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.

Lovely Didsbury Library.

 
What a gem.

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

 January read — 

Becoming | Michelle Obama

A friend came 'round - back when we still sat on doorsteps & stoops, out in the open air, until it was too cold to remain outside any longer.
She brought with her a bag of books she'd read through her book club and was now clearing out a few. Luckily for me, this was one of them. 
  What an excellent, excellent read; authentic and honest, interesting and engaging. 
  I was certainly interested enough to want to read Michelle's story but I hadn't twigged, daft really, just how engaging it would be.
  From funny insights such as Barack's messy ways to the sheer drive, determination and warmth which has come to define this couple. Their journey shared as well as Michelle's own journey of becoming - from childhood to adulthood.

My Year In Books: 2021

The Enormous Turnip - Katie Daynes & Georgien Overwater 
Giraffe on a Bicycle - Julia Woolf
*Becoming - Michelle Obama
Paddington & the Christmas Surprise - Michael Bond
Austenland - Shannon Hale
Sourdough - Robin Sloan 
The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart - David Greig
Hugless Douglas - David Melling
Busy People: Astronaut - Lucy M. George & AndoTwin
King of the Mountain: Fireman Sam - Adam Long
Little Miss Magic; Mr. Tickle in a Tangle - Roger Hargreaves
One Hundred Steps: The Story of Captain Tom Moore
- illus. Adam Larkum
Our House - Louise Candlish
The Golden Thread - Kassia St Clare
The Wild Places - Robert MacFarlane 
The Patchwork Quilt - Valerie Flournoy & Jerry Pinkney
You’re Called What? - Kes Gray & Nikki Dyson
Oi, Puppies - Kes Gray & Jim Field
Knowing God - J.I. Packer
How to raise a loaf & fall in love with sourdough - Roly Allen

'Sourdough' | Autumn '21

I started Robin Sloan's Sourdough on completion of another book & (having pulled myself through that one’s pages), just a page or two into this, I found I could exhale. Well-written & engaging; what a treat. A friend of mine, knowing me to be a baker, had recommended it to me a year or so ago.

Sourdough bread begins with sourdough starter, which is not merely living but seething. It is a community of organisms comprised of, at minimum, yeast, which is a fungus, and lactobacillus, a bacteria. They eat flour — its sugars — and poop out acid — thus, sour — in addition to, carbon dioxide which, trapped by stretchy, glutenous dough, gives the bread an airy structure, the so-called crumb, at its prettiest a dazzling network of gaps and chambers. [37]

Mhm. 🤩

Being a sourdough afficionado, Sloan’s novel had me laughing out loud in recognition of the tricksy behaviour displayed by its wild yeast & Lois’ endeavours to understand it better. Oh yes. 

… I set out my tools. I donned my apron. Everything was in order, and I was ready to produce a beautiful, burnished loaf just like Broom’s on the cover of his book. There were detailed instructions. I love detailed instructions. My whole career was detailed instructions. Precisely specified actions, executed in order. A serene confidence settled over me. I mixed the ingredients together, and immediately the project collapsed into chaos and disaster. Where the bread book showed a lump of dough folded elegantly into itself, I looked upon a twisted mutant mass. [39]

Not to mention the perils in attempt to perfect your loaf.
Optimism, dashed:

Where the bread book showed Everett Broom’s clean fingers deftly maneuvering said lump, my hands soon wore thick gauntlets of glop. I waved them over the sink, tried to shake some of it loose. Where the bread book showed a rustic work surface smartly maintained, I looked on a cramped and dingy countertop filmed with slime. There was dough on the cupboards. Dough on the faucet. Dough on the floor. It looked like a scene of a glutenous murder committed by a careless killer. [39]

The joy when a bake is executed & the desire to share, share, share. Dropping by, turning up unannounced on people's doorsteps; posting hot cross buns through a letterbox if they're out.

IT’S ALWAYS NEW AND ASTONISHING when it’s yours. Infatuation; sex; card tricks. How many humans have baked how many loaves of bread across how many centuries? I’m sure Beoreg baked calmly, matter-of-factly, without paroxysms of cosmic delight. But that didn’t matter. For me, the novice, the miracle was intact, and I felt compelled by some force — new to me, thrillingly implacable — to share. I tied the sliced loaves into neat bundles with twine and bounded outside, still wearing sweatpants I’d slept in. [45] 

_________ 

i./ I followed the scent to the kitchen, where the Clement Street starter had more than doubled in volume and was surging out of the crock, puffy tendrils oozing down the green ceramic. I heard a crispy, crackling pock-pock-pock; the starter was not merely bubbling but frothing. It is only barely anthropomorphization to say it looked happy. I could understand that. [50]

ii./ At Beo’s urging, I upgraded my flour …
The Clement Street starter loved it.
It groaned and luxuriated. It belched ecstatically. [133] 

              

Monstrous  ||  Happy bubbles indeed.

______

I’d known the Clement Street starter wasn’t normal, of course but I honestly hadn’t realised the depth of its strangeness until now, because the King Arthur starter was very normal. 

He was happy and dopey like a big brown dog. It had no special high-maintenance desires it just wanted to grow. 

I let it. [221]

 

So well observed & rendered. What else?

- Number one eater!
- Lois' workplace at General Dexterity
- Peter & the Slurry as a counter to her sourdough
- The Lois Club

In fact, it's such a well-peopled novel. I loved how richly Sloan draws his characters with a bunch of quirks and idiosyncrasies thus rendering them fully human. Lois' different interactions and relationships with a range of people: 

Beoreg & Chaiman. Chef Kate. The Loises. Lily Belasco. Horace & his library (a character in its own right).Carl & the Omebushi. Mr. Marrow. Jim Bascule. Charlotte Clingstone. Agrippa & his goats. 

Key favourite points in the novel's development:

- Lois building the Jay Steve Value Oven 
- The hurdles she faces whilst applying for the Farmers Market
- Email interludes with updates through Beo's correspondence - perfectly pitched - 
&, in that, learning more about the Mazg & how the CS Starter came into being
- How the novel uses intrigue & frames Lois as a detective, investigating the Starter's history. The physical journeys to connect with others whilst on a journey of self-discovery herself.

... I finished Sourdough & now have Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore lined up for later.  :) 

Sloan, Robin. Sourdough. Atlantic Books: London, 2018

Autumn Stack | 2

There are so many words involved in being a bibliophile and by that, I don’t mean the words themselves but more so about the process of reading, of stocking up To Read piles. 

I was nearing the end of Sourdough & wasn’t quite ready for the book to be over. Which got me wondering whether there was a word too, for prolonging an ending & resisting its conclusion?
  So I paused my reading progress & looked around for another so I could still stay within the un-concluded realms of Lois Clay, the Clement Street starter & the Vitruvian.
  Chancing across the Bookery, I’d picked up Austenland. A Mr Darcy theme; hopefully a fun, lighter read when in between books. Or avoiding endings. 

I liked it enough. 
You do have to suspend your disbelief to get behind the concept that women would pay actual money to sign up for a Regency immersion experience with its rigid Code of Conduct. 
Interlinking chapters by boyfriend recaps certainly aids the reader’s appreciation of Jane’s past love affairs: the crushes, the relationships, the disappointments. 

But it did also bug me at times… I sincerely hope to never read another ‘Zing!’ in my life. Not the most believable of interior monologue moments, however heroine Jane is finding her way through proceedings. 
   I also wondered if Hale was consciously over-egging the pudding with her signifiers of the fact that the grumpiest man in the room couldn’t possibly be a love interest despite the very characteristic being stamped through as Total Darcy. Perhaps the reader is meant to know she can only be fooling herself but then wouldn’t an Austen reader be far smarter about that?

Having Martin’s character with the IRL intrusion was a good foil however & — spoilers! — aided the neat twist that even that seemingly covert flirtation was still overseen & orchestrated as part of the package.

She had seen her life like an intricate puzzle, all the boyfriends like dominoes, knocking the next one and the next, an endless succession of falling down. But maybe that wasn’t it all. She’d been thinking so much about endings, she’d forgotten to allow for the possibility of the last one, one that might stay standing. 

                                                                                                                     [192] Hale, Shannon. Austenland. 2007

I can take the novel’s tied-up-in-a-bow ending. Although my own learned experience rather resisted the flippancy present in “There’s bound to be work for an attractive British actor..”  

— Yes, mate. No visa required, just come on in. Mm!

I discovered Hale's Alternate Endings later whilst reading further online. And well, a part of me could’ve easily taken Independent Jane instead, minus any kind of rom-com conclusion in its entirety. 
That said, having seen a few clips of the movie's trailer, a confrontation in the airport between Jane’s Regency rivals strikes me as being much more palatable than say, having one’s apparent love interest fly halfway across the world to turn up on your doorstep. Romantic? Nah, sorry. Somewhat weird & stalker-ish? Mhmm…

I liked it enough; a fun, lighter read whilst between other books.

Bookery!

This one's in my neighbourhood.  :D

Autumn Stack

The Wild Places 
I first encountered Robert McFarlane being namechecked in an article from Guardian's Review (RIP).  The writer had grouped together Daisy Johnson (Fens) with McFarlane's Underland alongside other authors writing similarly on landscape or wildness.         In sharing my new-found insight, I discovered my bookish friends were strides ahead of me - had got the book, been to the Waterstones signing; fully immersed.  Once known, I kept coming across him still in later works; through the beautiful, imaginative 'Lost Words collaboration with Jackie Morris. 

TWP I found in my local eco-friendly store. I was bending below the shelf to recycle a small stash of occasional green milk bottle tops when I saw too the book exchange pile.  From there, south then north; west to east on train journeys, tram journeys; plus a stint working away from home.  McFarlane propped open over breakfast, weighted with knife & pepper pot to hold the page.  Journeying myself, crossing through the sunny Peak District back to Manchester whilst reading of other journeys taken far further south. 

A revelation, 'Wrath' means not 'anger', but 'turning-point' [Cape, 133], 
& some choice extracts - -

Wildness, in Coleridge's account, is an energy which blows through one's being, causing the self to shift into new patterns, opening up new perceptions of life. 
[Ridge, 209] 
. . . 

On The Gentle Art by Stephen Graham 
Anyone who could sincerely observe that 'There are thrills unspeakable in Rutland, more perhaps than on the road to Khiva' was, in my opinion, to be cherished. Graham was also one among a line of pedestrians who saw that wandering & wondering had long gone together; that their kinship as activities extended beyond their half-rhyme. And his book was a hymn to the subversive power of pedestrianism: its ability to make a stale world seem fresh, surprising and wondrous again, to discover astonishment on the terrain of the familiar.
[Holloway, 230]

> Reading this in 2021, a year on from the pandemic & impact of lockdown ... It's a sentiment many of us came to recognise or if not, remember through staying local, holding still and watching the seasons change in close proximity, in one's own neighbourhood. 

Most of these places .. were not marked as special on any map. But they became special by personal acquaintance. A bend in a river, the junction of four fields, a climbing tree.. a fragment of woodland glimpsed from a road regularly driven along - these might be enough. Or fleeting experiences, transitory, but still site-specific: [. . .]  the fall of evening light upon a stone...

 [. . .]   It seemed to me that these nameless places might in fact be more important than the grander wild lands that for so many years had gripped my imagination. Taken together, the little places would make a map that could never be drawn by anyone, but which nevertheless existed.. I began to make a list in my head of what would be on my own map of private or small-scale wild places...  [Holloway, 236-7]

>  This fully engaged my attention as a reader. I may never climb a beech tree (my own climbing efforts ended in injury & a badly sprained ankle, aged 10) - nor attempt to scale Sgurr Dearg above Coruisk - nor sleep out on iced-over tarn in a blizzard in the Peaks [Ridge, 196, 199] ... but I can collate from memory a list of my very own places.
. . . 

Grief played its tricks: I kept forgetting that he had died, thinking for a second I could ring him up to ask him something, or call over to see him. I had known him for fewer than four years, but friendship with Roger did not seem to follow the normal laws of time. 
We had shared adventures, and there would have been others to come, but for the cancer.
I had wanted to know Roger as he aged into his seventies and eighties, for he would have grown old, properly old, so superbly. He was an expert in age: in its charisma and its worth. Everything he owned was worn, used, re-used. If anyone would have known how to age well, it would have been Roger.  [Storm-Beach, 266-7]

_____________

"There is wildness everywhere if we only stop in our tracks & look around us." 
~ Roger Deakin

. . .  _____________  . . . 

The Golden Thread
A bit of a voyage through time - & space. 
A good read which educated & entertained.

Some stand-out chapters: 
 Surf Dragons - The Vikings Woollen sails
 A King's Ransom: Wool in Medieval England
 Solomon's Coats: Cotton, America & Trade
 Workers in the Factory: Rayon's Dark Past

Some of what was unpacked I'd encountered of before - from social history, from C19th US Culture classes - but I enjoyed learning more of the specifics too. The challenges & obstacles faced across time by Vikings, peasants, enslaved African Americans with regards to cloth as well as the societal changes which fabric brought about. 
Alongside these, the combination of the historic & the modern - how textiles were first deployed, then improved & developed for mountaineering & for space travel (Layering In Extremis & Under Pressure respectively). 

 . . . _____________ . . . 

Our House

Mmm. Yeah. 

( No. )

It didn't help that this was my first fiction read in a long while & I was ready for something Good. I'd thought the premise sounded rather intriguing. But perhaps the  l a r g e  & thus easy-to-read, accessible nature should've sounded an even louder alarm bell as I started? 

At my most constructive, I'm going to say that when the plot hit its middle territory there was something of a recovered stride & so the tangled web became slightly more engaging.
I could have lived without every single one of the hip hashtag social media malarkey which ended each chapters & grated horribly. Reveal of Saskia = Merle brought absolutely nothing to the plot line other than a bunch of wholly unnecessary additional pages. (Couldn't the women just have been friends? Was there really so much need for betrayal to solidarity?)

A bit too much froth but hey, the same storyline came up in national news so the truth is certainly proven to be stranger than fiction & entirely plausible now, I guess.

My Year In Books: 2020

The Nativity Play ~ Nick Butterworth & Mick Inkpen

A Christmas Story ~ Brian Wildsmith

Ruby the Donkey ~ Mirabel Cecil & Christina Gascoigne

Jesus’ Christmas Party ~ Nicholas Allen

The Adventures of Parsley the Lion ~ Michael Bond & Rob Biddulph

Glass, Irony & God ~ Anne Carson 

Ernest the Moose who doesn’t fit  ~ Catherine Rayner

*Knowing God ~ J.I. Packer 

While We Can’t Hug ~ Eoin McLaughlin & Polly Dunbar

Middle England ~ Jonathan Coe
Time’s Arrow ~ Martin Amis
The Valley of Vision ~ Arthur G. Bennett
*The Golden Thread ~ Kassia St Clair
The Bell Jar ~ Sylvia Plath
Codename Villanelle ~ Luke Jennings
The Next Right Thing ~ Emily P. Freeman
The Pursuit of Love ~ Nancy Mitford
The Name of the Rose ~ Umberto Eco