November Books
Dec. 1st, 2009 10:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
slemslempikeNovember
Tragically, I Was an Only Twin - Peter Cook
Unseen Academicals - Terry Pratchett
Dimsie Grows Up - Dorita Fairlie Bruce
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Straw Without Bricks: I Visit Soviet Russia - EM Delafield
The Purposes of Love - Mary Renault
Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks: The Essential Alan Coren - Alan Coren
Dimsie Goes Back - Dorita Fairlie Bruce
Shakespeare Wallah - Geoffrey Kendal
Books do Furnish a Room - Anthony Powell
Temporary Kings - Anthony Powell
Hearing Secret Harmonies - Anthony Powell
Dimsie Carries On - Dorita Fairlie Bruce
Dimsie Takes Charge - Dorita Fairlie Bruce
The Encircled Heart - Josephine Elder
The Saturdays - Elizabeth Enright
Anything Can Happen - Jane Shaw
Now and Then - William Corbett
The Trouble With Vanessa - Jean Ure
I actually haven't seen all that much of Peter Cook's work, but he has such a distinctive voice that even with my small knowledge the scripts worked well enough to be more than just the words on a page. And since reading this I have been watching The Best of the Rest of Not Only But Also and finding Dudley Moore's corpsing rather irritating. I think because I've seen what are essentially the descendents of Cook's work before really being aware of him as more than a name, I can't properly appreociate how much of a challenge his work was to a lot of what went before.
I was very proud of myself for waiting to buy Unseen Academicals until I had handed in my chapter, and it was a nice reward. I had heard Pratchett talking about UA in Edinburgh last year, so I knew bits of plot. I enjoyed it (I like the wizards a lot, and I cannot BELIEVE the treachery of theDean Henry. I really liked "Oi! To his deaf mistress", and the Patrician insisting that the Explorers' Society be renamed to "Trespassers" because there were already people in the places they went to. Some things seemed like they didn't work as well as in previous books - the Professor of Post-Mortem Communication's refrain of "...skull" was forced. Probably due to dictating rather than typing, and still ace.
I don't know why Dimsie has to Grow Up. Ridiculous idea. And apparently DFB realised this as the next two books in publication order do in fact go back to school. The next one in series order is Dimsie Goes Back, which I didn't think I could remember any of at all, and then when I read it I was right. The dog gets dialogue. I do not approve. Also the characters seem rather thin - Coral Danesbury especially, and without the original Anti-Soppists it is all a little flat. Dimsie Grows Up has Wrens, which I always rather like, and Primula on a motorbike, and a German spy masquerading as a governess, and one doctor pretending not to be a German spy and another doctor pretending (briefly) that he is a German spy. But also children, and Scottish dialect. In other rereads I might stop at Intervenes. But to round off my reread I read through Dimsie Takes Charge, the collection of all the Jane Willard short stories. I am not particularly exercised by the modernisation of school stories (I don't like it or anything, it merely happens to be one of the few things that don't incense me), but having read all the series in original, the "teachers" and "classes" were rather grating. The stories are excellent though. Having finished, I think one of the things that struck me most was that they are rather funnier than I remembered. Also, that the Chalet prefects would never have been so fallibly depicted.
Madame Bovary was DULL. I read it mostly so that I could say I had. And I have now, no-one can take that away from me, and any future "most people have read minus three books, count up how many you have read so as to have a spurious sense of superiority" lists (I love them, I totally have always read more than most people, I'm great) that fail to feature Madame Bovary in the future will incur my wrath. It was quite interesting to see how her desires went unfulfilled and how she tried to make her life better without any real power to do so. But I could have done with it being at least half the length.
I found Straw Without Bricks in an Oxfam shop in Ealing, and it is about her publisher asking her to go to Soviet Russia and be funny about it, which she has doubts about managing. It is a good book, but more interesting than hilarious, though parts are very funny (particularly her descriptions of her communism-loving American fellow tourist). She does try to be balanced - it was published in 1937 and she attempts to compare what she sees as harsh conditions for the workers to what it must have been like for them pre-revolution - though overall she sees a lot of faults. I wonder if Decca ever read it? (Also wikipedia claims that EM Delafield was parodied in a 2003/2004 Simpsons episode as "Esmé Delacroix" - does anyone know which episode and if it's true? Is she well known in the US?)
The Purposes of Love's blurb sounds like a Mills & Boon medical romance, but isn't. It is a sad, rather beautifully told story of a nurse, her brother, and her brother's friend who becomes her lover. I liked the descriptions of the strictness of the nursing rules (no more than six personal items in one's room, and she had to fight to count her row of books as one rather than eleven), very like One Pair of Feet, only without the humour. Rules about when one can go out, how one must dress, who one can associate with outside the hospital, eveything so very claustrophobic. Very good indeed.
The introduction to Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks is rather irritating, a dialogue between Giles and Victoria. But the contents are wonderful. I'd read very little of his writing before at all, but from listening to The News Quiz it seemed all very familiar and comfortable. Anyone have any recommendations for his other collections?
Shakespeare Wallah was mostly very frustrating, a memoir of a fascinating life with virtually every memory touched upon and then left to move onto the next. It was sort of the opposite of Dance to the Music of Time, which dwells on virtually every memory, so that I can't really explain what the books are about, other than "everything". I was less taken with the last novel, where Widmerpool's downfall is too depressing. But an amazing series that I'm glad to have read.
The Encircled Heart is an adult novel by Josephine Elder (who I know from writing really good school stories - thoughtful, interesting books rather than brilliantly rollicking). Elder was a doctor herself, and this book is about Marion, a young doctor in the 1930s (when the book is initially set - published in the 1950s, pre-NHS which made it very interesting), who has her own GP practice, then meets Paul and marries him. I found it very sad. When the book starts Marion is successful, loving her work, living with her close friend Philippa. Then she marries Paul, and though she tries to keep going he is very jealous of her work and doesn't understand her affection and dedication to her patients (he deliberately undermines her several times). He is an academic, and he wants her to be a presentable wife for him so that he can get promotion. Although Marion says that she is happy, I didn't get any sense of why that would be at all. Eventually, unable to reconcile her professional work with keeping her husband happy, she gives up her practice (a decision aided by a pregnancy - that she suspects was deliberate on his part) and they move to the country. War comes, and Paul joins the RAF and leaves, and Marion starts to move back into medical work, and gets closes to the GP in the country. They fall in love, rather, but Marion declines his offer of a new life to stay with Paul (even though he is a TOOL) and her children (who are fine). When Paul does come back he reveals that he fell in love with a WAAF, but chose not to pursue it for Marion's sake, and also that he wants to write plays, so Marion can go and be the breadwinner again. And it's a considered, mildly uplifting ending, but it's still that she can only have the job that she loves because he suddenly finds it convenient. Such a good book.
Anything Can Happen popped up unexpectedly on my abe wants list ("Abe has found the book you want"" Really? Or are you sending me yet another email about a similarly titled book at an unreasonable price?), and I snapped it up with alacrity. It then turned out to have the line drawings coloured in in felt tip. When I contacted the seller about this they were very nice and offered me a return or a discount (I chose discount, and even with the colouring in it was a very nice price for a wrappered copy), but said that they had thought that the illustrations were meant to be in colour. My knowledge of children's books is not exhaustive, I admit, but I have yet to find a publisher whose idea of decoration is to messily colour the Eiffel Tower in a muddy brown that stains through to the text on the page behind. ANYWAY. Lovely book! I read Nothing Happened After All years ago, and was surprised at how familiar I found meeting the characters again (even allowing for the influence of general girls' story tropes).
Now and Then is about a man in his forties, who has recently lost his father, and a series of events that cause him to look back to the only time he has ever been in love, with a boy (Walker) at his boarding school when he was fifteen. The boy was a prefect, and their relationship had to be hidden for the age discrepancy as much as anything else. It is intense, and sad, and you don't know why it went wrong. Then he finds out that Walker had been sleeping with other boys, and this really upsets adult Christopher. Eventually he meets up with Walker, on his third marriage, in Spain, and it is all a bit awful. Walker claims to have loved everyone at the time he was sleeping with them, and doesn't (thankfully) realise that he's utterly crushed Christopher.
The Trouble With Vanessa was an accidental late-night reread, when I caught sight of the spine while I was undressing for bed, read the first chapter to see if it was the one I was thinking of, and then read the rest of it before sleep. Vanessa and Kate/Trottie have started a drama course at the local college, and are full of their new freedoms and friendships and struggles. Vanessa is a feminist and very bossy, Kate is a bit wet. They meet Ned and Danny. It did strike me during this that there's a repetition from the Peter High series of there being "good" black characters who are easy-going and happy to joke about things and are friends with white people, and then in the background there are "scary" black people who are into black power and (potentially) hostile. It is written so that the white characters' discomfort with it is partly the problem, but it's only partly. But I do like Jean Ure an awful lot.
Tragically, I Was an Only Twin - Peter Cook
Unseen Academicals - Terry Pratchett
Dimsie Grows Up - Dorita Fairlie Bruce
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Straw Without Bricks: I Visit Soviet Russia - EM Delafield
The Purposes of Love - Mary Renault
Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks: The Essential Alan Coren - Alan Coren
Dimsie Goes Back - Dorita Fairlie Bruce
Shakespeare Wallah - Geoffrey Kendal
Books do Furnish a Room - Anthony Powell
Temporary Kings - Anthony Powell
Hearing Secret Harmonies - Anthony Powell
Dimsie Carries On - Dorita Fairlie Bruce
Dimsie Takes Charge - Dorita Fairlie Bruce
The Encircled Heart - Josephine Elder
The Saturdays - Elizabeth Enright
Anything Can Happen - Jane Shaw
Now and Then - William Corbett
The Trouble With Vanessa - Jean Ure
I actually haven't seen all that much of Peter Cook's work, but he has such a distinctive voice that even with my small knowledge the scripts worked well enough to be more than just the words on a page. And since reading this I have been watching The Best of the Rest of Not Only But Also and finding Dudley Moore's corpsing rather irritating. I think because I've seen what are essentially the descendents of Cook's work before really being aware of him as more than a name, I can't properly appreociate how much of a challenge his work was to a lot of what went before.
I was very proud of myself for waiting to buy Unseen Academicals until I had handed in my chapter, and it was a nice reward. I had heard Pratchett talking about UA in Edinburgh last year, so I knew bits of plot. I enjoyed it (I like the wizards a lot, and I cannot BELIEVE the treachery of the
I don't know why Dimsie has to Grow Up. Ridiculous idea. And apparently DFB realised this as the next two books in publication order do in fact go back to school. The next one in series order is Dimsie Goes Back, which I didn't think I could remember any of at all, and then when I read it I was right. The dog gets dialogue. I do not approve. Also the characters seem rather thin - Coral Danesbury especially, and without the original Anti-Soppists it is all a little flat. Dimsie Grows Up has Wrens, which I always rather like, and Primula on a motorbike, and a German spy masquerading as a governess, and one doctor pretending not to be a German spy and another doctor pretending (briefly) that he is a German spy. But also children, and Scottish dialect. In other rereads I might stop at Intervenes. But to round off my reread I read through Dimsie Takes Charge, the collection of all the Jane Willard short stories. I am not particularly exercised by the modernisation of school stories (I don't like it or anything, it merely happens to be one of the few things that don't incense me), but having read all the series in original, the "teachers" and "classes" were rather grating. The stories are excellent though. Having finished, I think one of the things that struck me most was that they are rather funnier than I remembered. Also, that the Chalet prefects would never have been so fallibly depicted.
Madame Bovary was DULL. I read it mostly so that I could say I had. And I have now, no-one can take that away from me, and any future "most people have read minus three books, count up how many you have read so as to have a spurious sense of superiority" lists (I love them, I totally have always read more than most people, I'm great) that fail to feature Madame Bovary in the future will incur my wrath. It was quite interesting to see how her desires went unfulfilled and how she tried to make her life better without any real power to do so. But I could have done with it being at least half the length.
I found Straw Without Bricks in an Oxfam shop in Ealing, and it is about her publisher asking her to go to Soviet Russia and be funny about it, which she has doubts about managing. It is a good book, but more interesting than hilarious, though parts are very funny (particularly her descriptions of her communism-loving American fellow tourist). She does try to be balanced - it was published in 1937 and she attempts to compare what she sees as harsh conditions for the workers to what it must have been like for them pre-revolution - though overall she sees a lot of faults. I wonder if Decca ever read it? (Also wikipedia claims that EM Delafield was parodied in a 2003/2004 Simpsons episode as "Esmé Delacroix" - does anyone know which episode and if it's true? Is she well known in the US?)
The Purposes of Love's blurb sounds like a Mills & Boon medical romance, but isn't. It is a sad, rather beautifully told story of a nurse, her brother, and her brother's friend who becomes her lover. I liked the descriptions of the strictness of the nursing rules (no more than six personal items in one's room, and she had to fight to count her row of books as one rather than eleven), very like One Pair of Feet, only without the humour. Rules about when one can go out, how one must dress, who one can associate with outside the hospital, eveything so very claustrophobic. Very good indeed.
The introduction to Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks is rather irritating, a dialogue between Giles and Victoria. But the contents are wonderful. I'd read very little of his writing before at all, but from listening to The News Quiz it seemed all very familiar and comfortable. Anyone have any recommendations for his other collections?
Shakespeare Wallah was mostly very frustrating, a memoir of a fascinating life with virtually every memory touched upon and then left to move onto the next. It was sort of the opposite of Dance to the Music of Time, which dwells on virtually every memory, so that I can't really explain what the books are about, other than "everything". I was less taken with the last novel, where Widmerpool's downfall is too depressing. But an amazing series that I'm glad to have read.
The Encircled Heart is an adult novel by Josephine Elder (who I know from writing really good school stories - thoughtful, interesting books rather than brilliantly rollicking). Elder was a doctor herself, and this book is about Marion, a young doctor in the 1930s (when the book is initially set - published in the 1950s, pre-NHS which made it very interesting), who has her own GP practice, then meets Paul and marries him. I found it very sad. When the book starts Marion is successful, loving her work, living with her close friend Philippa. Then she marries Paul, and though she tries to keep going he is very jealous of her work and doesn't understand her affection and dedication to her patients (he deliberately undermines her several times). He is an academic, and he wants her to be a presentable wife for him so that he can get promotion. Although Marion says that she is happy, I didn't get any sense of why that would be at all. Eventually, unable to reconcile her professional work with keeping her husband happy, she gives up her practice (a decision aided by a pregnancy - that she suspects was deliberate on his part) and they move to the country. War comes, and Paul joins the RAF and leaves, and Marion starts to move back into medical work, and gets closes to the GP in the country. They fall in love, rather, but Marion declines his offer of a new life to stay with Paul (even though he is a TOOL) and her children (who are fine). When Paul does come back he reveals that he fell in love with a WAAF, but chose not to pursue it for Marion's sake, and also that he wants to write plays, so Marion can go and be the breadwinner again. And it's a considered, mildly uplifting ending, but it's still that she can only have the job that she loves because he suddenly finds it convenient. Such a good book.
Anything Can Happen popped up unexpectedly on my abe wants list ("Abe has found the book you want"" Really? Or are you sending me yet another email about a similarly titled book at an unreasonable price?), and I snapped it up with alacrity. It then turned out to have the line drawings coloured in in felt tip. When I contacted the seller about this they were very nice and offered me a return or a discount (I chose discount, and even with the colouring in it was a very nice price for a wrappered copy), but said that they had thought that the illustrations were meant to be in colour. My knowledge of children's books is not exhaustive, I admit, but I have yet to find a publisher whose idea of decoration is to messily colour the Eiffel Tower in a muddy brown that stains through to the text on the page behind. ANYWAY. Lovely book! I read Nothing Happened After All years ago, and was surprised at how familiar I found meeting the characters again (even allowing for the influence of general girls' story tropes).
Now and Then is about a man in his forties, who has recently lost his father, and a series of events that cause him to look back to the only time he has ever been in love, with a boy (Walker) at his boarding school when he was fifteen. The boy was a prefect, and their relationship had to be hidden for the age discrepancy as much as anything else. It is intense, and sad, and you don't know why it went wrong. Then he finds out that Walker had been sleeping with other boys, and this really upsets adult Christopher. Eventually he meets up with Walker, on his third marriage, in Spain, and it is all a bit awful. Walker claims to have loved everyone at the time he was sleeping with them, and doesn't (thankfully) realise that he's utterly crushed Christopher.
The Trouble With Vanessa was an accidental late-night reread, when I caught sight of the spine while I was undressing for bed, read the first chapter to see if it was the one I was thinking of, and then read the rest of it before sleep. Vanessa and Kate/Trottie have started a drama course at the local college, and are full of their new freedoms and friendships and struggles. Vanessa is a feminist and very bossy, Kate is a bit wet. They meet Ned and Danny. It did strike me during this that there's a repetition from the Peter High series of there being "good" black characters who are easy-going and happy to joke about things and are friends with white people, and then in the background there are "scary" black people who are into black power and (potentially) hostile. It is written so that the white characters' discomfort with it is partly the problem, but it's only partly. But I do like Jean Ure an awful lot.
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Date: 2009-12-01 11:41 am (UTC)Alan Coren (a billion trillion times more talented than his children).
Oh, and I also admire Jean Ure very much. She went to my school. So did Josephine Elder. Have I ever mentioned that? :-) I can't understand why the Peter High series isn't more popular.
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Date: 2009-12-01 11:54 am (UTC)The Delafield was in Oxfam Books - so not quite as good a find! It wasn't extortionate, but not much of a bargain either. I'm glad to have it though, a really interesting and quietly funny book.
Jean Ure is a wonderful author. I am always surprised when I look at my shelves and find how versatile her books are. From After the Plague to Jam Today - both really excellent and so different. I'm in the process of lending the Peter High books to
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Date: 2009-12-01 05:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-01 11:41 am (UTC)Did I pass Now and Then on to you at a bookswap? I remember really liking it when I first read it, but on later re-reads it tripped my "one incident RUINS YOUR ENTIRE LIFE" annoyance sensors.
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Date: 2009-12-01 11:56 am (UTC)IT IS SO BORING.
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Date: 2009-12-01 02:17 pm (UTC)I wish GGBP would reprint the rest of the Elder books. I really want to read The Scholarship Girl and The Scholarship Girl at Cambridge.
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Date: 2009-12-01 04:26 pm (UTC)no subject
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