Bookish.

S4T.

It was alright.

I picked it up in August, in a charity shop because back when I was a Netflix subscriber, I had added the McAvoy film to my To View list but had never quite got around to watching it. So I thought I'd start from the other end; that is to say, the beginning, in reading the book.      
   To be fair, I should add in a disclaimer that One Day also inspired a mediocre response from me so Nicholls isn't exactly one of my favourite authors. My response in both cases has been one of wanting to shake some sense into his characters, to "get it together!" so perhaps whereas others may find their qualities familiar or endearing; for me, that's just not the case.
    I'll probably pass on the film altogether now, especially with having read how the plot-line diverges from the text. At least Nicholls' ending showed some degree of sense. 

Update: June 2017 / III

Crimson Petal...    ★★★★★

I loved this book. I loved it in the way Time Traveler's Wife got me in 2005. I didn't want it to end even though I full well knew the ending from the tv series. 

But to rewind a little: first there was 2011 & then again onto 2014, where I spotted this copy & seized upon it in the brilliant Oxfam bookshop on Market Street, Nottingham whilst looking for some Long Read literature. 
Having added it to my 'shelf, I started it over Christmas 2016 & soon fell in step with the introductions to different characters as Faber passes you from one character to Caroline to Sugar and so on. 
- As ever, it's good to see the characters fully fleshed out from their tv dimensions; to know their back stories, to understand their foibles better. 
- Fascinating to trace Sugar's transformation from well-read prostitute, mainly out for herself & own interests to the nurturing love she holds for Sophie.
- The meta aspect too: revisiting Agnes through the old diaries.
- The friendship/unspoken love between Henry & Emmeline. 
- The novel's structure in itself which made it perfect for bedtime reading. 
No racing ahead to conquer a chapter before you drop off; short enough to stay with that character, their happenings & then stop at a good point, at your own pace & remember where you left off at the next night. 

I didn't want it to end. I knew whatever was due to follow wouldn't be as strong or powerful a read.
............

Wonder... read December 2016; generously lent by my friend, SB. 
I hadn't been expecting Palacio's variety of narrative voices given how the first chapter started out. I liked it all the more for that. Good to experience Auggie's life from different perspectives & the effect of his life on them. 
I wasn't sure how it would be tied up at the end; how could there be an end to something to mark him out as different throughout his whole life? 

Conan Doyle, 

revisited over January & into February. As Gatiss & Moffat led us through The Six Thatchers into The Final Problem, I happened across the Baker Street Babes - helpfully tweeting which threads linked back to which ACD stories. I devoured a fair few in appreciating the old against the new whilst maintaining the faintest hope of outsolving the mysteries of the detective ahead of The Final Problem. Unlikely but still. 

New York Trilogy, 

this text was due to cross over into my work life as a stage play. It'd been sitting on my Goodreads list for six years, having been recommended to me one summer at a party. One of those where you find yourself inevitably in conversation with other book nerds & start recommending your favourites.

- Of City of Glass - I was not a fan. Clever, certainly - possibly too clever for itself at times though. I would be reading the novel whilst thinking of how it was an exam board delight to pose post-modernist questions out of the text or what the essay title on that particular section might be. I finished the story & threw it to the floor. Deeply unsatisfying. 
- The Locked Room proved better as an exploration of relationships; of tensions in dating, of secrecy in married life, the obsessive nature of quests. 

- Ghosts was clever & funny. The colours for characters. The watching-him-watching-you drama to pull the reader in. Yup, Ghosts was probably my favourite of three.

All this created an exquisite tension. As the evening progressed, the most casual remarks became tinged with erotic overtones. Words were no longer simply words but a curious code of silences, a way of speaking that continually moved around the thing that was being said. As long as we avoided the real subject, the spell would not be broken. We both slipped naturally into this kind of banter, and it became all the more powerful because neither one o of us abandoned the charade. We knew what we were doing, but at the same time we pretended not to. Thus my courtship of Sophie began - slowly, decorously, building by the smallest of incitements. 
                                                                                                 The Locked Room: Paul Auster


I skipped through The Bridges of Madison County too. 

We'd had stacks upon stacks of books on set for a play & I was tasked (with much self-restraint!) to box them on closing. This one caught my eye; can't remember why. Perhaps the mention of intense passion; of chance encounters which alter your life forever. 
It served as my lunchtime read over a few weeks. I enjoyed it relatively well enough until the love-making scene. After those superfluous metaphors, I lost much respect for it but continued for closure. By the end with the children's response to their mother's letter. - Ugh; complete lack of realism.

The Library of Shadows

April - June 2016; another lunch-hour read.

Taken from another bookish struck set, post-run. 

Judging by Goodreads, I was not the first to scan the blurb, note mention of a bookshop & hope for something of Zafon's calibre. Nor was I the first to be disappointed that it did not manage to deliver.

A mixed bag. Perhaps I'm outwith its targeted demographic as it seemed somewhat YA.

I found it:

- shallow in some places (Katherina's damsel qualities; Pau's transparent villainy)
- sluggish in others (possibly due to the strictures of translation into English?) 
and weakly & unsatisfactorily resolved.
However, there were still flashes of goodness, such as:
- the early stages of the thread where the friends turned detective;
- the supernatural premise underpinning the plot was fairly interesting.


Stancliffe's Hotel, 

a present from Christmas 2016.  ★★★
First of all, it's a joy to know that these, Penguin's Little Black Classics, have been published. 
I knew of the stories from Angria from visits to Brontë Parsonage & habitual mention in Brontë biographies but had not known I could actually read one.   
It's by no means of the mature standard one finds with Jane Eyre or Villette but why should it be, being an early work? Although very well-peopled for a fairly short read, it made me laugh on many occasion with its wit & sharp, satirical eye. Definitely worth a read. 

There was the great man in his usual attire of a gingham jacket & canvas trousers of more than Dutch capacity. Stock he disdained, & waistcoat: the most fastidious lady might have beheld with admiration that muscular chest & neck bristled with heroic hair.

- Haven't we all been there?

It took me a full half hour to dress, and another half hour to view myself over from head to foot in the splendid full-length mirror with which my chamber was furnished. Really, when I saw the neat figure therein reflected, genteelly attired [...]   I thought 'there are worse men in the world than Charles Townshend'.

Lastly, Persuasion: 
a fond re-visit of my favourite Austen novel prior to watching a stage play of the same next week.  It will be a very loose re-working in a modern setting but nonetheless, I wanted to refresh my memory as to the characters & nuances of the plot. Persuasion: so real with its memories of love lost, of awkward reunions & one's best intentions gone awry. 

Newly Revised Bookcase

I buy from charity shops; I'm rarely a giver, a passer-on type book-reader. I keep 'em all. Not unless I really disliked a read. In which case, I'd bag it up & leave it on a bus, a train, a bench on the Meadows. One woman's doom is another woman's escapism.
   I had a dream of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Of sliding ladders and coffee tables and comfy chairs. Of my very own library space with books going back to childhood & the ones I'd managed to retain from then. 
  The dream diminished about 7am this morning in the name of self-storage and Going Away. Hence this post is being written as a Holding Place to list all that I'm parting with (to Oxfam/friends over Amazon/eBay) so that one day when I'm less nomadic, I can rebuild and restructure again. Some of them I may well be happy with having read once, others I will want to own again & have in my possession. Frustratingly, some of them I've still not yet got round to* but this way I may yet still get there, one day.
  Although I feel to be parting with a lot, it's actually what I'm holding onto, what I don't want to Second Copy - aside my obvious favourites - which feels more telling: Drina Ballerina (the complete series), my C.19th US Writing & Culture texts, Riverside Chaucer...

Here we are then. 

The Ones Which Got Away:

Procurement || & Dorian Gray

A friend of a friend who is Phdding in Publishing put out a questionnaire the other day. Amongst the range of questions asked was,

Where do you tend to purchase fiction titles?

• I don't
• Local independent bookshops
• Publisher's website
• Amazon
• Large national bookstore outlets
• Supermarkets
• Airports
• Elsewhere online

which worked fine as a compiled list but I fell into that black hole of "Other _______ " as my mainstay in book supplies comes out of the hordes of Edinburgh's charity shops. We're lucky to have them exist in packs up here with the useful addition of a few dedicated charity bookshops - Oxfam, in particular, excels in this field.
So the other day as I took a turn out of the office, I went past Shelter (temptingly two down from Work) & made my way down the hill in search of Oxfam and Atonement. Because it's not just the orphaned dross which ends up on the shelves, the familiar covers of the 'once read, now abandoned' authors. (Heh.) You can actually count on certain recent books to be there. Lo & behold, not one but two copies to choose from. Sorted.

I wanted Atonement specifically as Filmhouse are screening the film again this month (the wider 'burgh public get to benefit from 'The Film of the Book' course) & as I never caught it the last time round, I'm giving myself the next sixteen to complete it & fulfil the Golden Rule. Book first; film second. Why I want to see it: Romola Garai has an early turn as Briony & I love her acting; James McAvoy also features as the hero, likewise and Keira Knightley, well, she's not all bad. Plus, an epic element with landscape of war serving as a backdrop & repercussions of a single decisive life-changing event echoing down the ages. As I write, I still don't know what Briony actually sees between Cecilia & Robbie nor how she reports it so fatefully - that's all still to come; no spoilers, please!

From just looking at the shelves, I'd already spent £18. Line of sight included:

• Ghostwritten - David Mitchell
• Khaled Hosseini - A Thousand Splendid Suns; Kite Runner
• Love in a Time of Cholera - Gabriel García Márquez (I was informed over the summer that I absolutely should read this, causing it to move higher up the ranks; as well as Paul Auster's New York Trilogy. All in good time...)

I managed to make mental notes & step away until the next pay day. But as Atonement left the shop with me so did a newly discovered McGregor title, So Many Ways to Begin :)
 I also picked up one called, The Song Is You by Arthur Phillips. I had to just nip back to my bookshelf as the title itself (although I was remembering along the lines of Whitman) is not memorable. I knew if I did not pick it up then, I'd probably never seek it out again.
The latter interested me and my choice of the latter had me intrigued. Often a book's title has been recommended, memorised, stored up to find sometime later so if I chance across it, I might purchase. This one however had only a cover & a blurb to go by. So what helped it out of the door in my hands? A few things. In the blurb, there's both a cliché and an unconventional aspect,

- a shock of dark red hair sings with a voice that demands his attention.
- Though they do not meet, a strange and unlikely love affair is ignited.

Music also plays a strong part & I like that. It's a vital contributor to the richness of life. It weaves itself in in the smallest of ways and so significantly enhances the whole experience. A book which can tell of its story, High Fidelity as case in point here, has my vote.

A uniquely heart-breaking dark comedy about obsession and loss ?

Well, we shall see... Book Thief back on hold for Christmastime & travels then. (I'm almost tempted to also chuck War & Peace in there as well as I'll be abroad from home for some time then.) As it happened, The Picture of Dorian Gray ended up jumping the queue into my suitcase that day. I also had Distant Star with me as planned but that one requires a whole blog-post unto itself. Mixed opinions lie there.

DG offered a shorter read & a quicker route in as befitted evening trainhours escapism. I did uncover a whole stockpile of Wilde's epigrams within its pages & it felt sometimes as though they were coming in so thick & fast, the characters lacked depth, serving instead as merely witty mouthpieces on occasion.
Yet it was still a good read. Lord Heny Wooton was in particular, very powerfully and darkly drawn and so beyond the realm of conscience, " .. I feel not / This deity in my bosom."

There were other areas too which I appreciated:
- the dual nature of Dorian as he descended to the depths of gutter life whilst still maintaining the public appearance;
- numerous comical exchanges, and impending tragedy;
- interest in Wilde's handling of male friendship-cum-attraction and the social abuse of opium;
- Wilde's infinitely good reflections upon relationships between the sexes and shrewd epigrammatic remarks which did prompt a wry smile.

Never trust a woman who wears mauve, whatever her age may be, or a woman over thirty-five who is fond of pink ribbons. It always means they have a history.

... I can now also watch the film with a clear conscience & a proper understanding too. ;)

unearthed | Lighthousekeeping

I discovered a new Winterson last week, picked up a few lines written from a blog quoting out of Lighthousekeeping and soon after, headed to Shelter, three down from work. There's always at least a copy of Oranges waiting amongst the 'W's for a new reader. As it happened, I was in luck.

I've had Sexing The Cherry waiting in the wings for a while. I can't remember when or where I found it, sometime in the last three years. But Lighthousekeeping, the quotes I read compelled me to start now. Standing in the shop, I leafed through it, finding its weight amongst the words; that kind of 'affirming gravity' with which she writes. The style which won me over entirely when I first finished Oranges nine years ago: 'As it is, I can't settle...' I flipped to the back page. Exactly what you shouldn't do, but still.

And there it was:

I'll call you, and we'll light a fire, and drink some wine, and recognise each other in the place that is ours. Don't wait. Don't tell the story later.
Life is so short. This stretch of sea and sand, this walk on the shore, before the tide covers everything we have done.
I love you.
The three most difficult words in the world.
But what else can I say?

~ Winterson, Jeanette. Lighthousekeeping. Harper Perennial: London, 2004.

There will be others I'm sure, which nestle their way into my mind, which speak directly to me. Once I return and start again from the beginning. But for now, that will do.

Remarkable | if nobody speak of...

As Associated With Cambridge (i) 

 I mean to write about a recently loaned novel, Fried Green Tomatoes' - but before I do that, I feel I should backtrack slightly as there's another one which preceded it. 

One which I fully intended to review a fair while back. if nobody speaks of remarkable things: 

This book is: April 2008, lit by the early morning light creeping into Carl's room. Awaking with more than a hint of Cope's poem that, at 3am: somewhere else / you're sleeping / and besides you there's a woman / who is crying quietly / so you won't awake, I picked up from where I'd left off from my Standing Room Only journey on the tube and out of London, the previous day. 

 I'd found it on a charity shop shelf in North Berwick that Easter. For me, that's a surprisingly short amount of time between purchase & the act of beginning to read. I have books stockpiled from the last three years, calling out for a bit of love & attention. I can't remember now if it was just the blurb itself, which happened to sell the book to me. (I mean, how is one meant to walk away from

this novel owes as much to poetry as it does to prose.. an invocation of the life of the city (Times); overflows with prose as poetry (BI) ?

I know I couldn't and didn't.) 

Or maybe I'd read a review on it sometime that year? That's just as likely for the title to have curled up, dormant in my head for a while, to reawaken later on. 

Returning to it now (& its many edge-folded pages), it was this one which still stands out clearly in my mind from that morning, trying to make out the shape of the words from the limited light:

The man sitting on his wall, outside number eleven, he is drawing a picture of the street [..] That is what he wants to get onto the page, all the architectural details. For now there are just a few lines, faintly etched and erased and re-etched [..]  He wants to do a good job of this today. He's been told that his drawing is weak and that he must improve it,.. so he is trying very hard [..]  These houses are very different from the houses in his street, of course. The colour, the shape, the way they are all joined into one another.. it is all different to his village at home. But he likes them, there is a pride to see in these houses, in their age and in their grandeur. He knows that they were built over a hundred years ago ... He wonders about the people who lived in these houses first,.. what they would say if they could see their houses now, shunted into the poor part of town, broken up into apartments and bedsits.. But still he thinks, even if they are not what they were they are still good houses, in a good street.. He measures the distances between the ridges and the eaves, calculating the angles, and as he looks... he notices that the hop-skipping girl is standing right behind him and is looking at his skeletal drawing. It is the street he says, and he waves a hand at the row of houses opposite, I am drawing your marvellous street, and she giggles because his accent makes marvellous rhyme with jealous..

The book still holds a kind of beauty and power for me; it's so easy to just slip back between its pages. It opens with a song of the city, of that pulse and vibe of urban life. It pivots around its own finale. 

The climax of the novel is presented to us from the start so the movement of the text both leads up to and away from this moment. We have the accident constantly in our mind's eye and yet we still wait upon the intricacies which lead up to it, without fully knowing when or how the tragedy will break loose again. 

McGregor uses two plotlines to tell the story of what came after, as well as what came before. 

It's a novel of only a few voices but many-peopled and with many stories. Each person with their own bit of history and experience living inside them.

The novel moves smoothly between the third person narrative of the lives of those on the street and the first person, dominant storyline of the girl just become pregnant. Of the grief and daring which led her to that point and the way she adapts to her new state alongside an unlikely budding romance, her mother's dismay, as well as her 'social condition' in how the public now view and treat her. 

The difference between the narrative forms do not however, create any kind of hierarchy as to how much empathy is felt by the reader across the large cast of characters. Indeed, I was as interested and touched by the old couple from Number 20, dealing with terminal illness and the widowed father with his scarred hands & his young daughter & yellow ribbon of Number Sixteen as I was in following the girl herself and her evolving story. 

 McGregor writes in a way which reflects upon the mundane in the rituals of life and routine and the breaks we create within them. He describes beautifully in places the clutter of life, of possessions and memory-keeping, as underlined by the young characters packing up their belongings & moving out, moving on. 

He presents in the novel both noise - the dull traffic, the bland chatter, the small talk, movements within sex - and silences - from absence, loneliness, shyness, within married life, within the accident itself. 

 The clever part in his characterisation comes from the intertwining of lives and experience. Of neighbourhood life with people crossing in the street, interacting from their doorsteps, leaning out of windows, sitting on the garden wall. Living side-by-side but knowing only faces and habits. Of the girl, in her meeting with Michael and learning of his brother she unwittingly bewitched. 

Also, of relationships, blood and water: man and wife, father and daughter, mother and daughter; the casual exploratory nature of teenage relationships; the state of platonic, sexual, married relations. 

Amongst the turned page corners:
- Michael's brother, 'the young man with the dry eyes' of number eighteen and his recollections of 'that Wednesday night ... thinking he was getting ahead of the situation' and his desire for the relationship to be realised;

- the girl with the boy in Aberdeen in the aftermath of the funeral and the sudden attraction:

I'd never before felt such a deep need to move that way ... It made me feel primitive, rooted, connected to the dirt of the earth and the light of the stars, a spun thread pulled across the span of generations. I was swollen and pregnant with desire, and the need swept through me in waves...

- the old man of the couple, of his going away to war and returning home:

When he came back to her he would be unable to talk, knew it as soon as he put his hand on the cold tailgate of the truck heading home.. He could see her face all through that long journey, waiting to hear his stories, wanting to comfort his sadnesses. He could see the expectation she would have in her eyes, not knowing what he would say but knowing that he would surely say something. But this was different, and perhaps she'd understand.

- the man with the scarred hands, recalling his wife:

The look in her face when she lifted the veil, the delight, the pride, the beautiful in her soul, could be yesterday. Her face, was beautiful. Her hands, was beautiful. Her skin, was smooth and clear and unbroken, when she touched him lightly it felt like water trickling across his body... She was tall, and strong, and she kept her hair coiled tightly around the back of her head and she had intricate paintings on the secret parts of her body. She was a wonderful woman, but this was not enough to help her. He loved her deeply but this was not enough to help her... He could not reach, he was not enough.

- the prose-poem of the rain shower, falling and feeding itself into the plot like a portent:

...And there's the smell in the air, swelling and rolling, a smell like metal scraped clean of rust, a hard cleanness, the air tight with it, sprung, an electrical tingle winding from the ground to the sky, a smell that unfurls in the back of the mouth, dense, clammy, a smell without a name but easy to recognise and everyone in the street knows it.. everyone is smelling the air, looking upwards, saying or thinking it smells like rain... One, two, three drops at a time, a slow streak down a bedroom window... And after these first kissed hints there is the full embrace, the wetness of the sky pouring suddenly down upon this street, these housesm this city, falling with a strange quietness.. gently gathering momentum until suddenly there is a noise like gravel slung at windows and the rain is falling hard, heavy, bouncing off the tarmac with such force.. it's hard to tell if the rain is coming up or down...

- that tense moment, preceding a kiss, between Michael & the girl:

I say is that better, I say it quietly and I move closer to him as I say it. .. He says yes, thankyou and I move closer still, as if to hear the words. I look at him, I lift my face and he lowers his. He looks at me, he moves a breath closer, I feel his hands hovering around the sides of my face. Our mouths are as close as the closed wings of a butterfly. We each move closer, and the distance between us thins further, a veil of silk, a breath. Everything has stopped.

~ as well as the broken moment after a kiss is aborted:

... I don't say anything, I look at him, he looks at me, he looks away, he looks at me, he says I have to go I'm sorry, he picks up his coat and then he is gone. On the floor, a puddle of water and a crumpled t-shirt, wet footprints, a towel.

The man with scarred hands:

He says my daughter, and all the love he has is wrapped up in the tone of his voice when he says those two words.. He says this is a very big world and there are many many things you could miss if you are not careful. He says there are remarkable things all the time, right in front of us, but our eyes have like the clouds over the sun and our lives are paler and poorer if we do not see them for what they are.

I don't think I want to do a starred breakdown for this. I simply loved what I read.

McGregor, Jon. If Nobody Speak Of Unremarkable Things. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc: London, 2003. (Paperback ed.)

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