Winter Stack

 

Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist |  Cohn & Levithan

Nick stands up and offers his hand to me. I have no idea what he wants, but what the hell, I take his hand anyway, and he pulls me up on my feet then presses against me for a slow dance and it's like we're in a dream where he's Christopher Plummer and I'm Julie Andrews and we're dancing on the marble floor of an Austrian terrace garden. Somehow my head presses Nick's T-shirt and in this moment I am forgetting about time and Tal because maybe my life isn't over. Maybe it's only beginning. 

Cohn, Rachel & David Levithan. Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist. 
Electric Monkey: Great Britain, 2014.

The Sense of an Ending | Julian Barnes

Her own shelves held a lot of poetry, in volume and pamphlet form: Eliot, Auden, MacNiece. There were Left Book Club editions of Orwell and Koestler, some calf-bound nineteenth-century novels, a couple of childhood Arthur Rackhams, and her comfort book, I Capture the Castle. I didn’t for a moment doubt that she had read them all or that they were the right books to own. [24] 

At the same time, it made sense that Veronica didn’t give me a simple answer, didn’t do or say what I hoped or expected. In this she was at least consistent with my memory of her. Of course, at times, I’d been tempted to set her down as a woman of mystery, as opposed to the woman of clarity I married in Margaret. True, I hadn’t known where I was with her, couldn’t read her heart or her mind or her motivation. But an enigma is a puzzle you want to solve. I didn’t want to solve Veronica, certainly not at this late date. She been a bloody difficult young woman, 40 years ago, and – on the evidence of this two-word two-finger response – didn’t seem to have mellowed with age. [82] 

… There was a moment in my late twenties, when I admitted that my adventurousness had long since petered out. I would never do those things adolescence had dreamt about. Instead, I mowed my lawn, I took holidays, I had my life. 

But time . . . how time first grounds and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time . . . give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical. [93]

Barnes, Julian. The Sense of an Ending. Vintage: London, 2012.

Summer | September Stack.

 

September —  

The Bad Beekeepers Club | Bill Turnbull

I placed a reservation with MCCL for TBBC the same week as Bill Turnbull died. I remembered that when he'd retired, articles written had referenced his bees. This happened to coincide with my signing-up to become a beekeeper at work so reading his book just made plain good sense. 

It's very conversational in style, almost chatty to a degree and very self-deprecating from the outset as to how much he got wrong. Sometimes I like this as it can be humble and self-aware; sometimes it'd be nice to hear or learn of a few successes as well. But here, the humour & the storytelling mostly worked. Particularly on thrift,

... If not the mother, then necessity is probably the rather wrinkled & stingy maiden aunt of the Bad Beekeeper's sense of invention. [120]

What was much more valuable was factual background to bee characteristics. I'd started to pick up a fair bit through practical means on my rooftop visits but I was certainly learning here too - not just of 'the girls' but also about males, the drones & how

[a] bee has five eyes. And thanks to what’s called ‘flicker fusion potential’, it can see at the equivalent of three hundred frames a second. If bees went to the cinema, the film would appear to them as a long sequence of still pictures. In other words they could see your hand moving like it’s a slow-motion action replay. [8]

 &

CIVILISATION — What's the smoker for? [...]

Smoke makes the bees think that there’s a fire nearby and they may have to evacuate the hive. They quickly eat some of the honey to prepare for the journey. When the smoke passes, they realise they won’t have to leave after all. By this time though, they’ve had so much to eat that their mood has improved and so they are more placid.

& Waggle Dance —

First of all they match up and down a bit to indicate the position of the Sun. Then they veer off at an angle to indicate the compass bearing of the flowers they are guiding other bees too. They also shake their bodies at a certain frequency to let the others know just how far they have to go. And here’s the really interesting bit: the other bees can’t see them doing it. They feel the dance through their antennae. It’s outstanding when you think about it. [29]

but lastly, mostly:  

FELLOWSHIP — Ultimately, though, it’s all about the union with the bees. Forget about the honey, and the candle making, and the mead and all the other little bits and pieces you can harvest from the hive, like pollen and propolis. The real joy for me is just in keeping the bees, literally. From the moment you lift off the lid on the hive and peer inside, you are entering another world, and leaving your own. [243]

— Amen to that.

Turnbull, Bill. The Bad Beekeeper's Club. Sphere: UK, 2011.

________

August - September —

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

Millie Radcliffe-Dix:  Would you like some of this sponge cake by the way? I'm having some.  It's important to keep your strength up on adventures.  [217] 

: A borrowed read from some friends I happened to trade books with this summer. I'm not by any measure a straight-up consumer of SFF but there are certain ones which neatly intersect the genre whilst providing something extra elsewhere in keeping with my literary tastes. This particular read does just that, not least from its world inhabited by familiar characters from fiction.

Parry's Acknowledgments calls out a number of names, all bar one I'd knew of, had studied &/or read something by...

... thanks to Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Mary Shelley, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jane Austen, Margaret Mahy, Roald Dahl, C.S. Lewis, Emily Brontë, and the other authors whose creations grace the pages of this book. You’re wonderful. Your words are wonderful. I’m sorry for what I did to them. 

But it's also more than that. There's a real warmth & a care in how Parry's characters are cultivated & developed from their fictional origins; a love of reading; a world very much shaped by literary analysis (or for me, Lit Crit). Having five different Darcys (one sure nod to CF / BBC included) tickled me no end. And whilst I've never cared much for Dickens, I'm familiar enough with the ins & outs of his works to recognise & understand Copperfield, Uriah, Artful, Satis House, Havisham, Fagin & so on... If anything, the large equivalent dosage of Conan Doyle certainly helped — shout-out here for Henry (Hound Mk. 2), the depiction of Holmes as a righter of wrongs & a lovely bit of plot leading via 'the fly in the ointment' directly to:

“Moriarty,” Charlie said. “The Napoleon of crime.” The woman who wasn't Beth smiled. “Yes. And may I say, Dr. Sutherland, but it is a dangerous habit to finger books in the pockets of one’s dressing gown.” [364]

Well played indeed.  

I'm not sure I always knew exactly where the storyline was headed. Sometimes there felt to be a lot of signposting around The Coming Of The New World without much development. But there was enough to run with or to keep track of & Parry was meanwhile plugging the gaps of past, present & future. Diary entries neatly breaking up the novel. Helping me thus in turn, as a reader, to better understand how Robert and Charles had been shaped as well as their fraternal relations.

It was the latter part of the book, with the new world's arrival, the showdown which became the most compelling. A particularly TTTW moment such as when the Henrys crossover in time. Yup --

If you have difficulty believing your brother isn’t real, try seeing him dead or dying in two vastly different forms, as two vastly different people, while he’s standing behind you both times as the person you grew up with. And then try to tell yourself it isn’t killing you inside. [390]

Beautiful, beautiful writing & (2) I don't tend to envisage or picture much when I'm reading but this I could see as it took me right back to MIF '19's Atmospheric Memory...  

He was David Copperfield, and Sherlock Holmes, and Charles Dickens. He was Dr. Charles Sutherland, author of the world that was crumbling around us. He was words, and thought, and memory. He was a creature of metaphor and simile, of hopes and autobiography and dead people. And he was my brother. [426]

… Buildings folded over like the pages of a book. Liminal space. The space between two worlds. Where the light was strongest, there were no buildings—at least, none of bricks and mortar. They shone through with words. The city at the edges dissolved into block text, and the ground under my feet were shifting with printed sentences. In places the buildings looked like thinly painted watercolor over newsprint. In others there were holes torn through the walls or across the sky itself, and words teemed from those holes—or out of them, I couldn’t tell. Everything was in motion. And noise. There was so much noise. [425]

… I saw the city, Charley’s London, solid and real, made of words and thoughts and ideas and interpretation, sprawling out as far as I could see. It was disappearing: not to nothing, as Moriarty had feared, but into something I couldn’t begin to understand. It was passing into pure language. In another moment, perhaps, I would disappear with it. [427]

End resolution? Yeah... it wrapped up well. That last scene was particularly cosy after Robert's years of bubbling frustration / irritation with Charley & the company he'd been keeping. 

  Specific elements I enjoyed:

- Parry's writing-up of Wellington & her emphasis on the city's topography

- Charley's bookstrewn house (the Woolfs again!) 

- the dynamic between Millie & Dorian Gray 

- Heathcliff & his 'glorious' necessary death 

- The Street (& five entire cohabiting Darcys)

- different manifestations of David Copperfield 

- Millie & Charley's friendship 

Beastly to discover that Millie was fully fictional though. That's the kind of (plucky heroine & near scrapes) series I would've easily devoured in childhood. Darn! 

Parry, H.G. The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep. Orbit: UK, 2020.

_______________

August - October -  
— The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry | John Mark Comer  (underway)

Penumbra.

I ordered Mr. Penumbra... almost as soon as I'd finished Sourdough. 
A slightly different read, this one but still. so. good.

  Specific elements I enjoyed:

— The combination of quest & tech. It being a bibliophile’s book with ancient texts, dedicated reading rooms, the plot-specific punches that brought the texts together.

Neel takes a sharp breath and I know exactly what it means. It means: I have waited my whole life to walk through a secret passage built into a bookshelf. [143]

(Heck yes.)

But also technology, again, playing a part in throwing down obstacles; subverting...

Also:

— A superb ensemble of characters: Mat, Matcropolis; Mat and Ashley. Neel as patron; fully at home in ‘the nerdiest place in New York’ [159]. Edgar Deckle.

— Brotherhood, as a theme: Clay and Neel, lives linked from boyhood, the cohort of clerks, past & present: Clay, Oliver, Deckle ... Moffat.

‘.. we nod farewell like soldiers — like men who uniquely understand each other’s circumstances.’ [22]

— Googlers in the amphitheatre / the great uncoding.

— Clark Moffat: writer, clerk, scholar, code-maker; savant.

— Geritszoon. Historical (Manutius. Punchcutters.); Reimagined, ubiquitous, unlocking.

— Plot devices which just fit & solving obstacles: GrumbleGear 3000; Con-U’s curious storage; Tabitha Trudeau & Cal Knit. Hacking the Accession Table to track down artefacts.

— Clay’s commitment to, & eventual partnership with, Mr Penumbra. | Friendship: ‘the key to everything.’

. . . . .

A note on the character of Kat,

“It’s not good enough.” — “Don’t call that immorality.” [278]

I didn't love her... I understood the Cute factor, sure. The reason why Clay's really into her. But having come through the twists & turns of the plot alongside the others, to then abandon once the truth was explained & unpacked ... I didn't really get why our hero therefore needed her (nor wanted her, perhaps) back at all.

. . . . .

— This. 

Which made me laugh out loud. 

The build-up.

'If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well.' 

Punctured.

Heh. 

Clay; hero.

You seem resourceful. That’s something I haven’t heard before. I think about the word. Resourceful: full of resources. .. But maybe Deckle is right. Everything I’ve done so far, I’ve done by calling in favors. I do know people with special skills and I know how to put their skills together. And come to think of it, I have just the resource for this. [242]

 

Sloan, Robin. Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. Atlantic Books: London, 2012

(Loveliness: https://readingmapofpenumbras24hourbookstore.wordpress.com/)

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.

Spring Stack || DLW.

It took a while for this book to take hold & it seems now, in retrospect, I'm not alone in this. That said, I came to absolutely love it & - yes - I'd been in tears more than once by the end.

I had come across an advertisement for the novel, was struck by its name - read a brief synopsis & looked it up at the library. A popular choice; I had to wait for my reservation to take hold.

.  .  .  .

'PART ONE: Batten - Distrustful'
The jump from Esme's schooldays back to the grounds of the Scriptorium jarred & I wasn't sure why Williams was glossing over that part of events.  We'd been with Esme each step prior so it seemed odd to have that era of her life so closed off.  I suppose, for Williams as much as us readers, the drama was centred around the Scriptorium & in this respect, Scotland was now a closed book. 

But as Esme's involvement in being hands-on in the Scriptorium developed so too grew a rich array of new characters around her & with them, greater plot development.
Tilda and Bill and the stage for starters: 

   ‘I have ten minutes’, I said. ‘I wanted to see them in their costumes.'
   It was a dress rehearsal. Opening night was just three days away.
   ‘Why do you come every day?’ asked Bill.
   I had to think. ‘It’s about seeing something before it’s fully formed.

Watching it evolve. I imagine sitting here on opening night and
appreciating every scene all the more because I understand what has
led to it.’
   Bill laughed.
   ‘What’s so funny?’
   ‘Nothing. It’s just that you don’t speak often, but when you do it’s perfect.’
   I looked down and rubbed my hands together.
   ‘And I love that you never talk about hats’, Bill said.  [149]

.  .  .  .

‘But I’m not going to get married. 'Well, not right away.' 'If I get married, I can’t be an assistant', I said. 'What makes you think that?' 'Because I’ll have to look after babies and cook all day.' Da was silenced. He looked Mr Sweatman for some support. 'If you’re not going to get married, then why not aim to become an editor?' Mr Sweatman asked. 'I’m a girl', I said, annoyed at his teasing. 'Should that matter?' I blushed and didn’t answer. Mr Sweatman cocked his head and raised his eyebrows as if to say, 'Well?' ‘Quite right, Fred’, said Da … [85]

.  .  .  .  

It was a surrender, but not to him. Like an alchemist, Bill had turned Mabel's vulgarities & Tilda's practicalities into something beautiful. I was grateful, but I was not in love. It was Tilda I missed the most; her absence that left a misboding sorrow. She had ideas I wanted to understand and she said things I could not. She cared more for what mattered and less for what didn’t. When I was with her I felt I might do something extraordinary. With her gone, I feared I never would. [175]

 .  .  .  .  

'I don’t love him, though. And I don’t want to be married.' She stiffened slightly, and I felt her take a breath. Then she pulled a chair close to mine and sat opposite, our hands clasped. 'Every woman wants to be married, Essymay.' 'If that’s true, then why is Ditte not married, or her sister? Why not Elsie or Rosfrith or Eleanor Bradley? Why not you?' 'Not all women get the chance. And some… well, some have so many books and too many ideas and they can’t settle to it.' 'I don’t think I could settle to it, Lizzie.' 'You'd get used to it.' 'But I don’t want to get used to it.' 'What do you want?' 'I want things to stay as they are. I want to keep sorting words and understand what they mean. I want to get better at it and to be given more responsibility, and want to keep earning my own money. I feel as though I’ve only begun to understand who I am. Being a wife or a mother just doesn’t fit.' It all came out in a rush and ended in sobbing. [187-8]

 .  .  .  .  

The Old Ashmolean was as grand as the Scriptorium was humble. It was stone instead of tin, and the entrance was flanked by the busts of men who had achieved something – I don’t know what.

(This part made me laugh out loud. 

- Quite.) 

When I'd first seen them, I'd felt small and out of place, but after a while they encouraged me a defiant ambition, and I'd imagined walking into that place and taking my seat at the Editor’s desk. But if women could be barred from a public budget meeting, I had no right to that ambition.

I thought about Tilda, her hunger for the fight. And I thought about the women who had gone to gaol. Can I starve myself? I wondered. If I thought it would help me become an editor? [259]

 .  .  .  .  

Bondmaid. It came back to me then, and I realised the words most often used to define us are the words that described our function in relation to others. Even the most benign words – maiden, wife, mother – told the world whether we were virgins or not. What was the male equivalent of maiden? I could not think of it. What was the male equivalent of Mrs, of whore, of common scold? [266]

I did so want for Esme to become an editor. Not knowing the history of the OED, I held out hope a fair while. That said, perhaps the care & love which went into creating the dictionary (best engagement ring alternative ever) & the deliciousness of it joining the shelves with the other works...  That's not a bad shot. 

Other elements I loved: 

On names & naming 
(that very Winterson bend & bias of mine): 

- from being the man with the violet eyes to becoming Gareth: friend, suitor, husband
- the significance of the shift from being 'Mrs Lloyd' to Lizzie then adopting first name terms , in friendship, for each other
- Gareth's acknowledgment that Essymay, Lizzie's given nickname, is not his to use
- how Esme's daughter remains Her even after we learn her name

- Words & language:
Bertie at the Radcliffe; Esperanto returned, with purpose.

- Characters & Class:
Female friendship ~ Lizzie, Ditte, Beth.
Meeting Mabel in the Covered Market.

- Historical landscape:
how Williams locates her narrative within the greater evolving narrative of WW1.

_________

To Read:  Lynda Mugglestone - Lost for Words
                   Peter Gilliver - The Making of the OED

_________

I found the slips for bondmaid: that beautiful troubling word ...

But there was no sign of top-slip.. - it really had been lost. [407]

I know I'll definitely return to this read again in the future. The characters lived on inside of me for days after finishing.

Brilliant, beautiful, powerful book.

Williams, Pip. The Dictionary of Lost Words. Penguin Random House: UK, 2021

Well-thumbed; JW.

Brilliant. 

Lyrical. Witty. Authentic. Eye-opening. 

Shining a light on what she writes, why she writes & how she writes. 

Intertextual; a love of literature. 

Life in Accrington I'd known about & likewise of her time in Oxford due to ground covered in Oranges. But the breakdown? Writing her way out of it; figuring through. That particular chapter, The Night Sea Voyage, came up like a sharp left turn for the reader. 

Moving. Engaging. The recriminatory conversational creature. Courageous. 

The adoption papers trail; making the novel more than ever into a compelling page-turner. 

There were so many lines too, thoughts & themes which I wanted to savour. As the above photo shows, the closer I moved towards the ending, the more I felt struck by & wanted to revisit. 

______________________

.. In the morning there were stray bits of texts all over the yard and in the alley. Burnt jigsaws of books. I collected some of the scraps.
  It is probably why I write as I do - collecting the scraps, uncertain of continuous narrative. What does Eliot say? These fragments have I shored against my ruin . . . 

[41]

12. THE NIGHT SEA VOYAGE

... Life is layers, fluid, unfixed, fragments. I never could write a story with a beginning, a middle & an end in the usual way because it felt untrue to me. That is why I write as I do and how I write as I do. It isn't a method; it's me.   [...]
 Whenever I write a book, one sentence forms in my mind, like a sandbar above the waterline. They are like the texts written up on the walls when we all lived at 200 Water Street; exhortations, maxims, lighthouse signals flashed out as a memory and warning.
  The Passion: 'I'm telling you stories. Trust me.'
  Written on the Body: 'Why is the measure of love loss?'
  The PowerBook: 'To avoid discovery I stay on the run. To discover things for myself, I stay on the run.'   [156]

...  Then a string of lines start replaying in my head - lines from my own books - 'I keep writing this so that one day she will read it.' 'Looking for you, looking for me, I guess I've been looking for us both all my life . . . '
  I have written love narratives and loss narratives - stories of longing and belonging. It all seems so obvious now - the Wintersonic obsessions of love, loss and longing. It is my mother. It is my mother. It is my mother.   [160]

. . .

On text memorised,

I had lines inside me - a string of guiding lights. I had language.

[9]

4. THE TROUBLE WITH A BOOK . . .

At home one of the six books was unexpected: a copy of Morte d’Arthur by Thomas Mallory. It was a beautiful edition with pictures, and it had belonged to a bohemian, educated uncle   [...]
I have gone on working with the Grail stories all my life. They are stories of loss, of loyalty, of failure, of recognition, of second chances.  [...]
Later, when things were difficult for me with my work, and I felt that I had lost it turned away from something I couldn’t even identify, it was the Perceval story that gave me hope. There might be a second chance . . .

[37-8]

So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy.
A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to say how it is.
It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place. 

[40]

I looked out and it didn’t look like a mirror or a world. It was the place I was, not the place where I would be. The books had gone, but they were objects; what they held could not be so easily destroyed. What they held was already inside me, and together we would get away.  [...]
‘Fuck it,’ I thought, ‘I can write my own.’ 

[43]

5. AT HOME

Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home - they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and space. 

  There is warmth there too - a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm. I know this from the chilly nights on the doorstep.

12. THE NIGHT SEA VOYAGE

  On bad days I just held onto the thinning rope.
  The rope was poetry. All that poetry I learned when I had to keep my library inside of me now offered a rescue rope.   
[...]  
  But what is really your own never does leave you. I could not find words, not directly, for my own state but every so often I could write, and I did so in lit-up explosions, that for a time showed me that there was still a world - proper and splendid.   

[163]

It was a rope slung across space. It was a chance as near to killing me as to saving me and I believe it was an even bet which way it went. It was the loss of everything through the fierce and unseen return of the lost loss. The door into the dark room had swung open.   [...]

  The door had swung open. I had gone in. The room had no floor. I had fallen and fallen and fallen.

  But I was alive.

  And that night the cold stars made a constellation from the broken pieces of my mind. 

[169]

14. THIS APPOINTMENT TAKES PLACE IN THE PAST

.. When critics and the press turned on me, I roared back in rage, and no, I didn't believe the things they said about me or my work, because my writing has always stayed clear and luminous to me, uncontaminated .. 

[185]

15. THE WOUND

  All my life I have worked from the wound. To heal it would mean an end to my identity - the defining identity. But the healed wound is not the disappeared wound; there will always be a scar. I will always be recognisable by my scar. 

[223]

Winterson, Jeanette. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?. 

Vintage: London, 2012