2010: The Year in Review

I read a lot of great books in 2010, and although I didn’t have as clear a favourite as last year, I still had a lot of trouble narrowing down my list of favourites to the one you’re about to see. Going through my reading records at the end of a year is always a bit of a strange experience. As Lu was saying yesterday, it always feels like my new favourites have been part of my life for much longer than only a year, or even only a few months – which is a sure sign that they have, in one way or another, become a part of who I am.

The following is a list of my top twenty-six reads of the year (no, I couldn’t make it 25. And trust me, it was not for any lack of trying): 21 fiction and 5 non-fiction. They’re not books published in 2010, but books I read this year, as I very rarely read books right after their publication. Without further ado, and in no particular order, they are:

Fiction

• Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers: I read this entire book in one single delicious Sunday afternoon, despite it being almost 600 pages long. I could not put it down for a single moment: it’s a feminist mystery, it’s a wonderful love story, and it’s a meditation on gender, relationships, writing, academia and intellectual honesty. If you’re thinking of reading it, I’ll give you the precious advice that was once given to me: please please please read the Harriet Vane books in order: Strong Poison, Have His Carcase, and only then Gaudy Night.
  
  
• Passion by Jude Morgan: I don’t care how clichéd this sounds: Jude Morgan’s retelling of the lives of the Romantic poems from a female perspective is aptly titled, because it is indeed one of the most passionate books I read this year. My favourite thing about it, though, is that it takes the intellectual and emotional dilemmas that Mary Shelley, Augusta Leigh, Caroline Lamb and Fanny Brawne had to face absolutely seriously, instead of portraying them as victims who were dragged along. Morgan quickly became one of my favourite authors, and Passion landed a spot on my mental list of all-time favourite historical fiction.
  
  
• Monsters of Men by Patrick Ness: The final book in the Chaos Walking Trilogy is the perfect ending to a perfect series: it’s moving, suspenseful, daring, challenging, brutally honest, and it doesn’t shy away from asking difficult questions about war, violence, idealism, and what it means to be human.
  
  
• Alas, Poor Lady by Rachel Ferguson: My favourite Persephone to date deals with a theme that was recurrent in my reading this year: the Victorian marriage market and what happened to those who fell between its cracks. The fact that it stands above all the others is telling, as is the fact that it stands out from all the wonderful Persephones I read this year.
  
  
• Middlemarch by George Eliot: I’m so glad I finally made time to read this. I found Eliot’s writing surprisingly accessible, her characterisation nothing short of perfect, and the novel as encompassing as life itself.
  
  
• To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis: I was singing Connie Willis’ praise only earlier this week, and I’ll gladly do it again. To Say Nothing of the Dog is hilarious, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t deal with serious themes. It also amicably pokes fun at the Victorians, and it’s filled to the brim with literary allusions. What’s not to love?
  
  
• Blankets by Craig Thompson: One of the most moving graphic memoirs I’ve ever come across.
  
  
• Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster: A charming early twentieth-century epistolary novel that can be read in less than two hours. You’ll only be sorry it’s over so quickly.
  
  
• Indigo’s Star by Hilary McKay: The whole Casson Family series brought me much joy this year, and if I’m to be honest it belongs on this list in its entirety. But Indigo’s Star does stand out: I’m not even sure why, but it’s one of those books I didn’t want to ever end.
  
  
• Nightingale Wood by Stella Gibbons: Shockingly (to myself, at least) I prefer this to Cold Comfort Farm. It’s a 1930’s Cinderella story that becomes more and more subtly subversive as it progresses. I can’t tell you how excited I am for next year’s Stella Gibbons’ re-releases from Vintage.
  
  
• Illyria by Elizabeth Hand: An intense love story, a story about art and the role it plays in our lives, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Elizabeth Hand can do no wrong.

• No Name by Wilkie Collins: Oh Wilkie. I’m so glad I named my stuffed unicorn after you (true story. Heather made me do it). No Name is a thrilling and deliciously scandalous story, and also an example of Victorian subversiveness at its best.
  
  
• The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart: E. Lockhart doesn’t shy away from showing that standing up for what you believe in can have great personal costs - but such honesty only makes this a better story. I want to give copies of Frankie to teen girls everywhere.
  
  
• Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: I don’t think a book had stomped on my heart this hard since Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch. It’s not only the horrors of the Biafra war that make this such a heartbreaking read: in the end, the most heartbreaking thing of all is its very humanity.
  
  
• Love by Toni Morrison: Somewhat to my surprise, this has become my favourite Toni Morrisson to date. A stark look at race, gender, power relations, and how these interact.
  
  
• The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bedchel: “Half op-ed column and half serialised Victorian novel”, in Bedchel’s own words, and even better than the wonderful Fun Home.
  
  
• The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters: Quite different from Waters’ previous work, but no less amazing. A chilling look at class and power in a changing world.
  
  
• Atonement by Ian McEwan: There are many possible reasons to love this novel, but to me the main one is what it says about storytelling itself.
  
  
• North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell: Gaskell’s understanding of class has been called naïve and idealistic, but to me her idealism is of a kind of which the world could do with more.
  
  
• I Kill Giants by Joe Kelly and J. M. Ken Niimura: An extremely touching comic about a young girl using her imagination to face demons that cannot be killed off.
  
  
• A Room With a View by E.M. Forster: Oh E.M. Forster, how I love you. An absolute delight of a book.

Non-Fiction

• Singled Out by Virginia Nicholson: This intimate look at the lives of the generation that was callously referred to as “surplus women” is social history at its very best.
  
  
• Woman by Natalie Angier: A celebratory but scientifically rigorous analysis of the female body and what makes it unique. Natalie Angier manages to exalt what it means to be female without falling into a single essentialist pitfall.
  
  
• The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett: A collection of the letters of the two Victorian poets from their first introduction to their elopement. As exciting as a novel, and as intimate a look at the Victorians as you’re likely to get.
  
  
• Stranger in the House by Julie Summers: Another excellent work of social history, this time about what things were like for the wives, mothers, daughters, sisters or granddaughters of the soldiers who returned from WW2.
  
  
• The Magician’s Book by Laura Miller: A reading memoir, a literary analysis of The Chronicles of Narnia, a biography of Lewis, and an extremely insightful examination of what it means to love a story.

Honourable mentions: See my Smuggvilus post. Also: Doomsday Book, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Mrs Dalloway, Consequences, The Group, The Canon, Aurora Floyd, Yes Means Yes and Uncle Silas.

Before I share my reading stats, let me take a moment to write my usual disclaimer: I don’t much care about numbers, and in fact it makes me a bit uncomfortable to ever be congratulated for them. All over the world there are readers who read less, as much, and far more than I do, which I’m perfectly happy with. We all read at different paces and have different life commitments. Reading should never be seen as a competitive sport, and so on and so forth. I’m sure most if not all of you agree with this sentiment, but I can’t not say these things anyway.

Here goes: (Also, I do realise that these percentages don’t add up to a hundred, but that’s because some of my categories overlap.)

Total: 227 books
Novels: 140 (62%)
Short Story collections/anthologies: 8 (3.5%. I used to read a lot more short stories than this. I have no idea what happened.)
Comics aka Graphic Novels: 29 (13%)
Non-Fiction: 46 (20%)
Poetry: 4 (1.8%)
Plays: 0, as opposed to last year’s 12. I miss my Irish Drama class.
In translation: 10 (4.4%. No manga to inflate my numbers this year, I’m afraid.)
By women: 125 (55%)
By men: 96 (45%)
By people of colour: 22 (9.6% )
glbtq: 25 (11%. Pretty low on the diversity all-around :\)
By new to me authors: 109 (or 48%, which is far too much.)
Classics: 51 (22%)
Re-reads: 1 (0.4% — ha) (But at least it was a book very much worth revisiting – Michael Cunningham’s wonderful The Hours.)
Chunksters (450+ pages): 25 (11%)
Favourite authors discovered this year: Dorothy L. Sayers (I first read her last year, but it was this year that I really fell for her), Jude Morgan, Connie Willis, Hilary McKay, Virginia Woolf (I discovered that I’m not afraid of her; does that count?)
Least favourite book of the year: Gasoline by Dame Darcy
Best reading month: May (24 books, or 10.6% of my yearly reading.)
Worst reading month: September (13 books, or 5.7% of my reading.)

Here’s to a great reading year ahead for all of us. Happy New Year, everyone!

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Reading Goals for 2011

Photo Credit

To me, 2010 was the year of rebelling against reading commitments. For the first time in nearly four years as a reading challenge participant, I failed as many challenges as the ones I completed. I’m not even going to list the ones I failed, lest I begin to feel guilty (the Terry Pratchett challenge, self? Really?). Surely this a sign that I need to step back a little from commitments or reading lists.

Of course, I wouldn’t be a true addict if things were that simple. In 2011 I’m only going to officially sign up for one challenge – the Graphic Novels challenge, which is being hosted by Vasilly this year (and which you should all join as well). But then there’s the Year of Feminist Classics project which I’m hosting with Amy, Emily Jane and Iris. And then, because I’m nothing if not full of contradictions, I decided to set myself a Children’s Classics challenge. It’s an unofficial thing, a bit like the Carnegie Medal project I’ve been doing for a few years now, and my main goal is to encourage myself to read books that I feel I ought to have under my belt for both personal and professional reasons. If you’re curious about what I’m going to read for it, you can find my list here.

I’m also swapping reading lists with several blogging friends. The result may be a dauntingly long list of books, but I know none of my friends will hold it against me if I take it more as a pool of suggestions rather than a list of books I have to read next year, Or Else. I do hope to get to most if not all of them, but I want to approach this as relaxedly as possible.

The rest of my goals are more general: I’d like to read more diversely; I’d like to devote more time to re-reading; I’d like to explore the back catalogues of authors I already know I love, rather than read so many books by new-to-me authors.

Finally, and because I have a love-hate relationship with reading lists, I’m going to do something I have done in past years and name some books I’d like to get to in 2011. I won’t be pressuring myself to read them all, but it would be nice to get to at least some of these:

1. The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
   
2. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
   
3. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
   
4. Armadalle by Wilkie Collins
   
5. Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell
   
6. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë
   
7. Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
   
8. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
   
9. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (I think this has been on the list for as long as I’ve been making it.)
   
10. New Grub Street by George Gissing
    
11. Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
    
12. Catch-22 by Joseph Hellar
    
13. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (Same. #shame)
    
14. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
    
15. A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen
    
16. The Doctor’s Wife by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
    
17. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
    
18. Testament of Youth by Vera Britain
    
19. The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner
    
20. The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall
    
21. Persuasion by Jane Austen
    
22. Maurice by E.M. Forster
    
23. To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
    
24. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
    
25. East Lynne by Ellen Wood

What about you? Do you have any reading goals for the New Year?

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Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

The year is 2054, and at the University of Oxford historians from the medieval studies department are getting ready to send a student named Kivrin Engle to 1320. Kivrin is going right before Christmas, hoping to be able to see how the season was observed in the Middle Ages. Her tutor, Professor James Dunworthy, worries about her endlessly – one of the reasons being the fact that he doesn’t trust Medieval to run the drop cautiously and effectively. But despite his fears, he knows Kivrin has done everything she can to prepare herself for her journey: she has learned Middle English, she has been inoculated against all known diseases of the period, and she has come up with a convincing story about who she is and what a young woman like her is doing on her own on the road between Bath and Oxford.

But despite all these precautions, not everything goes according to plan. Shortly after Kivrin is sent to the past, Badri Chaudhuri, the technician in charge of setting the coordinates for the drop, suddenly falls ill. But not before telling Professor Dunworthy that something has gone wrong. Before anyone quite knows what’s happening, Oxford has been quarantined, just in time to separate people from their families at Christmas. And while things in the present turn chaotic, Kivrin is stuck in the past, suffering from the same unknown illness Badri has, and about to face far more than she ever bargained for.

Earlier this year, when I posted about Connie Willis’ amazing To Say Nothing of the Dog, I apologised for having written a sloppy plot summary that probably made the book sound far less appealing than it really is. I’m afraid I’m going to have to do the same here: Doomsday Book is almost as amazing, about as heartbreaking as TSNOTD is funny, and just as difficult to summarise (which doesn’t of course mean it’s at all difficult to follow). But in any case, the plot isn’t the only reason why you want to read Doomsday Book. There’s also the amazing characterisation, the way Willis brings the Middle Ages to life, and the fact that this is one of the most moving studies of what it means to be human I’ve ever come across, all wrapped in a very gripping historical fiction slash science fiction novel.

The main theme of Doomsday Book is perhaps the universality of human emotions. Yes, in many ways the past is another country, and as we have no way of travelling back in time and entering the minds of those who lived back then, we can’t ever really assess just how different this other country really is. But having said this, I don’t at all agree that the feelings of anyone who lived more than fifty years ago are impenetrable to us – and neither does Connie Willis, who has one of the historians from Medieval tell Kivrin:

“Attitudes towards death in the 1300s differed greatly from ours. Death was a common and accepted part of life, and the contemps were incapable of feeling loss or grief.” (Oh really?)

…and then has the whole novel disprove this point. If the past were that foreign, would the emotions in The Epic of Gilgamesh still feel so fresh or be so easy to relate to? Not to mention Ancient Greek and Roman drama or poetry, or Shakespeare, or… well, you get the point. Obviously there are differences between the present and the past, but taking them too far can lead to a dehumanisation of history – which I suspect is Willis’ whole point. She clearly takes a swipe at that line of thinking, and she shows us that differences aside, grief is grief, fear is fear, death is death, and humanity is humanity.

The people Kivrin meets in the Middle Ages are absolutely human and feel completely real: there’s Agnes, the five-year-old who constantly wants to play with her puppy and pony; there’s her sister Rosamond, engaged to be married at twelve and terrified of her adult future husband; there’s Lady Eliwys, worried about her absent husband; there’s Lady Imeyene, involved in a constant power struggle with her daughter-in-law; there’s Father Roche, illiterate and awkward but extremely kind. They are all characters you can’t help but grow to care about, which only makes the book the more moving. Also, and unlike what sometimes happens in novels with parallel storylines, the plot about the epidemic in Oxford is every bit as interesting as the one set in Middle Age. I particularly liked how Connie Willis cleverly established thematic parallels between the two, no matter how many centuries separate the characters – which again serves to illustrate her point about universality.

I don’t want to say too much about what exactly happens in Doomsday Book, but the story grows increasingly dark and heartbreaking as it progresses. And this brings me to yet another one of its main themes: hope, and just how much we humans need it. I don’t mean a naïve, head-in-the-sand kind of hope, but rather the kind that keeps us from despairing and giving up even when we realise that things are at their bleakest.

Kivrin never stops hoping, hoping against all reasonable hope. Her determination not to despair not only drags the reader along, but makes the book’s final chapter all the more heartbreaking. The final line of the book really moved me for this exact reason – though if I’m to be honest I’ll have to confess I’d been in tears for a good fifty pages by then. All along Kivrin has hope, even if she has no way of knowing what she says she has always known. Again, this isn’t about naively assuming that everything is always going to be okay – it won’t, and in Doomsday Book things are very much not okay. Rather, it’s about our propensity to look after ourselves and each other until we draw our very last breath, because the alternative is too dark to face.

Connie Willis has blown me away yet again. Blackout next?

Two bits that absolutely broke my heart (I may have teared up again while typing them up):

“Grandmother says it is a mortal sin to fear your husband, but I cannot help it. He touches me in ways that are not seemly and tells me tales of things that cannot be true.”
I hope he dies in agony, Kivrin thought. I hope he is infected already.
“My father is even now on his way,” Rosemund said.
“You must try to sleep.”
“If Sir Bloet were here now he would not dare to touch me,” she said and closed her eyes. “It would be he who was afraid.”

I don’t want you to blame yourself for what happened. I know you would have come to get me if you could, but I couldn’t have gone anyway, not with Agnes ill.
I wanted to come, and if I hadn’t, they would have been all alone, and nobody would have ever known how frightened and brave and irreplaceable they were.

Other opinions:
Stella Matutina
Becky’s Book Reviews
At Home With Books

Charlotte's Library
You Can Never Have Too Many Books
books i done read
Fyrefly’s Book Blog

Kay's Bookshelf

She Reads Books
Rhapsody in Books (And another take.)
Bookfoolery and Babble

(Have I missed yours?)

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Christmas booty!

My bookish loot, divided into the Victorian and Persephone pile, and the comics, non-fiction and awesome fairy tale anthology pile. As always, click to enlarge:


Panoramic shot, non-bookish gifts included:


Best.t-shirt.and tote bag.ever. What about you? Got any books you really wanted? Or any cool gifts other than books?

I hope those of you who celebrate it had a lovely Christmas!

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Ho Ho Ho (Also, Smugglivus!)

First of all, and as I won't be posting again until then, I wanted to wish those of you who celebrate it a very wonderful Christmas. If you celebrate a different winter holiday, or no holiday at all, I hope you have a great weekend anyway. I'll see you all sometime next week, when I'll (hopefully) be showing off the shiny new books I found under my tree.

Also! The very awesome Book Smugglers invited me to contribute to Smugglivus, their month-long celebration of books and readers and authors and bloggers, and my post is up today. I decided to make a list of books that almost made my best of the year (which I'll also be posting next week), but not quite. They're not exactly books I didn't like as much as the ones on my official list, but... well, I explain my reasoning over at the Smuggler's blog. Please click the link to read all about it.


Happy Holidays, everyone!

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The Box of Delights by John Masefield

The Box of Delights is a 1935 novel that opens with young Kay Harker on a train, returning home from boarding school for the holidays. Kay spots two suspicious-looking men on the train, whom he suspects of picking his pockets; later on, he’s told by an old, bright-eyed Punch & Judy man that ‘the wolves are running’. This mysterious message is the beginning of an adventure that Kay and his friends Peter, Maria, Susan and Jemima Jones find themselves involved in over their Christmas break. With their parents and guardians conveniently snowed in, there’s no one to hold them back, and the result is an adventure involving Herne the Hunter, running wolves, disappearing clergymen, and a mysterious box that allows its possessor to change sizes and travel through time.

There is something deliciously old-fashioned about The Box of Delights: the 1930’s language, the children’s freedom of movement, the very type of adventures Kay and the Joneses keep having: they all transport us to a different time. At the same time, there’s also something deliciously Christmasy about it: I’m very, very glad I decided to follow Jeanne’s advice and read Masefield close to the holidays this year.

The mood of The Box of Delights reminded me a little of Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, which is probably my favourite Christmas book, and also, like Geranium Cat so well pointed out, of the works of T.H. White. I say this because of the book’s juxtaposition of the mythological and the ordinary. At one level, The Box of Delights is a traditional adventure story slash mystery, about a group of children trying to stop the terrible Abner Brown and his gang. Yet at another level, it’s very much a story about midwinter, about darkness, about snow, about all the things that make us feel frightened and insignificant and small, and all the ways we have of bracing ourselves against them.

Myths and folktales have always been a way of addressing this sense of cosmic smallness, and the best crafted fantasy stories do the same. When the right sort of elements are thrown in, this sense of smallness becomes almost enjoyable, rather than Lovecraftian or desperate. What I found interesting here (and also very Christmasy) was the way The Box of Delights contrasts this sense of mystery and darkness with very comforting and homely things. There are dangerous things moving out there in the night; things we’re powerless against. But there’s also warm milk with nutmeg before bed, and Punch and Judy shows, and choirs singing Christmas carols, and children dressing up as pirates and laughing and having the time of their lives while the snow falls outside.

This quote from a Guardian article about why The Box of Delights deserves to be as much of a classic as A Christmas Carol expresses what I mean better than I have:

…the whole book is shot through with a folklorish, mythological flavour, and even the “real” world that Kay inhabits is peopled by a cast of often eerie, mysterious, enigmatic and sometimes downright scary figures. Masefield then, at the drop of a hat, switches between his poetic descriptions and episodes that are downright fairytale-ish or Narnia-esque, with talking animals and mice armed with sewing-needle rapiers.

My one complaint about this (excuse the terrible pun) delight of a novel is that it has One of Those Endings. I don’t want to say too much about it, because if I do you’ll very easily guess what I mean, but it’s a type of ending easily belongs on my list of top ten most off-putting literary tropes. I decided not to let this bother me too much, though: the ending doesn’t have to ruin what came before; not unless I let it. I can always pretend in my head that those final paragraphs simply weren’t there.

Once I had finished The Box of Delights, I found out that it’s actually a companion book (dare I say sequel?) to Masefield’s The Midnight Folk, with which it shares several characters including Kay Harker. I’m mentioning this because some of you have told me you’re a tad obsessive about reading things in order, but I’m happy to report that The Box of Delights makes perfect sense as a standalone novel.

Also: I don’t usually much care about which edition of a book I read, but in this case I’m very happy I got the more or less recent Egmont edition. Not only are the Quentin Blake illustrations wonderful, but the book itself as a wonderful feel to it: a feel that goes very nicely with the comforting, old-fashioned tone of the story.

Here’s a passage I particularly loved:

At first he thought that the figure was one of those giant red deer, long since extinct: it bore enormous antlers. Then he saw it was a great man, antlered at the brow, dressed in deerskin and moving with the silent, slow grace of a stag; and, although he was so like a stag, he was hung about with little silver chains and bells.
Kay knew at once that this was Herne the Hunter, of whom he had often heard. ‘Ha, Kay,’ Herne the Hunter said, ‘are you coming into my wild wood?’
‘Yes, if you please, sir,’ Kay said. Herne stretched out his hand. Kay took it and at once he was glad that he had taken it, for there he was in the forest between the two hawthorn trees, with the petals of the may-blossoms falling on him. All the may-blossoms that fell were talking to him, and he was aware of what all the creatures of the forest were saying to each other: what the birds were singing, and what it was that the flowers and the trees were thinking. And he realised that the forest went on and on for ever, and all of it was full of life beyond anything that he had ever imagined: for in the trees, in each leaf and on every twig, and in every inch of soil there were ants, worms; little, tiny moving things, incredibly small yet all thrilling with life.

Reviewed at:
Necromancy Never Pays
Shelf Love

(Yours?)

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The Sunday Salon – In Which You Pick Books For Me (Again)

Good morning, Sunday Saloners. So, I’m finally home for the holidays, which means that I’ve been reunited with my main TBR pile after several months away. The reunion is only temporary, though – grad school resumes in early January, and after that I probably won’t get to come home again at all until the late spring at the very earliest, and even then just for a week or so.

I’ve mostly given up the idea of taking books back with me in January (with very few exceptions – I won’t forget Tigana, Memory, or Skulduggery Pleasant, Kelly). Not only do I have enough books to eventually bring back as it is, but Christmas presents will most likely take over a great percentage of my luggage weight allowance. I’m actually really hoping I don’t get any hardcover books for Christmas, because I’d hate to have to leave them behind.

All of this means that I’m determined to make the most of the next three weeks and read as much as I can from my TBR pile. Of course, the holiday season is never great for reading; this year, in addition to wanting to enjoy the holidays and spend time with my family (four-legged members included, of course), I have a lot of school work to do. Still, I should easily manage to get through some three or four books. But with over a hundred to pick from, the remaining question is which. I’m sure there are some real gems hiding away in my TBR pile, but how can I discover them without your help?

Before moving away last summer, I asked you to pick five books from my TBR for me to read, and the result were some of my very favourite reads of the year. So I’m going to do it again: if you have a few minutes to spare, could you go through my TBR on LibraryThing and tell me what I should read right now? I’d give you some of the Lebkuchen Spice cookies I’m baking later on if I could, but as I can’t, I know that a thank you will be enough. I trust you all to pick some excellent books for me.

I’ll leave you with a gratuitous cat picture, as per Cass’ request. It’s so good to see him and his siblings again.

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Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan

Today I’m participating in Kelly and Marg’s fifth annual Virtual Advent Blog Tour, which has bloggers from all around the world posting about the holidays and how they celebrate them. My friend Chris from Stuff as Dreams are Made Of is also a tour stop for today, so we decided to review Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan together by coming up with six questions about the book that we’d each answer on our blog.

But first, a little bit about the book: The latest offering by the authors of the wonderful Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist and the even more wonderful Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List is a Christmas story set in New York. Dash and Lily are two teenagers who are alone for the holidays: Dash by choice (he doesn’t feel like dealing with his family, so he tells his mother he’s going to his father’s for Christmas, and his father the reverse. The fact that this works speaks volumes about his family’s dynamics); Lily because are parents took off to the Fiji Islands to celebrate their wedding anniversary.

They meet because, at her older brother Langston’s advice, Lily places a red Moleskine notebook among J.D. Salinger’s books at The Strand, the famous New York bookshop. The notebook contains a series of clues that Dash, who happens to be its finder, has to follow. Dash and Lily begin to exchange dares through the red Moleskine, and in the process they begin to get to know each other. But is the person hiding behind the pages the same person each of them has imagined?

Me: Did you have a favourite narrator? If so, why?
This is a difficult question, actually, because I really liked them both. But I think I warmed up to Lily quicker, if only because I could relate to her more. As she eventually acknowledges herself, she lives in permanent fear of getting hurt and being rejected if she allows others to get close to her. She inhabits a sort of cocoon she has made for herself (and which, in many ways, has also been made for her) that mainly consist of her family, of dog-walking, and of carol-singing. But even though she enjoys the safety of her little world, she knows she won’t truly be happy unless she gets herself out there and begins to take some risks.

I also loved her sense of humour – she never loses her ability to laugh at herself, not even when things go wrong. And I loved the fact that she was slightly eccentric but not twee; overprotected but not spoiled; sensitive but not overdramatic. As I was saying, though, I really loved both Lily and Dash, and that’s a huge part of what made the book for me. In some ways, what we have in Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares is an old story: a snarky, reserved boy is dragged out of his shell by a joyful, bouncy, outgoing girl. But that’s only what this book is about on a very surface level. As I was saying, Lily inhabits a shell of her own. There’s a lot more to her – and to Dash – than meets the eye at first, and as such there’s a lot more to the book. Both protagonists almost start out as character types, but by the end they have become human beings – both to the reader and to each other.

Chris: What did you think of the journal as a means of communication between Dash and Lily? Obviously it was central to the plot, but for them getting to know one another?
As someone who almost has a PhD in Getting to Know People Over the Internet at this point, I give the notebook two thumbs up. Over the course of the story, both Dash and Lily worry about whether the person they have imagined the other to be will correspond to reality (more on that when I answer the next question), but I think the authors make it very clear that this is a limitation of human interaction in general, rather than of the written medium.

We all have a tendency to project our ideals on those we’re getting to know, especially when a romantic interest is involved – and it always takes a real effort to see and accept the actual human being in front of us. This would have happened to Dash and Lily even if their first meeting had been face-to-face. What the notebook allowed them to do was be more open more quickly than they would probably have been otherwise. This has both positives and negative sides, one could argue, but to me it worked very well indeed.

Me: Without giving too much away, Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares does *not* play out like the traditional heart-warming romance you might expect at first. What do you think Cohn and Levithan were going for when they made the protagonists’ first meeting so different from anything readers might have imagined?
I think this has to do with the whole theme of expectations versus real human beings I alluded to in my previous answer. I don’t want to give away what that first face-to-face meeting is like, but suffice to say it’s unlike anything either of them could have imagined. And as I said before, this causes them to wonder whether the person they thought they were falling in love with only ever really existed in their heads.

I love that Cohn and Levithan made this an explicit theme of the novel, because I really believe this is a process that takes place in most, if not all, relationship. We all regularly run the risk of dehumanising those we love by projecting too much on them, even if that “too much” is made of nothing but good things. Dash and Lily have to find a balance somewhere in there – and I found this process a lot more real and more interesting than a straightforward or uncomplicated love story could have been. Before you get the wrong idea, though, let me clarify that none of this means the novel isn’t full of “awww” moments, or isn’t romantic in the best possible sense of the term.

Chris: Did you have a favorite secondary character?
How can I pick just one? I really liked Lily’s brother Langston, even though he doesn’t do much more than a) give her the idea for the notebook and b) be conveniently sick and therefore out of the way for most of the story. But he was responsible for my very favourite scene in the whole book:

“Are you over him?” I asked.
We both knew the him I referred to was not Benny, but the him who broke Langston’s heart so devastatingly. Langston’s first love.
“In some ways, I think I’ll never be over him,” Langston said.
“That is such an unsatisfying answer.”
“That’s because you’re interpreting it in the wrong way. I don’t mean it as a wistful, overdramatic declaration. I mean that the love I felt for him was huge and real, and, while painful, it forever changed me as a person, in the same way that being your brother reflects and changes how I evolve, and vice versa. The important people in our lives leave imprints. They may stay or go in the physical realm, but they are always there in your heart, because they helped form your heart. There’s no getting over that.

How lovely is that? Can we swap older brothers, Lily? (Just kidding! Mostly.)

Me: I don't know about you, but I know I'm going to have a hard time writing about this book without using the phrase “perfect Christmas story”, no matter how clichéd that sounds. What do you think (other than the fact that it’s set around Christmas and New Year’s) makes this such a great holidays read?
I was going to say it’s the fact that it’s set in New York, and the thing is, I’d only be half-kidding. I don’t know why, but visiting NYC around Christmastime is a huge dream of mine. This is undoubtedly inspired by all those Hollywood movies I was exposed to as a child, but I just don’t care.

Seriously now, I love that Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares captures the real warmth behind the holiday season. I am, like Lily, one of those people who really love Christmas. I respect those who don’t like it; I think there are plenty of valid reasons not to like it, and I even share some of those. But, as Amy said so well the other day (or as this song also says so well), most of us could do with a yearly reminder to connect to one another, to be warm, to be kind. At Christmas that reminder is often expressed in Hallmark clichés and comes covered in glitter, but again, I don’t much care. There’s something behind it all that I truly appreciate, and this story, which is above all a story about human connections, captures it perfectly

Chris: Share a favorite passage from the moleskine.
This is one of Lily’s bits – it’s an extract from a longer passage that includes references to the wonderful Franny and Zooey:

What I want for Christmas is to believe.
I want to believe that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, there is reason to hope. I write this while a homeless man is sleeping on the ground under a dirty blanket a few feet away from the bench where I’m sitting at the Astor Place subway stop, on the uptown side, where I can see across the tracks to the Kmart entrance on the downtown side. Is this relevant? Not really, except that when I started to write this to you, I noticed him, then stopped writing long enough to go dash over to the Kmart to buy the man a bag of “fun size” Snickers bars, which I slipped underneath his blanket, and that makes me extra sad because his does are all worn out and he’s dirty and smelly and I don’t think that bag of Snickers is going to make much difference to this guy, ultimately. His problems are way bigger than a bag of Snickers can resolve. I don’t understand how to process this stuff sometimes. Like, here in New York, we see so much grandeur and glitz, especially this time of year, and yet we see so much suffering, too. Everyone else on the platform here is just ignoring this guy, like he doesn’t exist, and I don’t know how that’s possible. I want to believe it’s not crazy of me to hope he will wake up and a social worker will take him to a shelter for a warm shower, meal, and bed, and the social worker will then help him find a job and an apartment and… See? It’s just too much to process. All this hoping for something—or someone—that’s maybe hopeless.
I’m having a hard time processing what I am supposed to believe, or if I’m even supposed to. There is too much information, and I don’t like a lot of it.
And yet, for some reason that all scientific evidence really should make impossible, I feel like I really do hope. I hope that global warming will go away. I hope that people won’t be homeless. I hope that suffering will not exist. I want to believe that my hope is not in vain.

I love how Lily allows herself to be honest and open and vulnerable here. I love how she’s kind, but is never self-righteous about it in a Look at Me, I Did Good kind of way. What she did was about simple human contact, which she herself craves; about loneliness; about making things better for one another in the ways we can. And no, this isn’t something that should only happen at Christmas, but one yearly reminder, one occasional moment of hope, is certainly better than none.

Don’t forget to visit today’s other tour stops! Other than Chris and I, there’s also Boof at The Book Whisperer and Marg at Adventures of an Intrepid Reader.

And in case you’re curious, here are my advent posts from previous years: Christmas miscellany (with songs and recipes!), a Portuguese Christmas recipe, and Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales.

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Persephone Secret Santa

It’s Persephone Secret Santa reveal day! That means that all around the blogosphere, participants are sharing their presents and just generally spreading the holidays cheer. A few weeks ago I got not one, but two packages from a mysterious sender bearing a lovely Persephone sticker. The sticker said the following:


…but despite that, I couldn’t resist taking a peek in time for the big reveal today. Here’s what my very generous Secret Santa sent me:


Thank you so, so much, Frances! The diary is absolutely gorgeous, and The Mystery of Mrs Blencarrow is perfect for a lover of Victorian literature like me. My lovely gifts are now back in their package, and will be placed under the tree until Christmas as soon as I get home. Thank you also to Claire for hosting the Persephone Secret Santa swap. Don’t forget to drop by her blog to see what everyone else has received.

On a personal note, I’m going home for the holidays very soon, and I couldn’t be more excited about it. I’m seeing my family, the cats and dogs I left in their care, and even my bookshelves (if I’m not too lazy to remove all the dust sheets) for the first time in months. The last few months were a little difficult on a personal level, so it will be nice to feel at home again for the first time in some time. I plan to make the very most of the season this year (let us ignore the four assignments I need to have finished by early January for now), and that will hopefully include plenty of comfort reading.

All this to say: I keep telling my myself that as soon as I get through whatever it is I have to do next, I’ll be able to blog properly again, to quit neglecting all my blogging friends, and to catch up with e-mail – but of course, it never quite works out as planned. If I disappear for a few more days, it’ll be because I’m stuck in an airport or a snowy train track somewhere. But hopefully all will go well, and I’ll be able to catch up with everything soon.

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A Winter Book by Tove Jansson

A Winter Book is a collection of twenty short stories for adults originally scattered over several of Tove Jansson’s books. They were collected in this volume by Sort of Books after the success of the English translation of The Summer Book; however, despite the title, A Winter Book doesn’t take place solely in winter. Readers are taken from snowy landscapes to tiny Finnish islands in the summertime. This might make the collection sound disjointed, but fear not: Tove Jansson’s unique style, and most of all the mood that infuses all her stories with, is more than enough to hold it all together.

Many of these stories, especially the ones in the first half of the book, are told from the point of view of a small child, a girl, who’s trying to make sense of the world around her and thinking about the often small things that matter to her. Jansson seems to favour writing from the point of view of either the very young or the very old, and I wonder if it this because both groups are often somewhat at the margins of what is happening around them. That makes them good observers, and also good interpreters of the surrounding world. Whatever the reason, she excels at both perspectives, and she treats her characters with complete seriousness (by which, mind you, I don’t mean humourlessness) and respect no matter what their age.

A lot of the stories collected in A Winter Book seem to be autobiographical in nature. I recognise the little girl growing up surrounded by artists, or the couple of older women artists who spend their summers on an island, from the talk by Tove’s niece Sophia Jansson I attended earlier this year. I will not say this makes the stories more personal, because I believe that all writing is personal regardless of how close it sticks to the facts of its creator’s life. But it was interesting to get a glimpse into the life of the woman behind the Moomins; to be able to imagine what it must have been like to be her.

What I like the most about Tove Jansson is the fact that she’s one of the subtlest writers I’ve ever come across. Her stories, for children and adults alike, suggest a lot more than they every spell out. I like that – I like feeling trusted with secrets too delicate to be fully named. I imagine that this is something that children, who are talked down to so frequently, also very much appreciate, and as such it’s probably part of why her stories continue to charm generation after generation.

But I digress. A few words on some of the stories in A Winter Book: My favourite was probably “Albert”, about a little girl whose trust in her older brother is restored then they encounter an ailing seagull; “The Squirrel” is a wonderful tale about a woman all alone on an island except for a squirrel, and how the two negotiate the space they share. “Snow” captures the darkness and the potential comfort of winter beautifully; and “Taking Leave” is a very moving story about two woman who realise they are now too old to be able to spend their summers on an isolated island on their own.

As you might have guessed by now, these stories are gentle and introspective rather than action-packed. I suppose that not much of anything happens in any of them, but that doesn’t make them any less enjoyable – quite the contrary. It all comes down to how you define “something happening”, really – which events are worth noticing, being touched by, writing about? Jansson’s writing constantly expands our notion of what these might be, and that’s exactly why I love it so much. I’ll leave you with a quote about Jansson I really liked, from the afterword by Frank Cottrell Boyce:

Like an angel, she thinks that humans are funny and vulnerable – tiny creatures accumulating grandeur and clutter on the surface of a dangerous and unpredictable planet. In an era when the weather seems to be going haywire, this is an exhilaratingly prescient vision.
But she also has a strong sense that, if we’re kind to each other; and if we take time to learn how to do things properly – if we make sure there’s enough firewood, and that the roof doesn’t leak – then somehow it will all be alright and possibly fun.

Other bits I liked:

When the log-fire is alight, we draw up the big chair. We turn out the lights in the studio and sit in front of the fire and she says: “Once upon a time there was a little girl who was terribly pretty and her mummy liked her so awfully much…” Every story has to begin in the same way, then it’s not so terribly important what happens. A soft, gentle voice in the darkness and one gazes into the fire and nothing is dangerous. Everything else is outside and can’t get in. Not now or at any time.

“The Dark”

She began sweeping, painstaking and calm. She liked sweeping. It was a perfect day, a day without dialogue. There was nothing to defend or accuse anyone of; everything had been cut out, all those words that could have been other words or might simply have been out of place and led to great changes. Now there was nothing but a warm cottage full of morning light, herself sweeping and the friendly sound of coffee beginning to simmer. The room with its four windows simply existed and justified itself; it was safe and had nothing to do with any place where you could shut anything in or leave anything out. She drank her coffee and thought about nothing at all, resting.

“The Squirrel”

They read it too:
Where Troubles Melt Like Lemon Drops
Stuck in a Book
Winstondad’s Blog

(Have I missed yours?)

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A Christmas Carol on Stage

Photo Credit

I was lucky enough to have the chance to see a stage adaptation of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol recently, and let me tell you, it was absolutely brilliant. This particular adaptation is geared towards children, but that doesn’t mean that the story or the language are simplified, dumbed down, or modernised in any way (in fact, one of my very favourite things about the play was how very Victorian it was, but more on that soon).

This is a production that clearly trusts children’s intelligence, and that trust pays off. I went to a matinee session, which means that the theatre was absolutely packed with school children. At first I was afraid that they were going to be loud, but as soon as the play started they were absolutely enthralled. They remained quiet all the way through, except to laugh at the occasionally moments of humour – it was a pleasure to see how much they were all obviously enjoying it!

As I was saying, the play is very Victorian – the language, the actors’ mannerisms, the clothes, and the simple but very evocative stage sets all felt absolutely right. I felt completely transported to a dark, foggy, snowy Victorian London Christmas. Also, I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed the wardrobe! As you all might have noticed by now, I love Victorian novels, but I don’t actually watch period films or TV series all that often, which means I imagine Victorian clothing much more frequently than I actually get to see it. Possibly this is a sign that I really ought to get my hands on all those BBC dvds you keep recommending to me...

Another thing I appreciate was the fact that this adaptation highlights the original story’s Gothic ambience – the play’s atmosphere was absolutely perfect, and the sound effects in particular really added to that. There was a lot of singing, especially of old Christmas Carols, and that emphasised both the gloomy, scary moments and the joyful ones.

Of course, A Christmas Carol being A Christmas Carol, there were a lot of saccharine and sentimental moments, but I made a point of leaving all my cynicism in the cloakroom and not letting any of it bother me. The flaws, if you want to call them that, were all Dickens’ rather than the adaptation’s, and I really glad for that.

I feel that I’m not doing this play justice, mostly because, never having written about the theatre before, I feel that I lack the vocabulary and the mental guidelines to do it properly. I should mention the acting, shouldn’t I? And the stage effects? Well, to put it briefly they were all perfect. Nothing felt out of place; nothing pulled me out of the story. For almost two hours I was completely engrossed in Dickens’ world.

And do you know what this same company’s next production is going to be? Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, in late February and early March. I’m ridiculously excited about it, especially as the timing couldn’t be more perfect for the Year of Feminist Classics discussion! I’m sure that getting to actually see the play will make me appreciate it all the more. This almost makes up for having missed Arcadia back in September. (I can feel Lu and Jenny in particular looking at me reproachfully. Sadly, I found out about it too late.)

Have you ever seen a stage version of A Christmas Carol? If so, how was it? And if not, you’ll have surely seen a movie. What’s your favourite version? I grew up with Scrooged, so that one will always have a special place in my heart. Of course, it’s a far cry away from the very faithful adaptation I’ve been telling you about today, but I actually really like that the same story can exist in so many different incarnation and yet still be recognisable.

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The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins by William M. Clarke.

As the title indicates, The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins is a biography that particularly emphasises aspects of Wilkie Collins’ life that were kept hidden from the public eye at the time of his life – for understandable reasons. The author, William M. Clarke, is married to Collins’ great-granddaughter, and by putting together old family stories, letters and diaries he arrived at the story of Collins’ personal and romantic life.

Like a characters in one of his own sensation novels, Wilkie Collins was simultaneously involved with two women: Caroline Graves, whom Collins met when she was a twenty-two year old widow and whose personal circumstances supposedly inspired The Woman in White; and Martha Rudd, with whom he had three children. Wilkie Collins’ distaste for the institution of marriage meant that his children were illegitimate. He took great care, however, to make sure they were provided for after his death, and he was not averse to recurring to subterfuge to protect Caroline or Matha’s reputations when necessary.

Sadly, I did not love The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins. Considering that this is a Wilkie Collins biography and that it deals with marriage and sexuality and illegitimacy and unconventional relationship arrangements in the Victorian age, this came as somewhat of a shock. It’s not that this is a bad book, but to put it simply, I found Clarke’s prose more than a little dry. Furthermore, the kind of detail he favours is not necessarily the kind of detail I’m interested in. The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins reads a bit like a Collins family history – a lot of attention is paid to both Wilkie’s father and to his descendants, as the fact that there are two chapters about what happened to them after his death illustrates. I can see how this would be of interest to someone invested in the Collins family, but personally I’d have preferred details about the Victorian social and literary world in which Wilkie Collins moved.

Also, when I hear about an unusual romantic situation like Collins’, Caroline Graves’ and Martha Rudd’s, I cannot help but want to know what things felt like for the people involved. I also wonder how Caroline and especially Martha dealt with the fact that there was so much more at stake for them socially than there ever was for Wilkie. I sympathise with Collins’ reluctance to get married, especially considering Victorian marriage laws, but this particular form of rebellion is one he could afford with much more ease than the women in his life. There is a power imbalance here that Clarke never explores – and while I perfectly accept that he had no way of doing this without entering into wild speculations, part of me still wanted the whole issue to be somehow acknowledged.

I guess what I’m saying is that unreasonable though this is, I kind of wanted this biography to be The Odd Women or Gaudy Night. This is especially ironic if you consider that Dorothy Sayers actually started a biography of Wilkie Collins, but she hadn’t finished it by the time she died. How sad is that? At the time when she was writing it, very few details about Collins’ relationships and illegitimate children were known at all, but I just know that if she’d had access to all this information, she would have written a brilliant and insightful book that would have asked the exact sort of questions I was hoping this biography would address. If only!

All of this brings me to a question I’d like to ask those of you who are more experienced biography readers than I am: how far do you think a biographer should go when it comes to entering their subject’s mind, to guessing at their feelings and motivations; in short, to making them come to life like an author does a character in a novel? I ask this because another thing that kept me from ever really connecting with The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins was the fact that I felt I was only ever seeing Collins from the outside. Is this an inherent limitation of non-fiction, or can more skilful biographers find ways around it? And do they necessarily risk straying from the known facts of their subject’s life too much if they do? I want to say no, that it can be done, but I guess it depends on what you have to work with. I guess that the more their subject has left behind in the form of letters or diaries, the easier it is.

As I said, I didn’t love The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins, but I didn’t dislike it either. I’m glad to have read it and to have learned what I did about Collins’ life. I look forward to seeing how his experiences might have informed his writing as I make my way through more of his novels.

They read it too: Rebecca Reads

(Have I missed yours?)

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Framley Parsonage by Anthony Trollope

Framley Parsonage tells the story of Mark Robarts, the parson of the small country parish of Framley. Mark is a childhood friend of Lord Lufton’s, the only son of the most distinguished local family, and he owes his livelihood, his house, and even the introduction to his wife to the patronage of his friend’s mother, Lady Lufton. Mark is quite happy in his mostly domestic, country existence, but he’s also a socially ambitious young man, and as such he begins to associate with one Mr Sowerby, a local MP - even though he knows Lady Lufton very much disapproves of the association. Framley Parsonage tells, among other things, the story of the results of this friendship, as well as the story of Mark’s sister, Lucy Robarts. Lucy goes to live at Framley Parsonage after her father’s death, and she and Lord Lufton grow increasingly intimate, much to Lady Lufton’s disapproval. But can the fearsome lady’s concerns about social propriety separate the two lovers?

Framley Parsonage is the fourth book in Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire, a series of connected novel set in or around the fictional cathedral town of Barchester. I was told that it would actually make a better introduction to the series than the first book, The Warden, as it was an easier novel to warm up to, and indeed Framley Parsonage proved to be a great introduction not only to this series, but to Trollope’s writing as a whole. I had an extraordinary amount of fun with it, and by the end I couldn’t help but care deeply about all the characters, even Lady Lufton. I suppose I’d have had more of an interest in some of the side plots if I had been familiar with the secondary characters from previous books; but as I can always revisit this novel once I’ve read more of Trollope’s work, that wasn’t really much of a problem.

Another reason why I decided to make Framley Parsonage my first Trollope was because one of my favourite reads of the year, Jo Walton’s Tooth and Claw, was partially inspired by it. Tooth and Claw has often been describe as Jane Austen with dragons, but in fact Trollope with dragon is a much more accurate description. Having previously read Walton’s delight of a novel, I was already somewhat familiar with the plot of Framley Parsonage, but rather than spoiling it for me this helped me warm up to it more quickly than I might have otherwise. I was never really bored, but I will admit that the book has somewhat of a slow start, especially until the delightful Lucy Robarts is introduced about a hundred pages in.

But what, you wonder, is Framley Parsonage about after all? The answer to that would be love, social and political ambition, propriety, financial difficulties and how the gentry deals with them, class tensions, social mobility, community life, gossip, machinations – it’s about people being people, really. The scope of Framley Parsonage put me in mind of Middlemarch: I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as Eliot’s novel, mostly because Trollope’s focus doesn’t match my own interests as closely as Eliot’s does (especially when it comes to gender issues), but the two books actually share many of the same themes.

Which brings me to something I’ve been wondering about: are there any contemporary macro or community novels along the lines of Framley Parsonage or Middlemarch or even Cranford? This is an honest question – I can’t think of any, but I don’t want to assume they just don’t exist. I realise that community life in the twentieth-first century is very different than it was in Victorian times; but personally I don’t think things have changed enough that we would no longer appreciate a piece of writing that analyses the ties that connect the members of a community to one another, and how these shape the kind of people they are. I suppose we do have novels that do this, but perhaps not in such convenient, manageable settings. I say this partially because of how absolutely fresh these novels feels: yes, they depict a kind of social world that no longer exists, but so much of their insight into human nature is still relevant. And part of what makes them so insightful is exactly their careful consideration of the social context in which the characters move.

And speaking of characters, they really are what makes Framley Parsonage. Especially Lucy Robarts, whose sense of humour completely won me over. How can I resist a heroine who says something like this?

“Lucy, I cannot understand you,” said Fanny, very gravely. “I am sometimes inclined to doubt whether you have any deep feeling in the matter or not. If you have, how can you bring yourself to joke about it?”
“Well, it is singular; and sometimes I doubt myself whether I have. I ought to be pale, ought I not? and very thin, and to go mad by degrees? I have not the least intention of doing anything of the kind, and, therefore, the matter is not worth any further notice.”

As I was saying earlier, Trollope doesn’t engage with gender as an explicit theme like Eliot does, but he still wrote a protagonist who is intelligent, sarcastic, a fully developed human being, and as far from a damsel in distress as she could possibly be. I know I need not tell you how much I appreciate that.

There’s a lot about Framley Parsonage I haven’t covered, namely the politics. This is the one aspect of the novel I did feel I’d have made better sense of if I had read the previous Chronicles of Barsetshire first. Still, the impression I got is that Trollope, like many other Victorian novelists, is ambiguous about the idea of progress, about class structure, about social mobility, about whether propriety should be observed or defied. His sympathy seems to be with the old, traditional way of life that Lady Lufton and her friends represent, but at the same time the warm, affable and very Victorian narrator goes out of his way not to dehumanize her political and ideological opponents. And the way things turn out (which I won’t give away, but which I know you’ll have no trouble guessing from early on) clearly signals that the old social order is far from infallible.

I read Framley Parsonage for the Classics Circuit Anthony Trollope tour, which begins today. You can visit Anastasia and Falaise for today’s other posts on Trollope, or click on the button below for a full schedule of the tour.

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Novellas in November

Yes, I do realise we’re almost a week into December (though part of me is going WHA?), but as I read all the books I’m going to tell you about today in November, I thought I might as well attempt to sneak in a last minute entry for J.S. Peyton’s November Novella Challenge.

But before that, a bit of personal blabbing: November wasn’t a bad month for me reading-wise, but between weekend trips, coursework, and being ill, I’m afraid I completely dropped the ball on the blogging front. The good news is that I’m now done with grad school assignments until Christmas (until very shortly after Christmas, unfortunately), which means I can take a deep breath for at least a few weeks. I’m so behind on replying to comments and visiting other blogs that I think I’m just going to start from scratch – apologies as always, and do let me know if I missed anything good!

On to the books: the first one I want to tell you about is The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald, a novella set in a small and isolated English town in the late 1950’s. As the title indicates, it’s about the opening of a bookshop; as well as about the struggles of its owner, Florence Green, to make her business prosper despite the opposition she has to face. Said opposition includes people with other goals in mind for the building the shop is occupying, sceptical townspeople, and even a poltergeist.

I went into The Bookshop expecting something very different from what I got – a funny, quirky sort of book; a delightful story about success against all odds – but for once this mismatch between my expectations and the story didn’t cause much of a problem. The Bookshop actually is funny, but in a subtler, more incisive way than I had thought. But it’s also quite sad, and very much a story about disappointment. Fitzgerald’s greatest strength is the ease with which she combines this sadness and seriousness with her wonderful irony. Here’s a passage that will hopefully show you what I mean:

Later middle age, for the upper middle-class in East Suffolk, marked a crisis, after which the majority became watercolorists, and painted landscapes. It would not have mattered so much if they had painted badly, but they all did it quite well. All their pictures looked much the same. Framed, they hung in sitting-rooms while outside the windows the empty, washed-out, unarranged landscape stretched away to the transparent sky.
The desire to exhibit somewhere more ambitious than the parish hall accompanied this crisis, and Florence related it to the letters which she had also received from “local authors”. The paintings were called “Sunset Across the Laze”, the books were called “On Foot Across the Marches”, or “Awheel Across East Anglia”, because what else can be done with flatlands but to cross them? She had no idea, none at all, where she would put the local authors if they came, as they suggested, to sign copies of their books for eager purchasers. Perhaps a table underneath the staircase, if some of the stock could be moved. She vividly imagined their disillusionment, wedged behind the table with books and a pen in front of them, while the hours emptied away and no one came.

Light Boxes by Shane Jones is a book I think many of you would enjoy a great deal more than I did. It’s a dystopian fairy tale for adults about a town perpetually stuck in the month of February, and it’s highly experimental when it comes to both layout and writing style. This is not by any means a bad thing, but you know a book isn’t working for you when its quirks begin to really get on your nerves after something like ten pages.

I don’t believe in saying “there no substance at all here” even when a book did absolutely nothing for me, because it always takes two – the book and the reader. I won’t argue that there’s no such thing as unsubstantial books, but I’m very well aware that there are also unsubstantial readers and readings. In this case, whatever makes the magic between reader and book happen completely failed to take place. Light Boxes is a book that relies mostly on imagery and symbolism to communicate whatever it was that it was trying to communicate. It would be absurd of me to complain about this, especially after having lamented the fact that people often accuse fairy tales of lacking substance for this very reason earlier this year. But when the imagery the author is using translates into absolutely nothing in your head, and on top of that you feel no emotional investment whatsoever in the story, then there’s nothing to be done. Jones is certainly a unique writer, and I’m sure many of you would have better luck with Light Boxes than I did. Make sure you head over to Savidge Reads and read Simon’s review, as he enjoyed it a great deal.

Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry is also a highly experimental novella, but in a way that felt much more familiar and homelike for me than the Jones book did (obviously this says much more about me than it does about either book). Sexing the Cherry combines magic realism, historical fiction and the fairy tale of the Twelve Dancing Princess into a daring novella that plays with gender identity and toys with stereotypes in humorous and provocative ways. As you might have guessed by now, I was greatly reminded of Angela Carter – not only because of the themes Sexing the Cherry deals with or of the fact that Winterson makes the most of the subversive potential that is so often present in fairy tales, but also because of the joy and energy she injects into her prose.

Again like Angela Carter, Sexing the Cherry is one of those books that make me wonder why the very things it’s so enthusiastically praised for – imagination, playfulness, fairy tale elements, vivid imagery, subversion – are frequently seen as sign of vapidity in genre fiction. But I will not submit you to That Rant yet again, and will instead point you towards Litlove’s excellent review.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson is probably Persephone’s most popular title, and it’s every bit as charming and delightful as everyone says (it seems it’s impossible not to use those words when describing this book – sorry; I tried!). It’s also very 1930’s, both in good ways (the period atmosphere, the slang, the bohemian world, the night clubs, the changing social structure) and bad ways (the undisguised anti-Semitism).

I loved Miss Pettigrew. She’s a governess who never felt capable of doing much of anything due to other people “taking her inadequacy for granted”, but in a single day she discovers that she actually has a knack for handling difficult situations – among many, many other things. She’s initially described as “a middle-aged, rather angular lady, of medium height, thin through lack of good food, with a timid, defeated expression and terror quite discernible in her eyes, if anyone cared to look” – but as you can surely guess, there’s much more to her than meets the eye. As the story progresses, we watch her lose her timidity and fear and emerge as a new woman – and what a joy to witness the whole process is.

Miss Pettigrew’s life changes when she’s wrongly sent to the house of one Miss LaFosse – a bohemian actress facing a romantic dilemma – to see about a new situation as a governess. Miss LaFosse is everything Miss Pettigrew was always taught to disapprove of, but does she care? “Not really. The thought was only a guilty, placating concession towards her former values. The excitement of adventure had entered fully into her.” What makes Miss Pettigrew such a delightful character is exactly her flexibility – her willingness to revise her assumptions instead of just dismissing the real human beings in front of her as Bad People; her courage and her spirit; her determination to face anything life throws her way head on. She’d never really had the opportunity to discover she possessed these qualities, but in a single day everything changes.

Another interesting thing about Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is its ambiguous handling of gender. I don’t see this as a flaw in the novel but as a reflection of the contractions the world is made of – then as now. The novel’s treatment of abusive relationship, of the use of female sex appeal for financial gain (in a world that clearly fosters this), of marriage and romance, of sexuality, of bohemian living, and of independence (personal, ethical and financial) are all things I would happily write about at great length if only time would allow it. Oh well; perhaps some other time. This is certainly a book I would love to reread one of these days.

Finally, Su Tong’s Binu and the Great Wall is a book in the wonderful Canongate Myth Series: it retells the tale of Meng Chiang-nu, a woman who goes in search of her husband when he is taken away and forced become one of the workers building the Great Wall of China.

I wasn’t familiar with this myth before I read Su Tong’s take, so I can’t comment on how closely he sticks to the original story. I liked the fact that Binu and the Great Wall had a different feel than the retellings of Western myths I have read to date - and I suspect this might have to do with the feel of the original material. I was reminded of other Oriental myths and folktales I’ve read in different anthologies over the years: they’re... grittier, perhaps, than the fairy tales I’m used to, and the magic is expressed in different ways, but I love them for that very reason.

Binu and the Great Wall is a story about a woman going on a long journey to take her husband a bundle of winter clothes – and while this, combined with the Ancient China setting, might make Binu sound submissive, in Su Tong’s hand she’s very much not. The magical elements and the fact that the story is set outside real time keep her from ever becoming anachronistic; instead she’s just a likeable heroine who embraces her own vulnerability and who makes us question our ideas of what exactly constitutes strength.

I enjoyed Binu and the Great Wall for both this and for the glimpse into the social structure of Ancient China and the building of the Great Wall. It might not be my favourite Canonagate Myth, but it’s an excellent read.

Have you read any of these books? If so, I’d love to hear what you thought! Also, I would love it if you told me what the last great book you read was. I’ve really missed you all, and I hate feeling so out of touch.

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