Posted in Library Loot on July 29, 2015| 3 Comments »
Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Linda from Silly Little Mischief that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries.
Just one book for me this week:
What did you pick up?
Posted in Library Loot on July 15, 2015| 29 Comments »
Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Linda from Silly Little Mischief that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries.
I am feeling shockingly – and slightly uncomfortably – au courant with my loot this week. It is not natural for me to have this many new books in my possession. I’m sure my borrowing habits will correct themselves shortly but for now I will enjoy the unfamiliar thrill of reading books that other people have actually heard of and which are readily accessible from any well-stocked bookstore.
The Pebbled Shore by Elizabeth Longford – probably the book I am most excited about this week. After reading My History by Antonia Fraser, I’ve been longing to know more about her fascinating mother, Elizabeth Longford. Thoughtfully, she took the time to write this much-praised memoir.
The Royal We by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan – I am either going to have great fun with this (as Eva of The Paperback Princess did last month) or spend the entire time wanting to curl up in embarrassment. But, frankly, I survived watching “William and Kate: The Movie” and if you can handle that, you can handle just about anything. (People were paid to make that movie. In real money. The mind boggles.)
In the Unlikely Event by Judy Blume – I am always up for some Judy Blume.
Savage Continent by Keith Lowe – after having checked this out roughly a dozen times (which sounds like a waste of effort but did result in bringing it to Maphead’s very appreciate attention), I have finally started reading it and it’s just as powerful as I expected.
Dancing Fish and Ammonites by Penelope Lively – another book I’ve checked out countless times without managing to read.
Margot at War by Anne de Courcy – A new Anne de Courcy biography! About Margot Asquith! My cup runneth over.
The Music at Long Verney by Sylvia Townsend Warner – I am reading a collection of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s letters right now and they’ve finally provided the push necessary to get me to try some of her fiction. Can’t wait to dip into this book of short stories, edited by Michael Steinman, who also did a marvellous job editing a superb collection of Warner’s letters back and forth with William Maxwell.
The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories by Michael Smith – Anything that has “Debs” and “Bletchley Park” in the title sounds good to me.
The Truth According to Us by Annie Barrows – This sounds like a perfect summer read and the reviews I’ve seen so far have me intrigued.
What did you pick up this week?
Posted in Library Lust on July 11, 2015| 5 Comments »
Posted in Correspondence, Non-fiction, Sylvia Townsend Warner on July 8, 2015| 14 Comments »
I’m not sure, no matter how long or hard I search, that I will ever find a more perfect letter writer than Sylvia Townsend Warner. I was half convinced of this after finishing The Element of Lavishness, a collection of letters back and forth between her and William Maxwell, but now, part way through Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner (edited by William Maxwell), I am convinced.
It’s not just her eloquence and style – she has an abundance of both – but her ability to transform the mundane into something both beautiful and memorable. Her imagination never flags and she uses it to elevate small moments – a passage in a book she is reading, an encounter with a friend, a memory of her travels – into amazingly vivid scenes that would not be amiss in a novel. What a delight it must have been to be one of her (many) correspondents.
I’m still near the beginning of the book but am enjoying it so much that I had to share my enthusiasm – and a few passages – right away.
Showing off her humourous side (on arriving back in England, having been in America when war broke out):
…Just when we were in port, and sitting waiting for the immigration officers to come and give us landing tickets, all of us sitting in glum patient rows in the saloon, the most terrible thing occurred. For a fulsome voice with a strong Irish accent upraised itself in our midst and began to intone Land of Hope and Glory. For a moment it was remarkably like being torpedoed. And people who had looked perfectly brave and sedate during the voyage suddenly turned pale, and looked round for escape. There was of course no escape. The singing came from a large fur-coated white-haired lady surrounded (rather like Britannia) with a quantity of parcels. And she sang all through that embarrassing stanza. Then she paused, and looked round challengingly. We all pretended we had heard nothing unusual, nothing, in fact, at all. (12 October 1939)
Longing for southern climes during the first, brutally cold winter of the war:
I feel sometimes that my eyes will give out, perish, if they don’t rest on a Latin outline. I would like to sit on a hot stone wall, smothered in dust and breathing up the smell of those flat-faced roses that grow along the edge of Latin roads, or perhaps the rich harmonious stink of a heap of rotting oranges thrown in the ditch; and look at oxen, and small dark men with alert limbs and lazy movements, such as cats combine. And I would like to sit outside a café of atrocious architecture, drinking a pernod, and looking across at some Jesuit great-grandmother of a church that I shan’t go into. And I would like to touch small hard dry hands like lizards, and hear people saying Tss, Tss, when a handsome girl goes by. And see small proud boys making water against notices that say they’re not to. And awful dogs of no known breed being addressed as Jewel; or alternatively as Bastard and Sexual Pervert. (16 February 1940)
Marvelling at Queen Victoria:
I have been re-reading that extraordinary woman’s Diary of Our Life in the Highlands. Really…she and her Albert were an amazing pair. They would go off, down an unknown road in the Highlands, in a strange pony-chaise, all by themselves, ford torrents, scramble up mountains, gather ferns and cairngorms and I should think all probability inaugurate some more heirs to the throne under a pine-wood or on the edge of a precipice, without a care of a scruple. And with their faces still quite filthy, tufts of heather sticking to their clothing, a most unsuitable freedom still gipsyfying their countenances, they would return to be an example of wedded decorum to all the courts and homes of Europe. (7 December 1933)
Posted in Library Lust on July 4, 2015| 5 Comments »
via Elle Decor (photo credit: Simon Upton)
Posted in Antonia Fraser, Memoir/Biography, Non-fiction on July 3, 2015| 11 Comments »
My favourite biographies to read are those of people I know next to nothing about. I can crack open the book without any of the trepidation I feel when I read about my idols – there is nothing more disappointing than discovering that someone you deeply admire is actually a self-pitying bore, unrepentant adulterer, vegan, or in possession of other similarly off-putting character traits. No, much better to stride out into the unknown. And that is just what I did when I picked up My History by Antonia Fraser.
Despite being a devoted student of history, I’ve never actually read any of Antonia Fraser’s books. I think I had a copy of Mary Queen of Scots lying around the house for a few years but, in general, my areas of interest don’t overlap much with Fraser’s, at least when it comes to historical research. When it comes to the details of her life, however, I am absolutely fascinated.
Going into this book I knew two things about Fraser: that she was an author and that her first marriage had broken up when she’d fallen in love with Harold Pinter. Her memoir of her relationship with Pinter, Must You Go?, has been on my to-be-read list since it was released several years ago. One day I’ll get around to reading it but I think this memoir of her youth and early adulthood was a much better introduction to Fraser, for me at least.
Fraser was the eldest of eight children born to Frank and Elizabeth Pakenham. One of the great delights of the book was learning about both her parents, each fascinating figures in their own right. Both Oxford-educated, they were passionate about politics (both ran for office), religion (they converted to Catholicism, though at different points), and social reform. Their interests kept them busy and allowed their children to grow up with only mild parental intervention. Fraser enjoyed this and spent much of her teen years in a vaguely dreamy state, spinning fantasies about favourite historical figures or dashing characters from novels, even while being dragged about the countryside by her campaigning mother:
I was even delighted to sit on the platform at the end of the row because in the romantic haze in which I chose to live, the Marquis of Vidal, saturnine hero of Georgette Heyer’s great novel Devil’s Cub, might see me sitting there and…after that I was vague, and even vaguer about the circumstances in which the Marquis of Vidal or his like would attend a Labour Party meeting in Oxford in February.
(Having just read Devil’s Cub for the first time last year, I can only wrinkle my nose at Fraser’s choice of Vidal as her romantic hero. But perhaps that’s the benefit of reading a book for the first time at twenty eight rather than fifteen – you are much less likely to fall in love with aristocratic murders.)
But it’s not just Heyer’s characters who fuelled young Fraser’s daydreams:
Aged eleven, I had discovered Trollope in a huge green-and-gold edition in my parents’ house. (I learnt later that there was a lot of wartime Trollope reading among the grown-ups ‘to get away from the war’.) Thus I was temporarily obsessed by the character of Lady Glencora Palliser in Can You Forgive Her? The tiny, tousle-haired heiress and her fatal love for the wastrel Burgo Fitzgerald occupied most of my waking thoughts.
Anyone who loves both Heyer and Trollope is clearly a kindred soul.
As we hear – in a charmingly self-deprecating style – about Fraser’s pleasant wartime childhood, excellence at school, and (rather too briefly described) adventures as a young working woman, we are also introduced into her alarmingly well-connected world. She vacationed in Italy with the Italian Prime Minister’s family, met Bernard Berenson in Florence (BB has shown up in my reading a least once a month this year), had her wedding portrait taken by Cecil Beaton (his gift to the bride), worked for the publisher George Weidenfeld, and was the niece of Christine Longford (whose novel Making Conversation is available from Persephone). There are countless other connections that I’ve forgotten but it’s an excellent resource if you’re ever stockpiling information to play six degrees of separation. Which I always am, obviously.
Starting as a complete stranger to Fraser, this was a wonderfully entertaining introduction to her and her fascinating family. Now I just can’t wait to read The Pebbled Shore, a memoir written by her mother, Elizabeth Longford.
Posted in Library Loot on July 1, 2015| 8 Comments »
Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Linda from Silly Little Mischief that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries.
What did you pick up this week?
The Captive Reader 