Just a quick note to say...

...I am still alive!

Still don't have internet access at our new house - was supposed to come yesterday, but trouble at t' mill. Will hopefully right itself soon, and I'll have lots to tell you about!

As a taster, I just finished The O'Sullivan Twins by Enid Blyton... who said Stuck-in-a-Book wasn't a highbrow place to be?

Last Days of Regency

I'm in the final throes of packing, and tomorrow I shall be living in Marlborough Road, Oxford, rather than Regent Street, Oxford. Last time I moved, I didn't have the internet for a few weeks - I do hope the same won't be true this time, but I thought I'd write and warn you all that any silence is probably involuntary.

This photo might be horribly familiar to those of you who have moved house recently. I've only been here a year, and have accumulated an enormous amount of rubbish. Having 'almost finished' packing yesterday, I filled three boxes tonight with what can only be described as 'assorted tat'. How does it happen? Can't imagine. Oddly enough, when we moved from Worcestershire to Somerset in 2005 (my only major move, since I was shipped off to friends for the 1992 move from Merseyside to Worcestershire) it didn't seem to take too long or reveal too much unwanted junk. Curious.

What am I up to over the next week or so? This weekend I'm off to London - that was quite a last minute decision, as I have been invited to my friend's 'stag party'. I wish there were a less repellent term for that... Marital Preparation Celebration, perhaps. The guy in question is a Christian, as is his brother who is organising it, so I have no qualms on the ethical front - but I don't really know what to expect. We'll see. On more familiar ground, I shall be spending the following week attending Book Groups - well, two of 'em. My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier, and To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. The Carbon Copy has been asking me to read the latter ever since he read it at school, and I have been meaning to. So far, wonderful (about 100 pages in) and unmistakably Southern American. Something in the style and characterisation, more than the topics or dialect. I'll report back on those two in further detail in the future, no doubt, and haven't forgotten that I owe you a review of The Brontes Went To Woolworths...

Adieu, hopefully not for long!

Happy Launch Day

Happy Launch Day to Ed Wright for his new mystery/crime novel DAMNATION FALLS. Here's what Jay Strattford at the Richmond Times Dispatch had to say about the book.

Guernsey Literary etc.

You may remember I eulogised about Mary Ann Shaffer's epistolary novel The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - in fact, it's had rave reviews from more or less everyone. Elaine at Random Jottings pointed me in the right direction, and the latest fan is Our Vicar's Wife, who took it to Cornwall with her last week.


Anyway - it's now on the shelves, published and ready to be read, so do go and get yourselves a copy! Bloomsbury have made a YouTube trailer for it - I tried to embed it in this post, but the technical wizardy flumoxed me - this is the link.

Damnation Falls Review in Wall Street Journal

Congratulations to Ed Wright for this wonderful Wall Street Journal review of his new novel DAMNATION FALLS, which St. Martin's Press will release this Tuesday.

Booker

So, the Booker longlist is out. Here it is:

Aravind Adiga The White Tiger
Gaynor Arnold Girl in a Blue Dress
Sebastian Barry The Secret Scripture
John Berger From A to X
Michelle de Kretser The Lost Dog
Amitav Ghosh Sea of Poppies
Linda Grant The Clothes on Their Backs
Mohammed Hanif A Case of Exploding Mangoes
Philip Hensher The Northern Clemency
Joseph O'Neill Netherland
Salman Rushdie The Enchantress of Florence
Tom Rob Smith Child 44
Steve Toltz A Fraction of the Whole

Guess what? I've not read any of them, though I do have Tolz's book (well, three books, isn't it?) I turned down a chance to read Child 44 because it sounded like the absolute opposite of my cup of tea, and I haven't heard of the others. Actually, I think someone mentioned the Mangoes one at Book Group a while ago... anyway, I have little intention of seeking out the rest.

Turns out I have read two Booker prize winners - Possession by AS Byatt, which was very good, and The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, which was not. Throwing in all the shortlisted books, I've read another five: A Month in the Country by JL Carr; The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood; Atonement and On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan; Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller. That's seven, out of over 200 possible titles... So you can see that I'm not a particuarly frenetic follower of the prize - though it's nice to keep half an eye on it, just out of interest.

What I find rather more interesting is the judges - I have a personal interest in this, since a tutor turned down working with me on a thesis, one of the reasons being her commitments as Booker judge - but what an interesting group they make. Do go and have a look on the Wikipedia page. They seem to get some pretty reputable writers, some who have been nominated before, the odd celebrity (Nigella Lawson, anyone?) but generally groups who have stood the test of time far more than the books nominated. And more in my line, as it happens. Of the judges, not all of whom are authors, I've read books by:

Frank Kermode
Richard Hoggart
AS Byatt
Susan Hill
Claire Tomalin
Hermione Lee
Fay Weldon
Libby Purves
Sebastian Faulks
Penelope Fitzgerald
Gillian Beer
John Sutherland

and have books by quite a few of the others. In fact, from this year on, I'm going to be watching out for the chosen judges, rather than the chosen books. A far more lastingly interesting indication of the literary world, I reckon.

Mrs. Hat

There are a few books I've finished over the last month, and not blogged about, but they're now all in boxes... I'm moving house on Wednesday, to the other side of Oxford, and my bookcase is moving tomorrow - thus I had to empty it, and consign all my books to boxes. I did, however, see my new bedroom for the first time today, and it has lots of shelves already there! Hurray! My books need no longer be in piles by my bed. I'm sure they will be, but at least it will be out of volition rather than necessity.

I can just about remember the book I finished early this morning, without fishing it out of the box, and it strays a little from normal Stuck-in-a-Book territory: The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks. I started reading this two or three years ago, simply because the title captured me, somehow it got shelved (I think termtime and essays got in the way) and now I've finished. For those who don't know, it's non-fiction, described by Wikipedia thus: "The book comprises 24 essays split into 4 sections which each deal with a particular aspect of brain function such as deficits and excesses in the first two sections (with particular emphasis on the right hemisphere of the brain) while the third and fourth describe phenomenological manifestations with reference to spontaneous reminiscences, altered perceptions, and extraordinary qualities of mind found in "retardates"

Gosh, doesn't that sound dull. Well, it isn't. Each chapter looks at certain patients/clients (as they were called, though Sacks rather disparages the term) and their medical predicaments - Sacks documents his interaction with these people, and his discovering why their conditions occur, without being too blinding-with-science. A woman who can only see the left-hand side of any object; twins who can identify the day of the week for any date over a span of 8000 years; the man, indeed, who mistook his wife for a hat. What makes this book interesting is twofold - the amazing things which the brain can do or cease to do, or ways in which illness can manifest itself, but secondly, and more importantly, the compassion and humanity with which Sacks describes the cases under consideration. One feels he was bucking a trend in his field of medicine in 1985, when the book was published, and has hopefully led the way. A unique compendium, perhaps, and one which is sometimes upsetting, often enlightening, and always fascinating.