A new Summer Project

I need a Summer Project. I've had a few Summer Projects over the years, all of which have involved books and with summer closing in this is the perfect time to plan the New Project. A good project take time but is also fun, there's no point in for example reading school books over the summer. My projects have been many and miscallaneous. There was the summer I read A la reserche du temps perdu (not in French mind you, my knowledge of French is pretty much limited to s'il vous plays), the one when I read all the Harry Potters back to back (well, that hardly took all summer, more like a week), the one with Lord of the Rings which then continued with The Hobbit and a Tolkien biography, the one with Virginia Woolf... I can't even remember all the Summer Projects from years gone by. But now I feel like finding one again.

I've been thinking about maybe reading all four of Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie books, perhaps visiting Jonathan Coe's The Rotter's Club -series (although can you call it a series if it's just two books?) or maybe finding something completely new? Finding the Summer Project really is the trickiest part of the project...

I know I could catch up on my classics; maybe reading all or even just a few Dickens', but I've never really been a fan so I doubt I'll go into that direction. The great Russians - I really have no enthousiasm going back there. Jane Austen I quite like because her books are so light and funy but I've read them a few times and I'm not sure Jane Austen really qualifies as a Summer Project. A proper Summer Project is something heavier or bigger. Like when I read all the Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events books. Although with that project the main hardship was trying to find all the volumes in different libraries. And then when I got to part 11 it turned out that parts 12 and 13 hadn't been published yet! Which is why I still own only the last two parts of the series. I did not have time to wait for them to appear in the local library, I had to get them straight from the printers!

I'm starting to lean more and more towards re-reading something I've been meaning to re-read for a long time. Only the trouble with re-reading something you've really liked is that there's a very true danger you won't like the book the second time and you'll end up destroying all the lovely memories you had. But. A few years ago Armistead Maupin published a new volume in the Tales of the City series. (See how a good project tends to involve a series?) I was very doubtful about it - very doubtful indeed. After all, the original series had been lovely; funny and interesting and captivating, I read all the volumes and learned to love the characters and have fond memories of it and them. Now how was I going to feel about a completely new volume which took place in the present time?

To my surprise I liked it. A lot. Well, really I guess it shouldn't have been such a surprise, I did after all like the first umpteen volumes so why not the latest one? The characters all came back to me in a flash and it felt like meeting old friends after a long time. Sure they had aged a little but inside they were still the same.

So maybe re-reading the series will be this summer's Project. Or maybe I'll just settle to reading all the I don't know how many books I've bought but haven't had time to read. Zadie Smith, Kate Atkinson, J.K.Rowling, Diane Keaton's biography, Mark Z. Danielevski's latest... All waiting for me in the book case. Oh, there's still time. Summer's a long time coming.

Penguin Books

I think I really truly became aware of Penguin books only after they started merchandising. Sure, I'd read Penguin books ever since I started reading books in English, but I never really took notice of the publisher - or should I say brand? But there they were: lovely, captivating, must-have Penguin book mugs!

It must have been over 10 years ago when I noticed them in a bookshop in London and like in a flash realized that I absolutely needed to have one. And once you buy one you really need a whole bunch of them. I mean, how can you possibly always be in the mood for a cup of A Room of My Own-coffee? Over the years I've managed to collect quite a library of these novels, detective stories, travel books and plays. Sometimes it takes more time to choose the cup you're drinking from than it takes to make the coffee...

But the mugs (and later the tea towels, the note books, the address tags...) made me more interested in Penguin. And I realized I had been reading them for years without even noticing. I'd read a ton of P.G.Wodehouse all in Penguin, detective stories too numerous to mention, possibly some Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll, Orwell, definitely some Woolf, Brontë, maybe Homer... When you really get into it the list is almost endless. And wasn't it a Penguin competition that my friend won receiving her height in books? That's a competition that any reading person would love to win. For a more detailed list of Penguin authors, not to mention the newcomers, please visit http://www.penguin.co.uk. The mugs are there too...

I think in the end I prefer the classics. The orange of fiction or the green of detective stories, the purple of non-fiction and so on. The books are so thin, so small - they make you fully appreciate the pocket book genre. And when they are old enough they carry that special smell that makes it just so much more interesting to read. The smell of history, I guess, of belonging to another era, a more leisurely time when paper was softer and less shiny. Don't get me wrong, I love the smell of a new book too; but it's a different kind of smell, more modern and efficient.

I've started to buy old Penguin books from flea markets and used books stores - they really do seem to call out to me. Sometimes I buy them even though I know I could borrow them from my mother, sometimes even in the exact same edition. But you see one of those volumes and you just feel like you must have it, or you must save it because let's face it: will the next person appreciate it as much as you do?

My friends know of my passion, I got a On the Road name tag for my luggage and a The Lost Girl passport cover for Christmas and a few years ago Postcards From Penguin which I've used for example to decorate my coffee table! My love of all things Penguin went a tad overboard with the Great Penguin Bookchase - a board game that should have been fun but really needed a lot of guesswork or very detailed knowledge (Which famous author's grandmother...?) to be any fun. 

But my love for Penguin continues.

The price you pay for leaving home without a book

I always carry a book with me when I know I have to spend time traveling or waiting or even if there’s just a hint of a danger of traveling or waiting. So why did I then like an idiot go to a meeting where I knew I had to pass 45 minutes on my own without a good book to keep me company? Well, that you may very well ask, the answer is a mystery even to myself.

But there I was, on my way to the meeting, clearly bookless. Imagine my happiness when I stopped for a bit of lunch and realised there was a library right next to the café I was in! With 10 extra minutes to spare I rushed in and pretty much grabbed the first book I could even vaguely imagine reading. And what did I get? Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies – a book I vowed never to read.

A while back I read Wolf Hall, Mantel’s first acclaimed novel in what was going to be a trilogy. Only I found out about the trilogy bit after finishing the first part and wondering why Anne Boleyn was still alive…

I was initially very excited about the book - I mean who wouldn’t be? A book about Thomas Cromwell, a forefather (great uncle or some such) of the great Oliver; Henry VIII’s main man, the man behind a mountain of beheadings… I’ve always loved biographies and histories, despite or perhaps because of suffering from the worst history teacher in the history of teaching. I’ve read about Henry VIII, his wives, his daughter Elisabeth; about Charles II, George IV (or v?), his children – just to mention a few in British history (then there are the kings & queens of other European countries, but that’s another story). So in a word: excited!

I should have taken more notice when a friend of mine said she didn’t finish Woolf Hall. She’s someone I love talking books with, someone with a similar but not always the same taste in books. We’re read tons of the same books and agreed on most of them but not by far all. I probably like history a little more than she does so I figured that maybe this just wasn’t her cup of tea. And ignoring all signs of warning on I plunged – straight into the depths of Tudor intrigues. I mean come on – she won the bloody Booker prize, didn’t she?

Why she won the Booker is the more relevant question. I found Wolf Hall tedious – it was too long, too dull, and too full of boring details. And as I’m fond of historical facts I found all the fictional dialogue between real historical characters dubious and annoying. Also the character of Thomas Cromwell was just too much. Surely such a great humanist, a smartass, a man who has survived from an abusive childhood and a few wars and has risen to great power, a man who seems to instinctively know what other people are thinking - surely such a man knows better than to get himself beheaded? OK, yes, I’m running ahead of things, so far Cromwell is on the height of his power and is so far beheading other people, but it’s just difficult to see how he’s going to transform into a very different person. That is if Mantel is even remotely true to history. Maybe this time he lives to see his grandchildren grow old.

But more to the point: will I ever finish Bring Up the Bodies, which I reluctantly started to read to pass the time but never got further than page 7? I run into a colleague by accident and so spent my waiting time merrily chatting away instead of ruining my day with Mantel.

So what is the price you pay for leaving home without a book? You get stuck with Hilary Mantel.

Ps. The first 7 pages were just like the first 500 of Wolf hall…

Elizabeth and Georgiana

I saw the film Duchess recently while on holiday. The film, much like every film about real people, got me thinking about the people in it. What were they really like? Did things really happen the way they did in the film?

I had an inkling that the film may not have been completely truthful as I remembered my mother talking about The Duchess of Devonshire, but like so many things a mother tells her children this piece of very useful information had passed me happily by. What I did remember however was that she had a book about the Duchess. It turned out she had two. One about Georgiana, The duchess of Devonshire and another about Elizabeth, the third party in the ménage a trois, which included the two aforementioned ladies and William Cavendish, the 5^th Duke of Devonshire.

Much as I had suspected the film had little to do with real life. And even after reading the two books much is still unknown about the famous (or infamous) trio. What I did discover was that Georgiana was a fascinating woman who was not only the absolute fashion icon of her time but also an influential figure of the political world in a time when women weren’t allowed to vote. She was also a manic gambler with debts that in current money equal millions of pounds. In the film she was in an unhappy marriage and jealous of her husband’s lover, her own friend Elizabeth. In real life it seems she didn’t mind the relationship between the Duke and Elizabeth that much – at least they were great friends all the time they knew each other.

Now in Amanda Foreman’s book Georgiana, The Duchess of Devonshire it is clear that like many a biographer she has fallen in love with her subject. This is possibly unavoidable, I’m thinking of testing the theory with a biography of Stalin– although history shows us that enough people have blindly fallen in love with him so why not a biographer? Anyway, Foreman clearly admires her subject but is also aware of her weaknesses.

Now I wonder if I would think differently had I read Caroline Chapman’s Elizabeth & Georgiana first, but after Foreman’s extremely well researched and written book Chapman’s biography was a massive disappointment.

Chapman also has fallen in love with her subject but has also quite clearly been wearing rose coloured glasses while writing the book. This has made it necessary for her to make continuous excuses on behalf of her heroine. The more Chapman defends poor Elizabeth, the more I start to feel like she was an extremely annoying and opportunistic woman.

When Elizabeth and Georgiana first met, Elizabeth was pretty much an outcast of society. She had left her husband, and doing so had no means of supporting herself and no respectful house would ever welcome her to a social event. So when she met the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire who both took a liking to her and were willing to support her financially it must have felt like a godsend. But not to Chapman, who says it is unlikely that in a situation like that a person would see and opportunity and grab it. Yeah, right.

That Georgiana and Elizabeth became best friends is an undoubted fact, they wrote thousands of letters to each other and were as close as any two friends can possibly be until Georgiana’s death.  Georgiana made sure her friend had a position in the Devonshire household and that she was treated with respect. After her death it was a completely different ballgame. Georgiana’s children resented the fact that Elizabeth stayed on and behaved like the lady of the house. They disliked her and felt that her attempts of friendship were forced and artificial. Now this tells more about the children’s feelings than about the personality of poor Elizabeth, but Chapman feels it her duty to remind the reader that the children were clearly wrong. Because once again it is impossible to see how someone who has just lost a beloved mother would be annoyed when her friend / their father’s lover decides to hang around instead of just plain moving out.

And so on and so forth. Every time someone dares criticize the lovely Elizabeth to her rescue comes Chapman like a knight in shining armour. And critics she had plenty of. Elizabeth lived a long life for example excavating the ruins of Rome and being, according to Chapman, the light and heart of Roman society – or, according to some of her contemporaries an upstart, a-know-it-all, a Georgiana-wannabe.

The further I read the more annoyed I became. So what if Elizabeth was annoying? There are plenty of people in this world who are annoying; it doesn’t make them any less interesting. Trying to undermine the intellectuality of the reader on the other hand makes me see red. Every letter of Georgiana’s children is rebutted with a quote from someone who’s really not relevant to the situation. But maybe some good became from reading both books: I’m still very curious about the mysterious Elizabeth, the captivating Georgiana and the Duke who in possibly the most famous threesome in history is left with the role of a minor character.

Why I love reading

I love books. I’ve probably loved them all my life – my mum tells a story of how she had to read my favorite book over and over to me when I was less than two years old, so my love for literature started very early on.

I learned to read very young and pretty soon I was in the local library taking with me all the books I had the strength to carry and then returning them in maybe a week just to get another load. The selection wasn’t huge so I’m pretty sure I read most books several times.

I’ve read the classics, the Dostoyevskys, the Tolstoys, the Kafkas, the Prousts and what-have-you’s. I didn’t like Mill on the Floss but loved Vanity Fair, I love Jane Austen but don’t like Dickens except for Pickwick… Like many a reader I suppose there’s not much logic to my reading or my likes and disliking’s.

When I say I love books it means I also love to have them, to feel them, to own them. I’ve never learned to like e-books and my once so fruitful relationship with libraries has pretty much died. I prefer to buy a book and then save it for just the right moment. I prefer paperbacks over hardcovers, mostly for their convenience: you can fit one in your bag, you can stuff 3 paperbacks on your bookcase in the space of just one hardback, you don’t get horrid pain in your arms from holding a paperback… You get the drift. I’m a writers nightmare I guess, buying hardbacks only when it’s one of my favourite authors new books and I just can’t wait.

So what are my favorite authors then? I prefer reading relatively new literature, mainly British and American authors like Kate Atkinson, Nick Hornby, Zadie Smith, Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Coe… I love discovering new authors and then getting through their works. I absolutely love books that play with your mind or with the text – when it’s cleverly done and isn’t just a gimmick. I read some B.S. Johnson after reading Like a Fiery Elephant, but after reading an omnibus of 4 books realised it wasn’t for me. I’ve read one book by David Foster Wallace and started another but realized that The Pale King isn’t one of those books you can read in bed in little bits every night so will have to give it a go during a holiday, possibly.

My great weakness are detective stories, the easy kind with not much suspense or violence. So as you can guess I'm all for Christie, Simenon, Marsh, Dickson Carr etc and not so much your "cool" contemporary suspense writers. There's just nothing better than sitting outside in the sun with a lovely detective story that you've probably read a thousand times before. Unfortunately my favorite authors have stopped producing new works decades ago..

I’m not a critic, don’t pretend to be one and don’t want to be one. But I thought I’d give this blog thing a crack. Since I love to read so much I figured this might be a way to talk about a thing I love – possibly with likeminded people. So here goes…