two books to one side for the rest of today and will be reading Quite Ugly One Morning by Christopher Brookmyre, because tomorrow I’m going to his Author Event in Livingston. I thought I’d get in the mood early. Quite Ugly was his debut novel in 1996. This is the synopsis from his website:

Yeah, yeah, the usual. A crime. A corpse. A killer. Heard it.

Except this stiff happens to be a Ponsonby, scion of a venerable Edinburgh medical clan, and the manner of his death speaks of unspeakable things.

Why is the body displayed like a slice of beef? How come his hands are digitally challenged? And if it’s not the corpse, what is that awful smell?

A post-Thatcherite nightmare of frightening plausibility, Quite Ugly One Morning is a wickedly entertaining and vivacious thriller, full of acerbic wit, cracking dialogue and villains both reputed and shell-suited.

Brookmyre’s books have such great titles, for example – One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night, All Fun and Games until Somebody Loses an Eye, and A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away. His latest book is Pandaemonium.