April’s Classics Challenge at November’s Autumn

1 May 2012 00:09

This month I read The Scarlet Letter and the April prompt is about book covers. Unfortunately I can’t find an image of the edition which I read, but it wasn’t a great cover anyway. It just had a few Puritan men on it.

There are absolutely loads of book covers for The Scarlet Letter, these are a few of the ones which I think are quite good although I’m not so keen on the letter A in amongst the trees on the first one. The Manga version is more of an illustration of the books contents and in a modern sort of way I quite like it.

I think the cover designers have been a bit lazy over the years though and most of them are opting for the obvious letter A. Having said that I think my favourite version here is the Penguin cover as it seems a bit more restrained and classical than the others.

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E.F. Benson’s Rye

27 April 2012 23:18

I’ve actually spent quite a lot of time in East Sussex over the years as I had an aunt who lived there but for some reason I never got around to visiting Rye. Mind you, way back then I hadn’t read E.F. Benson‘s Mapp and Lucia books, but Lisa May at TBR 313 has been discussing E.F. Benson’s writing and the upshot is that I’m adding Rye to my list of places to visit. Although Benson’s fictional town is called Tilling, it was based on Rye where he was the town mayor for years.

I had a wee look on You Tube to see if there were any excerpts from the Mapp and Lucia TV series – and there were but what I really liked was this Thascales ‘album’ of a visit to Rye which s/he has uploaded onto You Tube. The TV series was filmed in Rye and the buildings are all very recognisable.

If you like a twee 1930s setting and a bit of a laugh then you’ll enjoy the series, I wonder if it’s available on Netflix. Geraldine McEwan as Lucia in particular has lovely outfits to wear, it’s a feast for the eyes if you like vintage clothes.

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Roast Beef, Medium by Edna Ferber

25 April 2012 23:51

Roast Beef Medium

I downloaded this book from girlebooks because I have previously enjoyed Edna Ferber’s writing. I believe she won the Pulitzer prize twice. This reads like a book but I think they were stories which were published in a magazine between 1911 and 1913. It also includes a lot of illustrations, I didn’t even realise that was possible on a Kindle!

Emma McChesney is a travelling saleswoman working for the Featherloom Petticoat Company and travelling in the mid-west of the U.S. The title of the book comes from her advice to stick to roast beef medium at the many hotels she has to frequent in the course of her work. Apparently fancier food with rich sauces ruins your digestion and complexion.

Emma is a single parent, a divorcee with a 17 year old son, Jock, her pride and joy. She has brought him up on her own, is the best salesperson in the firm and earns a man’s wage. She’s determined to stay independent – in fact, considering her character was written 100 years ago, she’s an amazingly sassy and modern lady.

She runs rings around all the male characters and does it all with great style and wit. My only complaint is that this ‘book’ ended very abruptly.

The only other books I’ve read by Ferber are Show Boat and Ice Palace but I’ll be looking out for more. She was wildly popular in her day and quite a few of her books were made into films/movies. Yes, that Show Boat!

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The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

25 April 2012 00:14

I bought this book twenty years ago, intending to read it then but I’ve just got around to it, I don’t do many things fast. It’s one of those books which always seem to be being mentioned which is why I wanted to read it as I had only a vague idea of what it was about. I’m sure everybody else has read it. The book was first published in 1850 and has been described as a romantic mystery. It is set in 17th century New England.

Hester Prynne is a young married woman whose husband has been absent for many years so when she gives birth to a daughter the powers that be in the American Puritan town in which she lives, decide that she must wear a scarlet letter on her breast as a punishment for the rest of her life. The letter is A for adulterer and Hester could have been condemned to death but instead she has to stand on a wooden platform/scaffold for three hours with her baby daughter, Pearl.

Hester’s misfortune doesn’t get her down and she shows great character in coping with the situation and refusing to divulge the name of Pearl’s father. As she is a talented needlewoman she embroiders her letter A in gold thread, using fancy stitches which gain the admiration of the women of the town.

The mystery is, who is Pearl’s father and is he amongst the observers.

I can’t say I really enjoyed this book because it was obvious who the father was and I was so annoyed that he was such a hypocrite and just left Hester to struggle on on her own. The fact that he had a bit of a guilty conscience didn’t go anywhere close to him redeeming himself. To my way of thinking he was more than a wee bit of a swine.

Poor Hester was not good at choosing men. Her husband, Roger Chillingworth turns up in town just in time to see the spectacle of Hester being shamed but they keep quite about their relationship and when Roger realises who has been ‘keeping company’ with Hester he sets about befriending the culprit with the intention of dosing him up with herbal ‘medicines’.

Anyway, there wouldn’t have been a story if Hester had been a good judge of men and I must admit that I feel a sense of satisfaction that I’ve read it at last. The Scarlet Letter was on my list of 55 classic books to be read within five years or so at A Room of One’s Own.

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Kindle versus Real Book

23 April 2012 23:12

I must admit that I never thought that I would buy a Kindle because I’ve always had a bit of a love affair with books. I love the feel of them and yes the smell of them too. I like to keep them in pristine condition and I even manage to keep the spine of thick paperbacks intact, which is often no easy task as they’re so meanly and tightly bound.

I saw someone on TV a while ago and he was preparing to read an extract from a book. He opened the book in the middle and immediately bent it back as far as he could and cracked the spine. I can’t remember who he was, I must have blocked it out. It seemed like it was his way of rolling up his sleeves to be ready for work. I’m not in favour of the death penalty but really – he deserved to be put up against a wall and shot! So, that’s my attitude to books, even mass market paperbacks and that’s why I was so against Kindles/e-readers.

However, although I’ve only read one book on my Kindle so far I must admit that it was quite a positive experience. It’s so easy to handle and if you have problems with your hands, which so many older women in particular have I think after a lifetime of housework, DIY -ing, gardening and such, then you will probably find a Kindle to be a boon. It’s lightweight and its great to turn pages with just a touch. A Kindle/e-reader must also be brilliant for people who have restricted movement, maybe after a stroke or something, when holding a book and turning pages might be difficult. It’s easy to pop it into your bag just before you leave the house which is great too. I don’t know about you but I’m always running around at the last minute to pick up a book to take out with me, it’s handy to have one if you get stuck in a queue somewhere. You don’t want to be dragging a massive tome around though so a Kindle solves that problem.

The only thing I have against a Kindle is that as far as I can see you don’t get any information on the book you are reading. I would have liked it to begin exactly as a real book does with the date of the book’s first publication and such, and I always like to see who a book has been dedicated to. I missed that info.

You’ll think that this is mad but I would also have liked more in the way of instructions than came with the Kindle. I know that sounds daft when the gadget is an e-reader and you can obviously get the instructions from the screen but as I’m not technologically minded I have an aversion to tinkering with things like that in case I do something which damages it. Of course Duncan came along and had to see what it could do – which was a revelation to me. It’s more than an e-reader, it’s really a wee computer and you can access the internet to read blogs and the like. I can see myself getting quite fond of it though and I’m making myself some Kindle cases, wee sleeping bags to protect it, I haven’t gone as far as to name it/her/him – but you never know, I just might!

I’ll still be buying some real books but they’ll be special editions of books which are so lovely I just want to hold them, Folio books or similar. I can’t imagine ever buying a non-fiction book for my Kindle because for me things like gardening or history books or luscious coffee table books are all about the feel of them and their lovely glossy paper and of course I have to have a sniff of them now and then and lets face it there are definitely worse thing to sniff!

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The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart

23 April 2012 00:21

This is the first book I’ve ever read on my Kindle. Yes I gave in at last and bought one, just because I want to be able to get out of print books and free classics. No I’m not a mean Scot – just canny!

Anyway it is also the first book that I’ve read by Mary Roberts Rinehart and I did enjoy it although it was first published in 1908 so it isn’t my favourite era of vintage crime – that’s the 1930s/40s – but still well worth reading if you like your crime fiction to be a bit of fun too.

Miss Innes is a wealthy woman who became the guardian of her young nephew and niece when their parents died. It’s years later and Gertrude and Halsey have grown up but they still want to spend the holidays with their aunt. They persuade her to rent a large old
house in the country and almost immediately scary things start happening. It’s all bangs and bumps in the night and I suppose it seems a bit cliched but I enjoyed the whole atmosphere of it.

Apparently The Circular Staircase was put on Broadway in 1920 and ran for years but for some reason it was called The Bat.

I downloaded it from girlebooks which is a wonderful site which Peggy at Peggy Ann’s Post told me about. It has loads of free books which I hope to read sometime, by authors like Willa Cather and Elizabeth von Arnim – too many to mention, have a look! I felt like it was Christmas when I saw it so a big thanks to Peggy for pointing me in its direction.

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Gloucester,England

20 April 2012 23:30

I had been hoping to get this post done yesterday but I’m still decorating our bedroom, it’ll definitely be finished by tomorrow though, then I’ll be starting on the wee loo.

Anyway, on our recent road trip in England we ended up visiting Gloucester which hadn’t been on our original list of places to visit. That part of England, I suppose you could call it the mid-west, has lots of ancient towns and wherever you are you seem to be only about seven miles away from another place that you’ve heard of and it seemed silly not to visit them. We had to call a halt eventually and so we decided to leave Malvern, Hay and Ross-on-Wye for another road trip.

We went to Gloucester after visiting Cheltenham, which I’ll write about soon. Somehow Gloucester wasn’t at all what I was expecting it to be. I know that quite a few members of the royal family live in that county and I think that was why I thought it would be very up market and posh – but it wasn’t. Then I remembered that a certain serial murderer said that the paving stones of Gloucester had bodies under them, and that gave me a bit of a shudder.

So I was pleased to see the Tailor of Gloucester’s shop, which is now full of Beatrix Potter collectables. This is the actual building which she copied for her illustration but I should have photographed the whole alleyway because that would have been more like her drawing. My mother-in-law’s claim to fame was that she met Beatrix Potter when she was in the Brownies and was camping on B.P.’s land in the Lake District. Beatrix Potter actually gave her a signed copy of one of her books, I wonder what happened to it!

tailor of gloucester

In common with just about every large historical building at the moment, Gloucester Cathedral is having work done on it as you can see.
Gloucester cathedral

Here it is from another angle.
Gloucester cathedral

I can’t say that it’s a place that I’d like to revisit but it was a wet and freezing cold day which doesn’t help things. It might be one of those places that you need to be shown around by a local, I think that’s the best way to see anywhere. I keep going to places and then realising that I missed things which I would really have liked to have seen.

Hopefully I’ll be back with some book chat tomorrow, if I don’t get engulfed with domestic mayhem.

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Corduroy Mansions by Alexander McCall Smith

17 April 2012 00:06

I requested this book from my library after Evee of Evee’s Blog mentioned that it featured a dog as a character. I think there are only two books in this series so far. It’s set in Pimlico, London and Corduroy Mansions is a crumbling Arts and Crafts mansion block which contains a number of flats which are inhabited by disparate characters.

Freddie de la Hay, the Pimlico terrier (I suspect he’s a Heinz 57 variety – in other words a mongrel) joins them there when William gets part time custody of him in a bid to get rid of his dog-hating son who is a ‘waste of space’ according to Marcia.

It was a mildly entertaining read and I’ll read the next one in the series but I don’t think it was as successful as the 44 Scotland Street series. I want to find out if the ghastly Lib Dem M.P. Oedipus Snark gets his come-uppance, isn’t that a great name for a baddie?!

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Road Trip Book Purchases

15 April 2012 23:59

April 2012 books

I recently gave in and bought a Kindle, I wasn’t at all sure I would like the experience of reading a whole book from a small screen. The thought of being able to get some books free was what swayed me really, especially out of print ones which can be difficult or expensive to get a hold of. I also wanted to cut down on my actual book purchases because they take up so much room and books are murder when you move house, loads of smallish boxes are the only way you can pack them really. I’ve made the mistake in the past of filling a medium sized box with books and then not been able to budge it because of the weight of them.

Anyway on our recent road trip I ended up bringing 18 books home with me, I just can’t go past a bookshop, especially a second-hand one, I have to go in, just in case there are some treasures within. The Alcester charity shop books were particularly good.

So this is what I bought.
Taken By The Hand – by O. Douglas
A Time of Gifts – by Patrick Leigh Fermor
Enough to Kill a Horse – by Elizabeth Ferrars
Tender is the Night – by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Anderby Wold – by Winifred Holtby
Kilvert’s Diary – by Francis Kilvert
We Were the Mulvaneys – by Joyce Carol Oates
The Last Chronicle of Fairacre – by Miss Read (3 books)
The Whiteoak Brothers – by Mazo de la Roche
He Knew He Was Right – by Anthony Trollope
The Duke’s Children by Anthony Trollope
Life at Blandings – by P.G. Wodehouse (3 books)
The Waves – by Virginia Woolf

and last but not least Marguerite Patten’s Every Day Cook Book – which is a replacement for the one which Jack bought me 37 years or so ago. My original copy has parted company with its cover, I must try to get it fixed though if only for sentimental reasons. A top tip is: If your chap buys you a cookery book it means he’s seriously struck on you and is planning on you looking after his stomach in the future. If you aren’t so enamoured of him – it’s time to skeedaddle!

During our trip to England Jack only bought -

Emperor – by Stephen Baxter
The View from Another Shore – (European Science Fiction) edited by Franz Rottensteiner
The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 23
Immortality – by Milan Kundera
Gentlemen of the Road – by Michael Chabon
The last two aren’t in the photo. Jack had put them in a separate place from the S.F.

I’ll probably read those two but I don’t think I’ll be reading any of his other ones although I do sometimes read S.F.

I could probably have got most of the books from my library too, except the Ferrars, Douglas and de la Roche. I even had the cheek to feel hard done by because I didn’t find any Angela Thirkell books on my travels, and bought one online when we got home. So my Kindle isn’t working in the way that I had hoped, I can’t get out of the book buying habit, whilst there are still bookshops around anyway!

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The Groote Park Murder by Freeman Wills Crofts

10 April 2012 00:10

This is just the second book by Freeman Wills Crofts which I’ve read and although I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as The 12.30 From Croydon it’s still well worth reading if you’re into vintage crime.

The first half of this one is set in South Africa, when a man’s body is found beside a railway line on the edge of Groote Park. It’s assumed at first that there has been a horrific accident, but things don’t add up and Inspector Vandam begins to suspect foul play.

In the second half of the book the action moves to Scotland and I must admit that I preferred that part of the story. How parochial am I? (Don’t answer that!)

Anyway, it so happend that all of the Scottish locations are well known to me and it’s nice when you know exactly what it looks like when Princes Street or Queen Street is mentioned, even if you still have to imagine what it looked like in 1923, which is when the book was first published. It was enjoyable to be in Glasgow’s streets and then to travel north to Alexandria, Loch Lomond and Crianlarich – in an attempt to unravel the mystery.

I’m hoping to be able to read Inspector French’s Greatest Case soon, which is the book in which Crofts introduces us to the character who was described by someone in the Guardian’s Notes and Queries recently as the greatest fictional detective ever.

Which one would you plump for? I’m not sure, I still have a soft spot for Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey and Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion sort of grew on me, although to begin with he was just too much of a silly-ass upper class Englishman for me. There’s a trend forming here – I must be into posh chaps!

Going off at a bit of a tangent – I was doing the dishes tonight and listening to BBC Radio 4 Extra – or whatever they’re calling it this week, and they were broadcasting an episode of Dalziel and Pascoe, which was written by Reginald Hill. I’ve watched the TV dramatisations but not read the books but I think I’ll have to give them a go. I really liked the character Andy Dalziel (pronounced Dee-ell) although he could in no way be described as posh and the actor playing him on TV best resembles a bulldog chewing a wasp. Has anyone read anything by Reginald Hill?

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