My Year In Books: 2022

*The Relentless Elimination of Hurry - John Mark Comer

The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes

The House With Chicken Legs - Sophie Anderson

Open Water - Caleb Azuma Nelson

Two Across - Jeffrey Bartsch

The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep - H.G. Parry

The Bread Pet: A Sourdough Story - Kate DePalma

The Bad Beekeeper's Club - Bill Turnbull

Flush - Virginia Woolf

Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore - Robin Sloan

Was She Pretty? - Leanne Shapton

The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
The Art of Sourdough Scoring - Brittany Wood

Howards End Is On The Landing - Susan Hill

Dear Fahrenheit 451 - Annie Spence

Virginia Woolf At Home - Hilary Macaskill

Novel Houses: Twenty Famous Fictional Dwellings - Christina Hardyment

Hedwig And The Angry Inch - John Cameron Mitchell & Stephen Trask 

The Dictionary of Lost Words - Pip Williams

There's a Dinosaur in my Bathtub - Catalina Echeverri

Becoming - Michelle Obama

Flush.

 

' The human nose is practically non-existent. The greatest poets in the world have smelt nothing but roses on the hand, and dung on the other. The infinite gradations that lie between are unrecorded. Yet it was in the world of smell that Flush mostly lived. Love was chiefly smell; form and colour were smell. To him religion itself was smell. To describe his simplest experience with the daily chop or biscuit is beyond our power. [...] Confessing our inadequacy, then, we can but note that to Flush Italy, in these the fullest, the freest, the happiest years if his life, meant mainly a succession of smells. ' [86]

 
Woolf, Virginia. Flush. Penguin Random House. Clays Ltd. St Ives, 2016 

All These Selves.

He is typing something into his computer when he says: “Covid tends to seek out and reawaken old areas of inflammation.” I tell him that, aged 12, I had pleurisy, which left me with scarring in that exact spot; I refrain from mentioning that I sprained that ankle falling off a kerb outside a nightclub in my 20s. He nods as he hits the return on his keyboard. “There you are then,” he says.

This is the spiritual change or undiscovered country of my Covid: the virus has made me at once eight, 12 and 23 years old, all at the moment I am approaching 50, which is almost Clarissa Dalloway’s age. Covid has returned me to all that I grappled with as a child with encephalitis, and the lung infection I contracted as an awkward preteen, and incongruously the blithe twentysomething who stayed out too late and pretended all those things never happened to her at all. As I make my way across the car park, all these selves seem vividly present, within me and alongside me, as if the four of us are an unfolded chain of paper-people, for ever bound together, fluttering in the stiff breeze. But then my body, of course, knew this all along.

Maggie O'Farrell - The Guardian

Spring Stack || Books About Books

May — June  
Dear Fahrenheit 451 | Annie Spence

Another, possibly now the last, of the books first spotted in Ripon. I came recently to have a look for a second-hand copy & then thought to check the library first. It makes good sense to be reading a book about library reads having borrowed it from a library after all.

   I'd spent a few sleepless mornings back in the pages of my beloved 'Time Traveler's Wife, having read an article on the new HBO series.

  (NB: Not that I'll be going there with the tv series, having not ventured there when the film was released either. I want my Henry and my Claire to stay uninterpreted & unblemished, without any visuals when it comes to encountering them, time after time.)

From the stacks at the Newberry direct to these - and right back again with 'Finchy' & TTTW both featuring in Spence's top reads.

 

 

 Big Stone Gap Series - 

She was crouched on a stool next to your shelf. She had obviously been browsing and been so taken with you she couldn't stop reading. I knew because she had The Look on her face: the Look people get when their brains are so engrossed that they don't care ... Because they're not out in public anymore, they're in whatever world they're reading about. It's beautiful. [30-31]

Killing - 

We can't open ourselves up to that kind of chaos in the stacks. Next thing you know we're alphabetizing the entire collection by title ... [45]   

(God bless Dewey Decimal.)

Easy Rawlins - 

God, I love wandering down dicey alleys with you, roughing up people if they need it, experiencing two decades of Los Angeles, the '40s through the '60s.. Cruising down the strip when I should be in bed with nothing but my favorite PI, Easy & the desert air on my face. But seriously, I should be in bed. I have to be up by six tomorrow. [46]

Future Book Collection -

For now, you'll have to exist in my mind alone. But I've got you all figured out: a room big enough for all of you to fit but small enough to feel cozy & hidden from the rest of the world. Leather couches that are also comfortable, piled with ratty homemade blankets   [...]    A locked door will lead into the room. This will be essential. There will be a doorbell; however, entry is denied unless visitor-candidates answer a series of question posed  [...]  

Once the riffraff is sorted through, serious visitors will only be allowed inside if they agree to speak only about books   [...]   I'll also have a Reading Room Wardrobe, full of clothing Anjelica Houston would wear, which is to say something dramatic & stylish that says "I'm not fucking around." Drapey shit. Lots of otherwise beautiful pieces marred with cigarette burns. Sinister hats. That kind of thing.

But, I mean, obviously, it'll all be about you - the books. You'll all be wrapped in thick pastel marbleized paper, with your titles and authors embossed in gold lettering on the spine. ...  You'll be placed on shelves and in artfully haphazard piles around the room.  [168-9]

.  .  .  .  .

Dear Fahrenheit 451

I'm really glad we met. Reading you has helped kick off my holiday in a most relaxing manner, even reading you in the bath. (I'm so glad you've got that reassuringly waterproof cover.)  I'm enjoying meeting the different books mentioned in you & I'm glad to see we've got a few favourites in common. 

You're certainly making me laugh out loud (Fancy Bookshelf drunken antics!) as well as appreciating having a library service more than ever. It's pretty sweet that because of you I got to visit the one in Didsbury for the first time. 

Thanks for keeping me company over this last week or two. I'd definitely file you in the Fuck It, I'm Just Going To Read Instead of Do What I Need To Do Today section.

Best wishes, 

NW

PS: About that question you posed of keeping notes "& now you have a gabazillion books on your list?" [240]   Aye...  Thanks for that: my MCC Saved List is now even longer & where that stops short, my eBay watch list picks up the slack. That's another couple of months sorted then.   

Spence, Annie. Dear Fahrenheit 451. Icon Books: London, 2019.

____________

April — May

Virginia Woolf at Home | Hilary Macaskill

Another gem spotted in Ripon...  If I hold a sheepish, as opposed to a properly a Woolfish, hand up from having watched The Hours a time or two too many, I must admit I hadn't realised how much Virginia had moved around or changed homes beyond the slightly seismic shift from London to Richmond.

 I enjoyed the insight it gave; learning how much stock was set by regular reading as much as time spent writing; marrying up which books were written in which particular eras & respective house & home of the time.

Tactics around the writing of Flush: 

-- 'she continued to work on it as light relief from the early emergence of her next book, already brewing, already agonising' [135]

&,

-- The Years.. took four years. At her best, she was simply frustrated & longed to be rid of it, to get onto her next project... [135]

... I've certainly been there: desiring to swap to something a little friendlier & a less little foreboding, ready for a change & a chance to Move On.

- Knole again, mentioned - 'the extraordinary mansion that held such sway over Vita', with a glorious double-page illustration that helped me appreciate its magnificent self.

- My laugh out loud moment of houses for sale (inflation overlooked but): 

-- 'And it was cheap, just £300 for the freehold' 

-- 'they made the successful bid, obtaining it for just £700 ... 

on 16 July, they sold the Round House - .. a profit of £20.'

Ach. Ah well.  Interesting too to learn of Woolf's own interest in furnishings & textiles - supporting her sister & Duncan through the purchase or commission of artworks - as well as her bread baking.  :)  Plus Leonard's thoughts - linking in with house as character - the inherited history of a place & what would be their eventual final home together at Monk's House, with books piled high & overflowing from room to room.

Macaskill, Hilary. Virginia Woolf at Home. Pimpernel Press Ltd, 2019.

____________

March — April

Novel Houses: Twenty Famous Fictional Dwellings | Christina Hardyment

There's been a lot of houses with character recently. My reading of this happened to coincide with both a staged version of The House With Chicken Legs & a first viewing of Encanto.

I found the provided Context helpful in Hardyment's desire 

To prompt memories and tempt new readers, I sketch plots, always emphasizing settings. I also explore the lives of the authors in order to establish why they were inspired to create such dwellings.

I enjoyed re-visiting familiar houses & homes I'd known from fiction:  
Castle of Otranto / 221B Baker Street / Knole, Orlando / The Sorceror's Tower - I Capture The Castle / Uncle Tom's Cabin / Manderley, Rebecca / Cold Comfort Farm / Howards End / Wuthering Heights  

Kinship too due to Hardyment's understanding as to 'literary geography' linked to the delight I'd had a young reader. Seeing the village maps of Fern Hollow or Milly Molly Mandy as well as domestic interiors displayed in each book of The Secret Book of the Gnomes series. 

Stacks, Shelves | Howards End Is On The Landing

It seems somehow winningly appropriate that a day after my completing 
Howards End Is On The Landing, the excellent Brian Bilston then posted this: 

'Today’s poem is called ‘Tsondoku’ after the Japanese word for 

allowing books to pile up in your house without reading them.'

_____________________________

I'd clocked this title in 2017 whilst searching the library database for a copy of Howards End. Something in the lyrical nature of this title appealed to me so it went onto my saved list for a time. 

  I’ve known of Susan Hill, the novelist since reading The Woman In Black in Year 9, I think. I wasn’t much taken by it at the time but perhaps that was more to do with the nature of enforced group study than anything else. I know I'd now love to see its acclaimed staged version sometime if it ever tours this way again. 

  Reading around the book before starting it myself, I found some of its past readers were a bit sniffy about the number of names Hill mentions. But I didn't really interpret that as a vainglorious name-dropping exercise of hers. If anything, it felt as much to do with the respect and awe she had as a young student, & later as a novelist, to be encountering any one of those Greats whom she so admired in the flesh & off, away from their written pages. Fair play to her, I reckon.

  I enjoyed how she broke her book up into themed sections, the titles of which I could certainly identify from my own bookshelves & reading habits.

Things That Fall Out Of Books | Writing In Books | 

A Book By Its Cover |  Never Got Round To It |  

The Dregs:

Non-books do, though. Small hardbacked books bought in the run-up to Christmas or Valentine's or Mother's Day are non-books.   [...]   Non-books breed, too. Books about Everything Being Rubbish breed others the same or, contrariwise, books about Everything Being Wonderful...  they come in handy for Boxing Day, when people lie idly... After Christmas, their place is the charity shop but, as such books are often rather small in stature, they manage to hide themselves in the cracks between normal books and so go unnoticed...  [135]  

I appreciated her insights and asides about the nature of reading.

And here, at last, I find what I am looking for - a book to read.

If ever I am in this restless and unsettled book-reading state, I know

what will always satisfy me, always interest me, always welcome me into

the depths of its being. [80]

Fast reading will not get us cadence and complexities of style and language... It will not allow the book to burrow down into our memory and become part of ourselves, the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom and vicarious experience which helps form us as complete human beings.  [172]  

and of revisiting,  

none of these fade over time, meeting them again is always a pleasure  [108]

____ 

Memory is like a long, dark street, illuminated at intervals in a light so bright that it shows up every detail. Then one plunges into the dark stretch again. [106] 

A whole chapter on Woolf which brought me joy,  

[On A Writer's Diary]  I was enthralled by this extraordinary woman & her work & I have been ever since. She was unique, a genius, a rare & strange artist as well as an ordinary, thinking, feeling human being  [...]   all of it was revelatory to me as a beginner. It still is. [128]

On the whole, I prefer to keep a writer out of their work. [...]  But with Virginia Woolf, it is different. I am drawn to her, though I think it probable that we would have found nothing to say to one another.  [129]

whilst extending my 'To Read' list further still by her various recommendations. 

I think I'm ready for some fiction now, following several non-fiction reads, but I'm still glad I took the time to read this one. And that I bought the one with the prettiest cover too. 

Time to pass it along to another book-loving friend who'll appreciate it.

Hill, Susan. Howards End Is On The Landing. Profile Books: London, 2010.

‘ Lighthouse...

 Virginia Woolf, 

To the Lighthouse:

Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older or Cam either. These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters. Nothing made up for the loss. [67-68]

Meanwhile,

the bedside table stack grows ever taller... The Eyre Affair was presented to me last weekend by a friend with the command of "you must read this"; 'Jane Austen Adventures' was a birthday present :) But with it being creative has the requirement of pen & paper to mark a score so I shall need my wits about be for that one if I am to marry Fitzwilliam by the end. The Woolf was an entirely new & exciting find from last weekend. Stylist ran this wee advert for it (left) as published by Virago (Vintage Classics) & thus I went straight forth to Amazon & ordered it. I'd never known of its existence until now. Thankfully it is referred to as a forgotten classic so I might just be forgiven. .... Ah, I do love Virago's cover art. The Wiersbe study is an ongoing journey, shared with a friend. A blooming well-written study too. We thought we'd get through 14 questions a week & be done by Christmas. Hm. Not so fast. My Patten collection would normally inhabit a place on my bookshelf but at the moment, is living in an arm's reach from my bed. I'm needing his words and all of their gritty poetic realistic punch right now. That's to say nothing of the Other pile, the not-quite-ready-for but not-wholly-forgotten: Agnes Grey came to me from London for my birthday, as did Fanny Hill (apparently it's where all the best M&Bs originated from). Quite glad to have a new Bronte passed my way. I was thinking only recently as a friend sang its praises that I should go back & revisit Tenant. The next three are also gifts-in-waiting (soon, Zusak, soon!) Brideshead (DVD) was swapped with a friend: I lent her my novel; she provided me with Jeremy Irons. I read the novel in '08 as the new film adaptation hit the screens but - as ever - I can't see the film until I read the book and it's only right that once I've read the book that I should first pay homage to the tv series before becoming seduced by the film... :) Also on loan is the second of Niffenegger's novels. I admit to being slightly scared of starting that one. I've read the blurb on occassion, read the reviews, am fully armed with the knowledge that it is not & so will not be another TTTW and yet.... Please don't diminish the dream! TTTW first held me captive way back in '05 whilst I re-emerging from the dusty tomes of degree. Reading! For pleasure?! Send me to a desert island by all means, just be sure to pack that, Jane Eyre, Oranges, The Hours, The Visitation, my Bible & at least a few volumes of Duffy & Patten. (See my problem? Pedestals. Elevated. Dangerous - especially when following on from a debut novel.)

All hail the Woolf:

"Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack."  ~ Virginia Woolf