In the presence of...

I do like it when bloggers share little snippets from books they've read, or are reading, especially when these excerpts are anecdotal in nature. And so I thought I'd share something I read years ago in A.A. Milne's (brilliant) autobgioraphy, and which has stayed with me:

[J.M.] Barrie told me of an occasion when he was present at a gathering of young authors all very busy talking about style. An older man sitting aloof in a corner, but listening intently, was asked to contribute to the discussion. He confessed uncomfortably that he had never thought about the subject: he would rather listen and learn what he could: he really would have nothing to say of any value: they all knew much more than he did. Fearing to be drawn more deeply into the argument, he added that he had to go now, and slipped out. "Who was that?" Barrie was asked. Barrie, who had brought him there, explained that it was Thomas Hardy.

Review: A Werewolf in Manhattan by Vicki Lewis Thompson

Title: A Werewolf in Manhattan

Author: Vicki Lewis Thompsion

Series: Wild About You #1

Release Date: January 4th, 2011

Publisher: Penguin

Age: Adult

Emma Gavin writes about werewolves, but that doesn't mean she believes in them-not until a pack of real-life New York weres decide to investigate the striking accuracy of her "fiction".

When Aiden Wallace, son and heir of the pack leader, tries to sniff out Emma's potential informant, he discovers something even more dangerous- an undeniable attraction to her.

Since the moment I saw this cover and read the synopsis, I wanted to read this book.

Emma is a best-seller writer. Her book? Paranormal romance, including werewolves. She's funny and sweet, but her life is very different from the heroines in her books. She just has a boring boyfriend and spends her days in her house, writing and drinking coffee.

The werewolves exists, and Aiden Wallace is determined to find out how Emma knows so much about them. So he starts to investigate her and just when he's about to leave her alone, a rouge wolf starts to contact her.

A Werewolf in Manhattan is one of those books that starts so good but in the end I wanted more. I was really enjoying the story and the relationship between Emma and Aiden. They were very hot and both had strong personalities...Emma being intelligent and free spirited, and Aiden being the alpha male. Their world was very described and the plot good until Emma discovers the truth about the wolves. She turns to be very stubborn and Aiden turns out to do whatever his father said.

After everything is discovered, I felt like the plot was too fast and the conflict wasn't really resolved. They couldn't be together and suddenly then they were madly in love and thinking about binding. She was in danger and practically kidnapped, but her only worry was her laptop.

Still, I enjoyed the werewolves and Emma being a writer. I think it's the first time I read about a protagonist being a writer. Also, I liked that Aiden was more than the hot alpha male in the story. He sometimes was the narrator and it was great to understand what he was feeling.

Overall, it was a sweet story with hot scenes and a cute couple. Even when I wished more of the plot, I still enjoyed it and I recommend it if you want a fast and light reading.

More about this book at www.vickilewisthompson.com, Goodreads, Amazon, The Book Depository.

Strange Glory

One of the books I bought during Project 24 was Strange Glory (1936) by L.H. Myers. For some reason I had jotted down this name during my doctoral research, and so I bought it when I spotted it in my favourite shop in Oxford, Arcadia. Having read it (quite a while ago, actually) I have no idea why I decided to write it down. It wasn't remotely helpful for my research... but it was interesting enough.

It starts with Paulina stopping her chauffeur next to a mysterious wood in Louisiana. She is off to meet her fiancee, but is captivated by the wood instead - and the equally mysterious man she spots amongst the trees. Strange Glory returns to Paulina's life once every year, as she returns to the wood and to that man - whom she thinks a hermit - as gradually she detaches herself from her life of privilege and gravitates towards a new life.

To be honest, Myers lost me a bit sometimes. I read most of the novel on a long train journey, and when I returned to it I had great trouble working out what was going on. (That's the sort of confession you won't find in a newspaper review.) The second half of the novel becomes a sort of love triangle, with left-wing politics thrown into the mix, and for me it lost a bit of its mystique. Reminded me a little of David Garnett's Aspects of Love, which I didn't particularly love.

But why did I still enjoy Strange Glory? The aura of mystery does pervade it, and Myers' description of the woods helped deepen a narrative which could have remained quite dull. Here's an example - if you like this, then you might well enjoy the novel as a whole:

She woke from her musings to find herself passing through country that she had never seen before. The sun, now high overhead, was shining fiercely through a white haze. Fields of short, greyish grass bordered the road, and behind there rose clumps of huge, moss-hooded trees, the outposts of a line of forest. In the chalky, violet sunlight these mountainous forms loomed up hollow and spectral; they looked like lumps of foam left by a withdrawing tide. And the forest behind seemed to be more unsubstantial still - hoary and unsubstantial with an ancientness independent of time. A frontier of mystery, it stretched on for mile after mile; always the same distance away, it tantalised Paulina until suddenly the road made a turn, and the car rushed into it and was engulfed. At once a cool, swampy smell filled the air; pools of water glittered in the half-dark, the car plunged through clouds of noise that came from the throats of countless frogs.

Even though Strange Glory proved fairly useless for my research, it was yet an entertaining diversion and a glimpse into unusual territory for my reading. The blurb describes it as 'transcendental'. Perhaps it is no coincidence that L.H. Myers is the son of F.W.H. Myers, who wrote a rather bizarre (and very long) two volume work on the unconscious mind, called Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death which enjoyed a vogue in the early 20th century. Not the sort of work I'd particularly enjoy in purported 'non-fiction' (although it does currently sit on my desk, for research purposes) but when this sort of thing influences fiction, it can lend a haunting quality.

One of my more unusual and eccentric choices for Project 24, perhaps, but I'm glad I've read it - and there a few cheap secondhand copies over the internet, should you wish to sample it yourself.


Books to get Stuck into:

The Haunted Woman - David Lindsay: Lindsay was a friend of Myers, and weaves odd metaphysical elements into this unusual novel.

The Man Who Planted Trees - Jean Giono: not the most obvious of connections, but equally captivating in its depiction of woodland as the central force of a narrative.

Book-Trailer: The Violets of March

I discovered this book thanks to the author, and I loved the trailer so much that I want you to watch it:

In a mystical place where violets bloom out of season and the air is salt-drenched, a heartbroken woman stumbles upon a diary and steps into the life of its anonymous author, and so begins the story of The Violets of March, Sarah Jio’s debut novel, to be published by Penguin (Plume) in August of 2011. More about the story: In her twenties, Emily Wilson was on top of the world: she had a bestselling novel, a husband plucked from the pages of GQ, and a one-way ticket to happily ever after. Ten years later, the tide has turned on Emily’s good fortune. So when her Great Aunt Bee invites her to spend the month of March on Bainbridge Island in Washington state, Emily accepts, longing to be healed by the sea. Researching her next book, Emily discovers a red velvet diary, dated 1943, whose contents reveal startling connections to her own life.

April 26th, 2011. Pre-Order: The Book Depository, Amazon.

Stuck-in-a-Book's Weekend Miscellany

Happy weekend, one and all. Hope the weather where you are is a little less gloomy than Oxford... roll on spring. But, before that, roll on a book, a blog post, and a link. Today's Miscellany is a little more verbose than most...

1.) The link - (which is actually a blog post, I suppose.) The other day I reviewed Remember Remember by Hazel McHaffie, a novel with the theme of dementia. I intended (were I to summarise in a single line) to write something along the lines of 'This is a good novel; the second half is rather better than the first half.' That would save me an evening! And it is - a very interesting idea, executed skillfully and with feeling. Re-reading the review, from the author's p-o-v, I realise that my quibbles seemed to dominate, and my praise perhaps get a bit lost. But I didn't really have to try and work out the author's p-o-v, because Hazel got in touch - and has written this response to my blog post.

I've got to say, I felt flattered that Hazel thought my blog post worth responding to, and read her thoughts with much interest. I was rather mortified to realise that my review had come across worse than I meant it to (Hazel and I have since exchanged friendly emails!), but it also made me want to say something which is perhaps controversial. I do believe that the very worst writer (which, of course, Hazel is not anywhere close to being) is somehow on a higher plane than the best reviewer/blogger. To be creative is so much more valuable than to analyse creation. So my view, really, isn't that important, in comparison...

That sounds negative about blogging, doesn't it? It wasn't meant to - rather I wanted to celebrate writers. Of course, blogging can cross over into 'creative writing' territory, but generally I admire those wonderful people who create novels - and must remember to be humble as one who merely writes about them.

Oh, and my failure to get on board with Aaron in Remember Remember does (as I have told Hazel now) put him in the same category as Mr. Rochester, Mr. Knightley, and Heathcliff!

2.) The blog post - is Pamela's beautiful list of 'Simple Pleasures'... which just happens to include Miss Hargreaves...

3.) The book - is Vanessa Gebbie's new short story collection, Storm Warning, which sounds intriguing. I reviewed an earlier collection by Gebbie forever ago, here. And here's what her publisher (Salt) have to say about Storm Warning:

Storm Warning explores the echoes of human conflict in a series of powerful stories and flashes inspired by life with the author’s own father, an ordinary and gentle man who fought and was decorated in WWII, but who suffered the after-effects for the rest of his life.

The conflicts range from conventional warfare through violent tribal clashes to historical religious persecution. Gebbie’s viewpoints are never predictable. War veterans are haunted by events that echo louder and louder. A prisoner sees the violent execution of a friend and mentor, a boy hides from a necklacing, a young student escapes the fighting in Iraq in the hope of continuing his education in the West and a woman tells what she knows of her parents’ torture.

Echoes of conflict are often explored from the child’s perspective. A young girl witnesses an attempted escape over the Berlin Wall. Another is present when her grandfather, a writer, is targeted in the Russian Cultural Revolution, and two small boys are unwilling bystanders to atrocities in African inter-tribal conflict.

The people in these stories are not those who go down in history. They are the ordinary troops. They are the powerless, caught up involuntarily. All are tested, sometimes to breaking point, in this extraordinary collection as Gebbie pulls no punches, exploring the surreality of conflict, the after-effects of atrocity and sometimes, the seeds of atrocity itself.

Old Habits...

Those who thought I have learnt good habits, or become a better person, under the strictures of Project 24 probably had those beliefs dispelled on January 1st, when I bought twenty-four books. Just in case there are any lingering doubts, I thought I'd better share with you my purchases since the beginning of the year (Jan. 1st purchases not included - posted about them already!) Oh, how I missed going into a bookshop, gleam in my eye, wallet in hand, knowing the only things holding me back were time and the limited number of bags one man can carry at any one time!

One of my favourite bookshops for potential bargains is Notting Hill Book & Comic Exchange. A cramped ground floor, with the choice pickings - and three sprawling, untidy basement rooms, where books are all only £1 each. Last time I went they were 50p each, but I suspect they made nary a jot of profit that way. Last Saturday I met up with Sakura (aka Chasing Bawa) and we went book-hunting. Sakura wisely took books to exchange, thus getting vouchers to spend in the shop. I can never find more than one or two books I am willing to part with, and they're always in Somerset rather than Oxford, so it was cold cash I parted with.

I bought nine books... and they came to £9. Not all were downstairs, but they actually only charged me 50p for some, so it balanced out. Nine pounds! When you think that the uncomfortable bus journey to and from London cost £13... Anyway, enough prevarication - here's what I got.


- Foreigners by Leo Walmsley
Jane (Fleur Fisher) wrote this very compelling review of Love in the Sun by Walmsley - I've not been able to track that down, but thought it might be worth picking this one up.

- The Gipsy in the Parlour by Margery Sharp
Another author Jane likes, but one I actually first read in 2003 or thereabouts - I read The Foolish Gentlewoman after reading in letters by P.G. Wodehouse that he liked it a lot. And last read in 2003, so far, but I've got a fair few waiting on my shelves.

- Loving by Henry Green
All manner of people have told me to read this, and a nice Penguin never goes amiss.

- The Mist in the Mirror by Susan Hill
I've not read any of Hill's ghost stories... I'm not entirely sure I want to, as I'll most likely be terrified, but... maybe in the summer.

- The Empty Room by Charles Morgan
Like Margery Sharp, Morgan is an author I read once, enjoyed, and never quite returned to. Still, at least this will give me another option.

- Aiding and Abetting by Muriel Spark
You all know that I've become besotted by all things Spark - and this is simply another (short! hurrah!) novel of hers to add to the shelves.

- The Girl With Glass Feet by Ali Shaw
I read this a year or so ago, but it was a library copy, and I thought I'd quite like one for myself. You know how it is.

- The Child That Books Built by Francis Spufford
I've been considering getting this one for a while, since it sounds exactly the sort of thing a bibliophile would enjoy, and at £1 I felt I could take a gamble.

Most excitingly, I spotted Potterism by Rose Macaulay. To be honest, I still can't remember whether or not I have a copy (LibraryThing says no) BUT when I flicked it open...


Eeek! And for only £1! Having checked it against examples of her autograph online, I am confident that it is bona fide Macaulay - and am utterly delighted.

After all this excitement, we then popped to a nice little cafe, where Sakura kindly bought me a cup of tea, and we ooohed and aaaahed over each other's purchases.

But this is not all! I have been hungrily around Oxford's bookshops; I have bought one or two things online - here are my other finds.


- Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield
Yes, of course I already have this - but my 4-in-1 copy is falling apart, and I've been looking to replace it.

- Mr. Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood
This novel has been on the edge of my book-consciousness for a while, but I can't remember why. Did one of you mention it? A beautiful Folio edition (sans boxy-thing - it's the yellow patterned book) swung the deal. But illustrations by Beryl Cook... can't say I'm excited about those.

- Leonard Woolf by Victoria Glendinning
Oh, the times I walked past this in the £2 bookshop last year! Praise be that it was still there in 2011...

- Letter from New York by Helene Hanff
I didn't realise the author of 84, Charing Cross Road had done much more, so was pleased to spot this collection of articles.

- The Demon Lover and other stories by Elizabeth Bowen
I bought this in Langport, Somerset in the sweetest, and most bizarre, bookshop I've seen in ages. Dozens of pieces of furniture placed at random... not many books, but this collection of stories might help me find my way back to Bowen, after not enjoying The Last September. 2010 was the year of giving authors another go; something I should continue this year - since it was so rewarding.

- The Bondmaid by Pearl S. Buck
Since I loved The Good Earth last year, this leapt into my hands. I daresay Buck will follow the Sharp-Morgan path, of arriving on my bookshelf and never making it to being read, but... maybe one of you can give it a shove in the right direction?

- Daphne by Justine Picardie
Everyone else was reading this a few years ago... now I might join 'em.

- England, Their England by A.G. MacDonell
This was recommended to me by Tim, my colleague, and the first page was very funny. I'm not sure what led Tim to recommend it, since I don't think we've talked much about books we like, but... I'm quietly hopeful.

Not pictured is The Public Image by Muriel Spark, which I bought in Somerset and left there. And lovely Deanna, who reads this blog, says another Spark is winging its way from her... I will thank her suitably profusely when it arrives!

Phew! There you go. For those who didn't read my blog before 2010, this is more or less standard Stuck-in-a-Book behaviour...

And as always, I'd love to know your thoughts on them: have you read any? Which should fight its way to the top of the tbr pile first? Just how exciting is that Rose Macaulay signature?!

Review: Second Hand Heart by Catherine Ryan Hyde

Title: Second Hand Heart

Author: Catherine Ryan Hyde

Release Date: September 2nd, 2010

Publisher: Black Swan

Pages: 460

Age: Young Adult

Vida is 19 and has never had much of a life. Struggling along with a life-threatening heart condition, her whole life has been one long preparation for death. But suddenly she is presented with a donor heart, and just in time. Now she gets to do something she never imagined she'd have to do: live.

Richard is a 36-year-old man who’s just lost his beloved wife, Lorrie, in a car accident. Still in shock and not even having begun the process of grieving, he is invited to the hospital to meet the young woman who received his wife’s donor heart.

Vida takes one look at Richard and feels she’s loved him all her life. And tells him so. Richard assumes she’s just a foolish young girl. And maybe she is. Or maybe there’s truth behind the theory of cellular memory, and maybe it really is possible for a heart to remember, at least for a time, on its own.

Second Hand Heart is both a story of having to learn to live for the first time, and having to learn to live all over again.

Vida is a 19 years old women who is going to die soon. All her life has been about dying, so she isn't really afraid. But suddenly her life changes when she gets a second chance.

Richard's wife is dead, and a girl named Vida received her heart. He miss her very much, so he made the decision to met Vida. But as soon a they met, Vida knows she loves him.

Cellular memory is a theory that says a person's memories aren't only storage in the brain but in every organ, and when a person receives an organ transplant, they can feel what the other one felt. So, it's true? Is Vida really in love with Richard? And what about Richard and his feelings?

Vida is an amazing character. At first she was a sick girl waiting for her death and wondering about it, but when she receives the heart she becomes afraid of life and confused. She's 19 years old but acts like a kid, just discovering life. The only thing she was sure about it was her feelings for Richard. She knows she's in love with him.

It was sad to read Richard. He just lost his wife and it's scared for his wife's heart, now in Vida's body. The sudden death of his wife made it difficult for him to move on, he couldn't say goodbye. Even when he doesn't want to take a part of Vida's life, it's impossible not to feel drawn to her...or to her heart?.

Cellular memory is the biggest theme in this book, but not the only one. It's about Vida finally being able to grow up. It's about appreciating every minute of your life, and learning about real love. Both of the main characters had extremely difficult journeys in this book, but when they stopped struggling, it's when they both could finally move on.

The author made a good job writing realistic characters. I could feel their feelings, even when I haven't had the same experiences. Sometimes the story was a little bit slow, but I think it was necessary for this kind of story.

Overall, Second Hand Heart is a heart warming story about love and life. Beautiful written, it's a book that I'd recommend to all.

More about this book at www.catherineryanhyde.com, Goodreads, The Book Depository.