R.I.P. Studs Terkel

Radio host and Pulitzer Prize winner Studs Terkel died today. He was 96 years old.

Hypothetical Rejection

Dear Aspiring Writer,

Thanks for sending me your query. A book about the Holy Spirit communicating with you sounds fascinating - right up my alley. You're completely right about me not being courageous enough to represent it.

Except that I don't represent books with religious themes. Oh, and I also don't represent crazy people.

Sincerely,
Lyons Literary LLC

PS Best wishes for success!

Debs at War

More book-buying shenanigans today... was in Blackwells and my eye was caught by the title Debs at War, because I thought it might refer to my heroine, Deborah Mitford. It doesn't, but closer inspection didn't make the book look any less interesting - the full title is Debs at War: How Wartime Changed Their Lives 1939-1945, and it's about those who were debutantes shortly before war broke out. Anne de Courcy, the author of this book (and maybe known by some as a biography of Diana Mitford/Mosley), interviewed 47 women who were pre-war debs whose lives were dramatically changed by the war. They entered the Services, as Wrens, WAAFs, FANYs or ATS; they became nurses or VADs; some even started factory work and tried to hide their background.

As before, I'll try to give an overview of a book by its chapter headings. The difference, of course, being that I haven't read this one yet...

- Childhoods 'We were taken down to say good morning to our mother'

- A Question of Upbringing
'You won't need exams'

- Coming Out
'The whole point was to find a husband'

- The Approach of War
'I stood in the room that had been my nursery, listening to Chamberlain declaring war'

- Joining Up
'I wasn't going to get on with anything else until we'd finished with Hitler'

- FANYs
'Posh girls driving staff cars'

- ATS
'We were the rough, tough ones'

- Fun in Wartime 'Boyfriends were more important than bombs'

- Factories
'We were working too hard to flirt...'

- Nursing
'Sometimes the ambulance bells never stopped'

- Love and Marriage
'...and then we got engaged. Crazy, really, wasn't it?'

- Bletchley
'How much German do you speak?'

- On the Land
'We don't want any bloody land girls here'

- The Class Barrier
'We'd never met girls like these before'

- Wrens
'We began to learn to do without sleep'

- The Air
'Why are you bringing up only half an aeroplane?'

- Afterwards
'The war made us feel capable of doing something'

Google Settles Over Book Scanning

I still haven't read all the details, but it seems that the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers have reached a settlement with Google regarding the scanning of books still under copyright protection by Google.

Read Subtle Science

Inspiration seems a little dry at the moment for Stuck-in-a-Book, possibly because my own pleasure-reading has been taking a back seat to my work (though, with Conrad and Kipling and Katherine Mansfield this week, that will make interesting writing when I'm finished with it) so I'm going to set a little activity which will quite possibly drive you a little insane over the next few hours/days/years...

And today's post title tells you what the task is. If you're feeling particularly intelligent, that is - because, no, I'm not suggesting that I've read subtle science, or that you should, but...

Sorry? What was that?


You at the back?


Yes! You've spotted it. 'Read', 'Subtle', and 'Science' each have a silent letter - 'a', 'b', 'c' respectively, in fact. Can you help me compile an alphabet of silent letters, as it were? I've only got about half the alphabet. I need your help. And I'm going to recycle a cartoon from my library days...

Client News

Congratulations to David Oppegaard, who received a starred Publishers Weekly review for The Suicide Collectors. "Eloquent prose and haunting characters lift Oppegaard's astonishing debut..."

Kelly Meding is guest blogging at The League of Reluctant Adults.

Lorraine Bodger will appear live on the Martha Stewart Living satellite radio show November 10th to chat about her book Cook up a Cookbook. If you missed Lorrie on the Faith Middleton Show two weeks ago, you can now hear it online.

Mac Montandon will be doing readings throughout Oregon and California starting November 9th.

More Library Finds

I thought I was spoilt with all the exciting things I was shown in the Bodleian last year, but the treasures just don't end - the other day we students on the MSt course had a session looking at twentieth-century manuscripts. And what an exciting group of items they were, and quite a motley crew too. Handwritten manuscripts by C.S. Lewis and Thomas Hardy; some original drawings by J.R.R. Tolkein; mischevious cartoons by Philip Larkin; a snooty letter by Ezra Pound; a rather overly fond letter from Ernest Hemingway to his mother-in-law... all sorts.

And today I went to a talk on Jane Austen's Volume the First, one of three notebooks in which she wrote her juvenilia - none of the manuscripts of her novels remain, so this notebook is among the small amount which still exist. I've held one of her letters before, but this was Jane Austen in authorial mode, and thus even more exciting... I did worry about myself a little when I realised I considered the notebook as somewhat sacred... *Jane Austen was just a human* *Jane Austen was just a human*...