I've recently finished reading A S Byatt's The Children's Book(interview/review here). I have to admit this is the first Byatt I've read, although I did get about a third of the way through a library copy of Possession, before it had to be returned, and I didn't for a variety of reasons  reserve it again. However, The Children's Book is one of the most amazing, absorbing and engrossing reads I've experienced. The cast of characters seems huge but in fact is a few families, the timescale seems immense but is in reality that period at the end of the 19th century, ending just after the First World War, and the setting is basically London, Kent and later Germany in the beginning of the 1900's..I found the references to the art of that period easy to visualise, as I'd watched the recent TV programmes on Art Nouveau, called Sex and Sensibility, presented by Stephen Smith, which was both very interesting and informative. Unfortunately I read this on my Kindle, so missed having the beautiful cover to look at whenever I closed the book, as it would have added to my enjoyment. I think the hugeness of this book comes from the range of emotions described and felt by both characters in. the story and the reader, as well as from the range of events and characters.
Another fairly long read was Vere Hodgson's wartime diaries, Few Eggs and No Oranges, published by Persephone Books. Social history at its best, as Vere describes the Blitz, doodle-bugs, V1 and 2 rockets and other bombs that fell on London and elsewhere in the country from 1940 to 1945. She also describes the difficulties of getting food as well as household necessities such as saucepans, kettles and sheets, when setting up her own flatlet. It brought back memories of my grandmother's stories of the Second World War. She lived on the Isle of Wight and though there was some bombing there, they were under the flight path of bombers aiming for Southampton and Portsmouth, both badly damaged during that time.

Winter again

Here in the Auvergne, winter or something very like it, has returned. There is snow up on the montagnes above us, although lower down in the valley, the grass is green and trees are coming into leaf. Some of the cattle are out in the fields. Yesterday we went for a drive to Salers and back down to the Vallee du Mars via the Col de Neronne, which was only just about open. We met a snow-clearing lorry on our way down; fortunately we'd stopped for a moment at a pull-in, otherwise there wouldn't have been room for both vehicles I don't think we'll be repeating the trip until the weather clears up a lot, or we our next visit later in the year. There has been almost non-stop rain for the past week, apart from a couple of afternoons when it has dried  up a bit. Most mornings the cloud level is not much higher than the houses in the village.

A little light reading

As an antidote to reading books narrated by young boys, I picked up Katie Fforde's Summer of Love on a recent visit to my local library. I like Katie's books, they are light, cheerful and have a happy ending. I know that people in the book world are saying that chick-lit is dying but Katie fforde has been writing fro quite a long time and shows no sense of slowing down - long may she continue. Chick-lit was only a name dreamed by someone who possibly had never read it - and I'm not sure the "lit" bit applies to much of it, entertaining as it is. Summer of Love is vintage Katie Fforde, with a single mother, Sian Bishop, as heroine, running her own small business and moving to the countryside to provide a better school for her son. She eventually meets Gus Beresford, her neighbour's explorer son, recently returned from his latest adventure. But Sian and Gus have met before, so the twists and turns of the plot begin. Great fun.
Michael Wright's C'est La Folie was recommended by a friend, after she had read his articles in the Telegraph newspaper. As he lives in France in the Limousin region, next to the Auvergne region, I thought it a very sympatique read. Much of the life he describes is rural, somewhat isolated and very different from English city life. We are heading off to the Auvergne ina few days, so it had many resonances.

A bit of craft

I made some of these little lavender-filled strawberries for a charity lunch and they were very popular. The original pattern came from Selvedge magazine, (issue No 31, Nov/Dec 2009)but I've seen a variation in Mollie Makes magazine (issue No 2, June 2011) and also in Martha Stewart's Encyclopedia of Sewing and Fabric Crafts, although these latter are designed as pincushions. I filled mine with home-grown lavender from the large bush in my front garden. The lavender bush also supplies the wherwithal to make these lavender pottles, which I tuck into drawers to help scent the contents and protect against the increasingly voracious clothes-moths.

Catching up

I know its now March, but not having blogged for a while, ( have been catching up with gardening and so on),  it's time for a catch-up. So what have I been reading recently? Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending is a slight book , physically, but its impact is much greater than its size, although I do feel ambiguous towards it. A story about memory of the past and how events are remembered by others as well as oneself. Tony , retired  from his somewhat dull job, is recalling events from his schooldays, and particularly one incident in which one of his schoolmates hung himself after getting a girl pregnant. At university, a fellow schoolmate, Adrian, talented and clever, goes out with Tony's girlfriend Veronica and later kills himself. Although I didn't particularly like any of the characters in this book, yet I felt some sympathy for them and the positions they found themselves in. I think the clue is in the section where Tony writes that " we are all damaged" and goes on to expound about how people cope with the damage that life inflicts on us in different ways. When we discussed The Sense of an Ending at a recent Book Club meeting, the talk was concentrated for almost the whole of the meeting on this book , instead of wandering off on to a variety of vaguely associated subjects, as often  happens.

A couple of reads seen through the eyes of ten year old boys followed on from each other. The first was Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman. I liked Harri Opuku, recently arrived in Peckham, together with his older sister Lydia and mother, father and baby sister Agnes left behind in Ghana. Harri is at school where his best friend has ginger hair, his would-be young girlfriend blonde, so the atmosphere of racism is present, along with, increasingly, violence. Gangs, a schoolmate called Killa, the death of an older boy in a seemingly random stabbing all lead to a growing sense of menace in Harri's life especially when he and his ginger-haired friend Dean decide to play detective na d find out who killed the stabbed boy. The pigeon which Harri feeds and which he looks after and by which feels he is watched over is also an important character in the book.


Annabel Pitcher's debut novel, My Sister lives on the Mantelpiece is narrated by ten-year old Jamie, who has moved to the lake District with his Dad and older sister Jasmine to make a fresh start, after their Mum left, and after sister Rose has died., killed by a terrorist bomb. While Dad has difficulties in moving on, Jamie has difficulty in remembering Rose, as was only five when she died. Jasmine and Jamie try to support each other and their father, while also trying to deal with the changes in their own lives - new schools, different friends to find, how to cope with bullying, racism and the absence of their mother. Ultimately this story is one of hope, as despite a particularly mad idea of Jamie's, life does begin to change for the better.

Reading about reading

I've recently read a couple of books about reading, its influence on us as readers and how it can change us. Having read all my life - I can't remember actually learning to read, and had a career as a librarian, the subject of reading is fascinating to me, the why and how and what people read. Needless to say, the reasons people read are as varied as the people.  Stop What You're Doing and Read This is a collection of essays by a number of well-known writers, with a variety of views. Most had been avid readers since childhood, some could even remember learning to read and the approval of adults at achieving this skill. Some articles relate the influence certain books had on the authors' lives, while others discuss and describe the influence of libraries, or of reading more generally. The concluding article poses questions about the influence on our brains of modern technological innovations. Alan Jacobs' The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction also poses this question, which is , as yet, unanswered. We humans have since time began had a love of stories, and many men who seem to have a problem with reading a physical book  are reading all sorts of stories on Kindles, i-pads, tablets and similar reading devices. I bought a Kindle last year, to enable me to take more books away with me than I could cram physical objects in my suitcase, and find that when reading on it, I think I concentrate on the actual text more than I do when reading a physical object book.
Alan Jacobs' book is a more academic work, although not in a particularly academic style. He concentrates on the idea of reading for pleasure, at Whim,as he describes it, so is not a fan of reading lists. A book such as A 1000 books to Read Before You Die is one of his worst nightmares, as he reagrds ploughing through such list as drudgery, and I found myself agreeing vehemently. One of the most disappointing books I have is How To Read and Why, by the critic Harold Bloom. Apart from the few pages of the prologue, this is a list of books, poems and plays you should read and why they should be read. Nothing about reading these for pleasure, although Bloom does give this a mention in his prologue. One of the most useful aspects of libraries is the opportunity they give for serendipitous dipping into books, and chancing on something unexpected but which is intensely interesting., serendipity being another aspect of reading for pleasure which Alan Jacobs recommends.

Past Imperfect

Julian Fellowes second novel Past Imperfect was chosen (by me) as a light read over Christmas for my reading group. But it's not as light a read as its choice for Richard and Judy might appear. The plot concerns a search for the mother of an unknown child, and there are frequent visits to the past to accomplish this. The narrator is commanded by a former friend, Damien, now dying, to find the child he never knew he had, in order to pass on his extremely large fortune. The narrator, whose name is never revelaed, was part of the debutante season of 1968, and invited Damien to meet his fellow debs  and debs delights. The story shifts back and forth in time, setting the scene of the past and also bringing us up-to-date with how the sameprople are living their lives now. There are many comparisons with past and present, and also how we change as time goes by.  Comments such as " We generally end up with lives that are the products of our choices" and " Anyone with any brains gets nicer as they get older" reveal that the narrator feels this is true of himself as well as others of his acquaintance. His search for Damien;s child returns him to several former female friends, some of whom he knew well, others less so. Some of the reading group felt the above comments and others on life in the 1960'swere a bit too moralising, and that the author went on a bit too much in this vein. Most thought the book as quite a good read. With its constant refernce back to the past of the late1960s, a time when i was growing up myself and finding my own way in the world, I found some aspects of this book made me reflective of my own past.