I'm Dreaming of a Grey Christmas...

I know it's still October, and it feels too early to be talking about Christmas, but I had to tell you about the Persephone Secret Santa which Book Psmith is organising. Instead of typing out all the information here, I'm going to put a link to Book Psmith's post instead. Here it is, click here please. There you are, don't say I never give you anything. The general idea is a Persephone Books give-around, which I did with a group of friends earlier in the month too, receiving Hostages to Fortune by Elizabeth Cambridge - one of my favourite Persephones, but one I'd had from the library originally. For Book Psmith's Secret Santa you're *supposed* to send a list of the Persephones you already have... but I realised, discounting the 56 I already have, and all the cookbooks and gardening books and others that I don't particularly want, there are only a handful waiting to appear on my shelves. So I just sent an email about those instead...

I've spent today reading books with titles like Outside Modernism and Challening Modernism, and even Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual & the Public Sphere. So it'll be nice to spend the remainder of my evening curled up with a Richmal Crompton novel.

And, in territory far away from S-i-a-B norm, has anybody else seen the TV show Gavin and Stacey? Comedy or drama or dramedy, it's sometimes 'a bit near the knuckle', but it's also very funny and very, very sweet. My brother lent it to me months ago, and I only got around to watching it yesterday... and now I've seen five episodes. Out of a series of six. Always the way, but I'm sure I'll find something else to get addicted to soon...

Wordle

I saw this Wordle thingummy at Books Please, and it looked fun - and indeed it is! You can type in a blog address, or just paste in some text, and then customise further what arrives... This is what happened when I put my blog address in...


Have a go at making your own at Wordle.net! No real point to them, but fun, I think you'll agree?

So Many Books

I know I've read Simon Savidge's post on Gabriel Zaid's So Many Books, because I commented on it, but when I saw the book in a local charity shop, I came upon as a new friend. Just goes to show - there must be hundreds of blog posts out there that I've written "Oh, I must keep an eye out for this!" - and I always mean it - but somehow the book slips from my mind. What I *did* note was that a) it was called So Many Books, and thus was likely to be my sort of book, and b) it was published by Sort of Books, the wonderful people behind the Tove Jansson translations. And so I bought it...

Like Simon S, I wasn't expecting quite what I got - I was in HEiotL-withdrawal mode, and was hoping Zaid had written something about his own book collection, and his relationship with it. What he *has* written is actually much more about books as commodities. I suppose this has the bonus that it can't deter anybody with unheard-of tastes and obscure favourites, but equally So Many Books can't rouse my love and affection much.

You can Simon S's thoughts, best bet, because he sums up so well the topics covered in Zaid's book. Zaid looks at the production of books - how people are reached, cost differentials, how it works as a commodity in the marketplace. He compares the book to speech, and wonders how a conversation can be had. He approaches the topics of electronic reader, public library, and ancient manuscript with the same investigative mind, facts falling out of his head onto the page, always keeping his love of reading peeping over the parapet of economics and functionality. And there are occasionally nice little phrases:

And how many college classes are no more than the tortuous reading of a text over the course of a year? Is anything more certain to make a book completely unintelligble than reading it slowly enough? It's like examining a mural from two centimetres away and scanning it at a rate of ten square centimetres every third day for a year, like a short-sighted slug.

Well, quite. The point Zaid returns to again and again is, in fact, the title - so many books. If no books were ever published again, it would take me 250,000 years to read all the ones already published. Even reading a list of the titles and authors would take fifteen years. He comes back to this point throughout the book, it seems to haunt his life. But not with the wry smile I expect of a bibliophile, as they cheerfully take Pride and Prejudice off the shelf to read again, but with some sort of panic that he can't get everything into his mind at the same time... it was a bit off-putting, to be honest.

And that sums up my lack of enthusiasm for So Many Books as a whole, actually. If all these topics I've touched on fill you with interest, then this might be the book for you - but I must confess, I found it a little dull. I don't think of books as commodities - I think of them as acquaintances and friends. I love the sort of bookish book which feels the same. And this wasn't it... So, a word of warning - before you spot the title and buy this for all your bibliophile friends, check first to see if they're the sort of person who also thrives on facts, figures, and ref. fig. 1-ing. If not, perhaps I can recommend Susan Hill's Howards End is on the Landing...

Just what the doctor ordered

I'm am back in the land of the living! Sorry to abandon you for so long - I did mean to at least put up some photographs, but post-flu exhaustion left me feeling more or less dead in the evenings, which is when I usually do my blogging. But now I am fighting fit (relatively speaking) with only an annoying cough which seems disinclined to go away.


As I mentioned in the previous post, any sign of illness and I stop being able to read. Hugely irksome, as you can imagine. But I did manage to read one book last week - the font was sufficiently big, and the story adequately undemanding, while yet being rather wonderful - it was Joyce Dennys' Repeated Doses. As the title suggests, it is not the first in the series. And, using my last months of spontaneous book-buying, I scurried away to buy Mrs. Dose the Doctor's Wife and The Over-Dose. These are, respectively, the first and third books in the series, published between 1930 and 1933.


I say series. These books are divided into various sections - not really short stories, but more like episodes in various lives. Like Henrietta in Joyce Dennys' now much-beloved Henrietta's War (wrote about it here), and Dennys herself, all the heroines are doctors' wives. Or rather, all the stories are about doctors and their families - usually with an instrumental wife. Though they all have different names, they have a shared characteristic running through (I believe) all three books - that of 'false nosery', in Dennys' words. Let me explain, by quoting the first book:

All Doctors' Wives wear False Noses. This fact is not generally known, except to Doctors and their Wives themselves. Even their children hardly ever realize, until they grow up and possibly become Doctors or Doctors' Wives, that their mother went through her married life with a False Nose firmly fixed to her face. There have been cases when even the Doctor himself has forgotten that the Nose he sees as breakfast is not the Nose he wooed. But these are exceptional cases, for Doctors are, as a rule, discerning and disillusioned people.

A Doctor's Wife must wear a False Nose to disguise herself, and thus persuade her husband's patients, and even more, the people who are not her husband's patients, but who might be, that she is like Caesar's Wife, above suspicion.

She must, if possible, however dark her thoughts and evil her intentions, persuade people that she is a model of wifely devotion, motherly love and womanly yearnings.
If she meets the Vicar being carried in at her front door with his throat cut, as she goes out to a Bridge party, she must not divulge this spicy bit of gossip to her friends, and if during the afternoon somebody comes rushing in to say that the Vicar has been hanged, she is denied the exquisite pleasure of saying, and it is at such times that the False Nose hangs most heavy, "Excuse me, but his throat was cut, I saw it; your deal, I think."

And so it goes. These are stories about the diplomacy of doctors' wives, the peculiarities of the medical profession, and the length to which the wives will go to secure patients for their husbands. (That sounds more macabre than I intended...) In many ways, I think being in a doctor's family must be quite similar to being in a vicar's family - certainly in terms of diplomacy, presenting the Public Face of the Profession, and keeping schtum on all sorts of topics.

Dennys' stories in Repeated Doses exaggerate a bit - a woman seeking treatment for a wart ends up in a Rest Home; a name mix up causes an international incident; baskets of fruit become the front line for deceit and intrigue. All great fun.


And, which is half the pleasure with Dennys' books, they are illustrated by Dennys too. I've scattered some of those illustrations throughout this post, and they might prove irresistible to you... They make a lovely set of books - really thick, chunky books, with thick paper, and a feel of luxury quite unexpected for the early-thirties. Obviously they got printed just before printers started economising... I'm so grateful to have heard of Joyce Dennys, and these are real treats to enjoy, return to, and treasure.

Casting pearls before...

I'm afraid I've had swine flu. Or at least flu of some variety, but since it's passing more quickly than normal flu, the consensus is that it's of the swine persuasion. So posts might not be forthcoming for a bit - I feel a lot better than I did yesterday (I was only awake for a few scattered hours throughout the day) but my brain resists doing much thinking. And, annoyingly, I don't seem able to read books... always the way when I get ill: hours in bed, and not able to use the time to lessen the tbr pile. Doh.

But this post is more to explain my absence (or at least the absence of any particularly well-thought-out posts for a bit) than for sympathy, so I shall leave you with a picture from my trip to the Lake District and Edinburgh... more of these soon, I think my brain's up to that. This is from Grasmere, home of Wordsworth and my friend Phoebe.

24: The Challenge

The effects of Howards End is on the Landing continue apace... For the past couple years I've been on a book buying ban during Lent. I have hundreds of unread books, a limited budget, and love of a challenge... and so I'm rolling out a year-long restriction.

Restriction, not ban, I hasten to add. I toyed with a ban on book buying, but realised that going cold turkey would send me smashing the windows of Waterstones at 3am on January 3rd, grabbing handfuls of books, and collapsing in tears.

Or something like that.

So, instead, I thought I'd buy 24 books next year. Two a month. If I'm good one month, I can get more the next - on the other hand, if I go on a book-buying splurge, then I'll have to stay away from bookshops for a few weeks.

Let's put this into perspective. Two books a month coming into the house is probably rather more than your average person buys - but I would be surprised if I've bought fewer than 240 this year. I'm decimating my book buying, and then only keeping the bit that I've got rid of...

I should give you an idea of the response my friends have had to this, on Facebook and my online reading group:

• 'GOOD LUCK, Simon! I wonder how many days you'll last? ;-)'
• 'Is that IN 2010 or AT 20:10? I think the latter is more likely.'
  
• 'Hilarious. I'll watch and laugh.'
  
• 'I simply could not possibly do this. And I seriously wonder if you can.'
• 'Madness!'
• 'WOW. I look forward to seeing how this pans out.....'
• 'I'm still speechless at Simon's decision to curtail book-buying, and if the resolution were made by anyone less sincere, I would suspect a Publicity Stunt! I can hardly imagine not buying books when you live in *England,* the *home* of books'
• (and perhaps my favourite...) 'what evs!'

So you can see the faith my friends have in me. But I quote them in amusement, and shan't be insulted - far from it - if you happen to agree with them. I should add, to be just, that I'm not going to stop getting review copies, so more than 24 books will enter the house...

I think it'll lend a nice slant to the blog - as I unveil each of my acquisitions over the year, and at the end of the year can see which twenty-four made the grade... unless, of course, my friends are right and I crack mid-March...

How To Save A Life

There is a pile of books by one of my bookcases - actually, there are many piles of books by most of my bookcases - but there is one in particular which holds all the books I've recently read, but haven't yet blogged about. They go in that pile, waiting for me to exert myself enough to write a proper review, and I promptly forget nearly everything about them. Not an auspicious way to start a review, I know, but I like it when bloggers give little insights into the geography of their books...

I think Oxford University Press's A Very Short Introduction series is a great idea, though I must say it's not one I've investigated closely. They have these books, about A6 size, covering more or less every topic conceivable - Autism to Particle Physics; topics as wide as History and as specific as The Dead Sea Scrolls; Animal Rights, Machiavelli, Free Speech, Emotion... even, intriguingly, one called Nothing. You get the picture. I must admit, my only previous dalliance with this series was Jonathan Culler's Literary Theory, much bought by panicking finalists - and it wasn't particularly good. Too fuzzy, and asked a lot of questions rather than giving much of use. I suppose it depends how you interpret 'Introduction' - it should send you off to find out more, but I feel it should also give you an understanding of key terms and central ideas.

Which is pretty much what A Very Short Introduction to Biography by Hermione Lee does, thankfully. In 140pp (plus thirty odd of notes and index) Lee gives a whistle-stop tour of biography's vogues, peaks, ideas, and stars. She kicks off by looking at various metaphors for biography, trying to understand the impulse for telling the stories of lives, and the ethics of it. Then by going through 'ten rules for biography' (The story should be true, the biographer should be objective, etc. etc.) she demonstrates how often the rules are broken, and ends the list with no concrete definition at all. Which is perhaps to be expected.

From here we look at the various vogues biography has experienced - exemplary lives, from the Bible and before, through increasingly 'honest' (read: critical) biographies, to the type we expect today. Freud's influence is examined - even the most anti-Freudian is likely now to use his language of childhood trauma, dreams, and so forth. More or less every aspect of biography is touched upon - the attempts of the Dictionary of National Biography and others to collate biographical information; the aesthetic arguments against even attempting biography; even the ways in which Marilyn Monroe has been treated.

It's all there, then, or at least it's introduced. It is, if you like, a biography of biography. So why did the book not really work? No, I need to phrase myself better, because the book did *work* to a large extent - why didn't I love it? What prevented all these fascinating facts and angles from making a captivating 'life'? I think, mostly, because it is quite dry. The style is teacher-y; the occasional verbal tricks felt like they'd work in a lecture, but perhaps not in a book. I wasn't counting, but I think 'V.S. Pritchett's fine short Life of Turgenev' might have been the only evaluative comment made. And Lee only elliptically mentions her own life as a biographer, which would surely have been of interest - it is after all, one presumes, the reason she was asked to write this. She states, for example, 'Biographers are often asked what effect the superseding of letters by email and texting will have on their work' - an interesting question, which I don't think she ever attempts to answer. A hundred other times I'd have loved to hear what *she* experienced as a biographer... but maybe that would be a very different sort of book, and most of her audience might have resented it.

Perhaps the problem is the comparison with what I was hoping for. If I had set out to get a pocket outline of the history of biography, then I'd be happy. Lee's research is vast, her selection of angles intelligent. What is missing (what can so often accidentally slip out of a biography, whatever the number of facts and stories) is humanity. A Very Short Introduction to Biography is a very good resource, an excellent introduction, but you won't find yourself curling up in bed with it.