When Did Andy Roddick Get so Funny

Andy Roddick was interviewed Tuesday night following his quarterfinal win in the US Open. A reporter asked about the physical condition of his next opponent, Novak Djokovic, and went on to explain that Djokovic injured his right ankle in his last match. Djokovic has a reputation of being a bit dramatic, and so Roddick interrupted, which led to the following conversation:

Roddick: Isn't it both of them? And a back and a hip?

Reporter: And when he said there were too many to count...

Roddick: And a cramp.

Reporter: Do you get the sense right now that...

Roddick: Bird flu.

Reporter: A lot of things. Beijing hangover.

Roddick: Yeah.

Reporter: He's got a pretty long list of illness.

Roddick: Anthrax. SARS. Common cough and cold.

Damnation Falls a Bestseller

Edward Wright's Damnation Falls is #13 on the Los Angeles Times Hardcover Bestseller List. Congratulations!

The Bookshop

I'm SO glad that Enid Blyton provoked such a joyous reaction in you all; not even one derogatory comment. She obviously helped us all become obsessive readers. Though I'm on a St. Clare's binge at the moment, my favourites are either Famous Five or The Naughtiest Girl in the School or the Six Cousins... tricky. Our Vicar's Wife, and probably Our Vicar too, organised a Famous Five party for us once. Brilliant.

Now (and watch closely here, to see if you can spot the seams) Enid Blyton books could be bought in a bookshop, which brings me to The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald. Lynne Hatwell, aka dovegreyreader, very kindly gave this to me when we met earlier in the year, and it was just the right size to slip into my bag on the train today.

I tried a Penelope Fitzgerald novel last year, Human Voices, but not sure I got round to writing about it on here. It was one of those books which I finished before I quite felt that I'd got into it - the style was a little jabby and awkward, and somehow it didn't click. And The Bookshop felt the same for the first thirty pages... but then, thank goodness, how wonderful, it all fell into place and hallelujah, I raced right to the end. From being a book I couldn't get on with, it became one of my favourite reads this year.

Slim and simple, The Bookshop is about Florence Green setting up a bookshop in a small town called Hardborough, in 1959. The business meets genteel opposition from several quarters of the town, but also support from others. Christine, a stubborn and resilient young girl, comes to work as an assistant - and between Christine and Florence a rather touching, but unsentimental, friendship develops. If that sounds remotely mawkish, trust me, it isn't. Penelope Fitzgerald doesn't do mawkish. Her writing is spare, very spare, and there isn't room for emotions - we simply see the people interact, and can quite easily understand the emotions they must be experiencing. How Florence faces opposition, how she accepts Christine's characteristics and how she changes as a result of the bookshop.

The denouement is subtle and devastating - it involves neighbours acting as they would in a Mapp & Lucia book, where it would be a gentle comedy. Here it is understated tragedy. The Bookshop is a triumph of a novel, and I'm so glad Lynne gave it to me, and that *something* clicked whilst I was reading it.

Jolly Hockeysticks

Oh dear, did everyone go when I was in Northern Ireland? Hope someone is still reading! Perhaps this will get you to say something... I'm afraid I'm going to take a literary nosedive, and return to that which I mentioned a few days' ago - Enid Blyton and the St. Clare's stories!



I've probably mentioned here before that I grew up on Enid Blyton, reading little else for quite a few years - it does mean I missed out on some gems of children's literature, but can always catch up now (I don't believe you can ever be too old for a good book). Those doom-mongerers who wanted Blyton banned and thought she would provide nothing but illiteracy to generations of youngters would find it hard to say I don't like books now... Blyton provides addictive, but harmless, stories which feed young imaginations and are almost limitless in their quantity.

I loved the St. Clare's series, largely because the central characters are twins. Pat and Isabel actually shun the book stereotype of being either absolutely identical or wholly opposite - though perhaps they are a little too like each other. Neither want to go to St. Clare's; within minutes of arriving they learn to be good eggs and to be true to their school and honest with their friends ya-dah-ya-dah. All enjoyable tripe. Blyton appears to have had a pathological hatred of 'tell-tales' (which always seems to me to be invented as an excuse for teachers to ignore the majority of children's squabbles) and a fervour for sport, and Janet (in the 'good egg' category) is so bluntly rude that I wanted to push her down a well - despite all these things, I've been joyously reliving my youth through these books. Any Blyton fanatics out there? Any children's books which can take you right back to your infancy - or do you avoid them on principle, in case your memories would be tarnished? I, for one, had no notion that Blyton used such a flood of exclamation marks...

Off to Somerset tomorrow, will be there for three weeks. On Friday I will hear whether or not Magdalen have granted me any funding... wish me luck!

Short Stories

As I mentioned earlier, Vulpes Libris are having a week about the short story, and for the first entry they asked a selection of bloggers to choose their favourite short story writers, collectioins or individual stories - and I contributed my views. Didn't really have to think twice, go over here to see whom I choosed. Go forward to the next post over there to see Elaine's (aka Random Jottings') selection of short stories, and realising that she does like quite of them despite thinking she didn't!

Year Two: Book Reviews

My second year isn't finished yet, but I thought I'd make this an ongoing list - it seems silly to wait til the end of the year to make reviews accessible, so this will go over on the left hand side at the top, one of the quick links, and will be added to as and when!

3191 Blog - A Year of Mornings
Anand, Mulk Raj - Untouchable
Anderson, Sarah - Halfway to Venus
Arlen, Michael - The Green Hat
Austen, Jane - Northanger Abbey
Banks, Lynne Reid - The L-Shaped Room
Bennett, Alan - The History Boys
Benson, E.F. - The Mapp & Lucia series
Blyton, Enid - The St. Clare's series
Brandenburg, Molly - Everyday Cat Excuses
Brinton, Sybil G. - Old Friends and New Fancies
Buzbee, Lewis - The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop
Carey, Edward - Alva & Irva
Carroll, Lewis - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Cartwright, Justin - This Secret Garden: Oxford Revisited
Coetzee, J. M. - Foe
Coles, William - The Well-Tempered Clavier
Compton-Burnett, Ivy - A House and Its Head
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Crompton, Richmal - Frost at Morning
Delafield, E.M. - Straw Without Bricks: I Visit The Soviets
Devonshire, Deborah (Deborah Mitford) - Counting My Chickens
Dockrill, Laura - Mistakes in the Background
du Maurier, Daphne - The Flight of the Falcon
du Maurier, Daphne - My Cousin Rachel
du Maurier, Daphne - Letters from Menabilly
Eliot, T.S. - The Family Reunion
Ferguson, Rachel - The Brontes Went To Woolworths
Fitzgerald, Penelope - The Bookshop
Fraser-Sampson, Guy - Major Benjy
Freese, Matthias B. - Down To A Sunless Sea
Garnett, Angelica - Deceived With Kindness
Garnett, David - Aspects of Love
Gillard, Linda - Star Gazing
Grace, N.B. - High School Musical: The Book of the Film (!)
Hansford Johnson, Pamela - An Error of Judgement
Hill, Susan - The Battle for Gullywith
Humble, Nicola - The Feminine Middlebrow Novel
Jackson, Shirley - The Haunting of Hill House
Kendal, Felicity - White Cargo
Kennedy, Richard - A Boy at the Hogarth Press
Koppel, Lily - The Red Leather Diary
Leacock, Stephen - Literary Lapses
Lee, Harper - To Kill A Mockingbird
Light, Alison - Forever England
McEwan, Ian - Black Dog
Melbye, Eric - Tru
Milne, A.A. - Two People
Milne, Christopher - The Enchanted Places
The Mitfords - Letters Between Six Sisters
Morley, Christopher - Parnassus on Wheels
Nemirovsky, Irene - Suite Francaise
Niffenegger, Audrey - The Time Traveler's Wife
Norton, Mary - The Bread and Butter Stories
Oliphant, Laurence - Piccadilly
Orwell, George - Homage to Catalonia
Oyeyemi, Helen - The Icarus Girl
Rice, Eva - The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets
Rosenthal, Amy - On The Rocks
Sacks, Oliver - The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat
Sackville-West, Vita - The Heir
Saki - The Penguin Complete Saki
Schein, Elyse & Paula Bernstein - Identical Strangers
Schreiner, Olive - The Story of an African Farm
Sellers, Susan - Vanessa and Virginia
Shaffer, Mary Ann - The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
Smith, Emma - The Great Western Beach
Solomon, Laura - Alternative Medicine
Stacey, Tom - The Man Who Knew Everything
Stevenson, D.E. - Miss Buncle's Book
Taylor, Elizabeth - Angel
Visman, Janni - Yellow
Warner, Sylvia Townsend - Lolly Willowes
Waterfield, Giles - The Long Afternoon
Waugh, Evelyn - Put Out More Flags
Whipple, Dorothy - Someone at a Distance
Wiseman, Robert - Quirkology
Woolf, Leonard & Trekkie Ritchie Parsons - Love Letters
Woolf, Virginia - Orlando
Yates, Richard - Revolutionary Road
Zusak, Markus - The Book Thief
Various - The Sixpenny Debt and other Oxford stories

Reviews by Our Vicar and Our Vicar's Wife

Return! A plethora of books

I am back from a week in Northern Ireland and a weekend in Warwickshire, and hope some of you are still around - will try and pop into most of the blogs tomorrow to say hello and catch up, but too late to do that tonight. Instead, will give a round-up of three books I've read recently... that's right, leave me alone for a week and I have to burst with bookish things. None of these three books would make my top ten of the year, but each was worth writing about - and that might be where the connections end. We'll see if any more come up as I write...

Capuchin Classics kindly sent me another of their reprinted novels - Tom Stacey's The Man Who Knew Everything, which was published as Deadline in 1988. If you're thinking 'Oh, wasn't that a film with John Hurt and Imogen Stubbs?' then I'll stop you there - Stacey's foreword to this slim novel makes it clear that he has no wish to be associated with that film. Despite talented actors, 'the director and editor went to ground for three months to emerge inexplicably with an edited version, not readily intelligible, which re-shaped the story as a tragedy of love'. So, if it is not a tragedy of love, what is it? Granville Jones is an aging newspaper correspondent in the 1950s Gulf, writing occasional dispatches and mostly idling towards the end of his life, reflecting on the two women who have played significant roles therein. He is there when a coup threatens the island's leader, also a personal friend, and must report on it - and must meet the journalistic deadline before anyone else gets there.

In some ways it's a pity Stacey had to lose the title, as it lends the narrative an urgency which can't always be felt by those who, like me, haven't lived the journalist's life. It doesn't help that Granville isn't a particularly likeable character (I felt more than a little sympathy for his abandoned family) but he does come into his own when in conversation with the island's leader, the Emir. 'We have grown old together, Jonas. You and I are too old to fear to die.' All in all, an interesting novel with some touching moments, but requires a mind with a greater political bent than mine possesses.

Piccadilly by Laurence Oliphant was also a reprint, but my copy is a 1928 reprint of the 1870 original. Victorian literature forms too large a gap in my reading, which I decided to rectify with the shortest Victorian novel I owned. Piccadilly is described as a satire on London politics of the 1870s - well, I'm not particularly clued up on the political scene of that era, or indeed any era. No matter, I continued regardless. The hero, Frank Vanecourt, decides to launch himself on a life of selfless charity, and to write a book:

'I shall tell of my aspirations and my failures - of my hopes and fears, of my friends and my enemies. I shall not shrink from alluding to the state of my affections; and if the still unfulfilled story of my life becomes involved with the destiny of others, and entangles itself in an inextricable manner, that is no concern of mine'.

It might not astonish you to learn that the story of his life does become involved with the destiny of others - specifically his noble (and quite lovable) friend Grandon; the woman Grandon loves, Lady Ursula; and Ursula's mercenary mother Lady Broadhem. What unravels is a complex and often amusing plot of secrecy and blackmail and love and much introspection and expostulation from Vanecourt - presumably mocking a vogue for novels of this ilk. Some rather unsavoury, but perhaps inevitable, racism occasionally spoils what is quite a witty work, but I can't help feel I'd appreciate Piccadilly more if I'd read any of the sort of novels which it mimicks.

Finally, a collection of short stories by Mathias B. Freese, Down to a Sunless Sea, which I was sent to review. Full marks on the title - I do like quotations in titles, as I might have mentioned before. Vulpes Libris are kicking off a week on short stories over on their blog, and very interesting I'm sure it will prove to be - whilst they're at it, perhaps someone could answer a query. Why does the short story so often attract the macabre? I thought (and wrote!) quite a lot about the Victorian short story for a dissertation at university, but the macabre didn't pop up nearly so often... Freese's collection has large doses of it, and wasn't always my cup of tea, shall we say. I did want to mention one story, though, which seemed head and shoulders above the rest - 'Young Man'. It's a little like Virginia Woolf's The Waves in style, but communicates some sort of mental illness, in an atemporal confusion. If I could remember Genette's Narrative Discourse, then all sorts of terms would be appropriate. This is part of it:

One day his daughter asked him, "What's on TV for children tonight, Daddy?"
One day his wife said, "Someday it will be all right."
One day he asked himself, "Is this it?"
Again his daughter asked him, "What's on TV for children tonight, Daddy?"
"Watch me, instead," he replied