Phone box? No, it's a library!

I went to Hofheim today, and this time I remember to take a picture of this pretty thing here: the phone box that has been transformed into a mini-library! (I snatched up an older German children's book.)

In Support of Jackie Barbosa

If you're looking for some good books to buy this week, I ask you to consider the books of my colleague Jackie Barbosa. Jackie writes in various different genres, so there's a little something for almost everybody, especially if you like your stories a bit spicier. I've just bought the contemporary According to Luke myself because the excerpt sounded so very delicious. Check it out here.

And here's the blurb:

Luke Finley, the eldest of four brothers, is a committed serial monogamist. He’s all for one woman at a time, but not one woman forever. He knows a lifetime of fidelity just isn’t in his genes.

But when his latest girlfriend kicks him out–of his condo–the woman he’s always thought of as “one of the guys” turns out to be the one woman who can rock his world and make him believe in forever.

A friends-to-lovers story! Love those!

Or perhaps you'd like to have a look at her two free historical shorts, The Reiver and Nine Ladies Dancing.

The reason I'm asking you to support Jackie is a sad one: You might have already heard that earlier this month Jackie lost her 17-year-old son Julian in a car accident. Most of us will never be able to fully understand what Jackie and her family are going through right now, the terrible pain they must be feeling.

There is nothing we can do to ease this pain, but we as her colleagues wanted to show her our support, and so Beverly Kendall and Courtney Milan came up with the idea of authors highlighting Jackie’s books on their blogs or FB pages.

There is also a memorial fund set up in Julian's name. Details to donate can be found here. Any and all donation amounts are greatly appreciated.

Beautiful Books

Michael Ende's DIE UNENDLICHE GESCHICHTE (THE NEVERENDING STORY) was one of my favourite novels when I was a child. Not only is the story magical, but also the book itself is beautifully made (or at least the edition I own was beautifully made). As you can see from these pictures, the book was printed in two colours: red for the real world and green for Fantastica.. There were also beautiful illustrations at the beginning of each chapter.

An amusing side note: I always thought Atréju had green skin. When I looked up his description a few months ago, I realised that he isn't really supposed to be green: he is described as olive-skinned. (But who cares? For the past thirty years, my Atréju has had green skin... *g*)

My Year in Books

Happy New Year, everybody! I wish you all the best for 2014!

As this is not just the time to look forward, but also to look backward, I thought I'd do a review of 2013 in terms of books I've read.

2013 was the very first year I've managed to keep a reading journal (yay me!). While I haven't kept track of all the books I've read (for example, I don't note down the books I read for university), I think very few have actually fallen through the cracks.

Gloms

I went through three four five major gloms last year:

1. I re-read a lot of Kerry Greenwood's Phryne Fisher books in January (she had a new one out in September: Murder & Mendelssohn - loved it!)
2. In spring and summer I read and re-read most of Michelle Reid's books. I even bought the M&B Special Edition set (because the books looked so pretty). Reid's books are a bit of a hit or miss with me: either I really, really like them, or they fall into the meh category for me. One of my favourites of hers is The De Santis Marriage, which plays with the conventions of Italian tycoon stories. Here's a very nice example:
   

   Lifting up her hand, she caught hold of his fingers and pulled them away from her mouth. "That was really good," she commented. "Quite breathtakingly arrogant and rightfully proud of your mighty fine self, in fact, and it should really have put me squarely in my lowly place."

3. In May and June I read several of Anthony Berkeley's Roger Sheringham mysteries. I thought the first three or so quite delightful - very entertaining, with a clever twist at the end - but eventually I figured that the "clever twist" is one of the characteristic features of those mysteries. (When an author insists on depicting his hero as a bit of an arrogant, know-it-all moron, he shouldn't be suprised when said hero gets on readers' nerves after a while.)
4. In October I re-read all of Jacqueline Gilbert's books. *happy sigh* They're just so lovely! Old-fashioned, but really, really lovely. With grumpy heroes and all that! *another happy sigh*
5. I also did a mini-glom / re-read of Dorothy Dunnett's Dolly series once I realised they had become available as e-books. Her prose is - oh my goodness! - so, so wonderful! Take this sentence from Roman Nights:
   

   Every ruin is packed like a biscuit box.

   Or this:
   

   In Rome there is a pathological shortage of small coins. For change, the little shops tend to use candy.

   Or this:
   

   If a Roman junction during one of the four normal rush hours is suicide, a Roman junction while the traffic lights are off resembles nothing so muhc as a her of myopic rhinoceroses meeting eye to eye with a her of dim-witted elephants and attempting to copulate.

 DNFs

I had quite a number of those, alas. Several of the historicals I bought (luckily, I bought most of them cheaply or got them for free) were simply unbelievable: not only was the writing often stilted or the story mind-numbingly boring, no, several books also abounded with historical inaccuracies. As in: a debutante dances the waltz (!) at Almack's in 1806 (!!!). *head desk*

I'm afraid even one of Michelle Reid's books fell into the DNF category: I thought the The Italian's Revenge was truly, truly awful ("thoroughly disgusted" I wrote in my nifty little reading journal). But then this was one of her older books (originally published in 2000), so this might have had something to do with it. Many of her later books have an underlying humour that I simply love!


Discoveries

At some point in September, I thought it would be nice to have a nice reading copy of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South aka one of my favourite classics EVER! So I perused various different editions on Amazon and eventually stumbled across the Penguin Clothbound Classics edition of Cranford. Oh my. I mean.... OH MY! Here's what happened then (Part 2 of my September Book Haul):

Favourite Classic

And speaking of classics, my favourite work of 2013 in that category was Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (translation by Simon Armitage). I read it for the class on medieval literature I'm teaching this semesterand was thoroughly enchanted. There's also an audiobook available of that translation, read by the translator himself - which didn't work for me at all, alas. In fact, I had to switch off after a mere five minutes because I felt the desperate urge to throttle the narrator. Ugh. (Why couldn't they have let RICHARD Armitage read the story? He would have done such a great job, I'm sure, and they would have sold oodles of copies. Hmph.)


Favourite Romance

Apart from my re-reads, my favourite romance of 2013 was Courtney Milan's A Kiss for Midwinter, her Christmas novella from 2012. The premise is rather unusual, the hero is rather unusual, and the heroine is all prickly. Nice. :-)


Favourite Books

But two most favourite books this year were Robin Sloan's Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore (a book about books and the love for books and really strange bookshops) and Joyce Dennys's Henrietta's War (which I called "Cranford for the 1940s!" in my reading diary). I have to admit I was drawn to both books because of their beautiful covers (well, in Mr Penumbra's case, I had to order the novel from Canada because all other editions sport rather ghastly covers) - I'm shallow like that. But it's such a joy when something that looks so pretty turns out to be wonderfully written as well. I highly recommend both books.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So, that was my year in reading. Which books and authors did you discover in 2013? Which were your favourites? Which were the books that you re-read? Let me know!

Weekend Reads

Have you read any good books over the weekend? Here's what I've read:

Temptation in Green

It started harmless enough: I was looking for a nice edition of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South. I love, love, LOVE North and South, but my Penguin Classics edition, which I use for teaching, looks rather bedraggled, and the Norton edition that I also have isn't really that pretty. Soooo... Off to Amazon I went to check out my reading options.

And there it happened.

I stumbled over the Penguin Clothbound Classics edition of Cranford (see above).

OOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

You know how susceptible I am to pretty covers. And if that is not a pretty cover, I don't know what is!

This was the first time I had ever heard about the Clothbound Classics. They are hardcovers. And they are pretty. (Unfortunately, there is no North and South Clothbound Classics edition. That's too bad of you, Penguin!)

So, there I was, sitting in front of my computer, salviating at the sight of this beautiful book. Have I mentioned that I was somewhat stressed, too, what with contacting reviewers about Springtime Pleasures, inserting the copy edits, and finishing off all the grading from the past semester? Well, you know what happens when I'm a bit stressed: I buy books.

And so I succumbed to the green temptation. *happy sigh*

Dorothy Dunnett, Roman Nights

One of the things I'm trying to do this year is to keep a reading journal. I started one last year in March, when I stumbled across the lovely reading journal produced by Leuchtturm, but abandoned it in April (understandable in a way, since in April things turned rather bleak). I took it up again in late December and so far, have managed to stick with it. *knocking on wood*

I like the layout of the Leuchtturm book: apart from lines where you can note down the title, author, date of publication, genre, and date when you read the book, there's plenty of space for notes and quotations, and they even have included some very convenient boxes for your rating. AND there's an alphabetical register at the end of the book. As I said, very convenient all around.

I don't just note down new books I've read, but also re-reads. In an effort to cut back on my book-spending, I've done a lot of re-reading this year (but never fear, I made up for that by falling in love with the books produced by the Folio Society *sigh*). A couple of days ago I found out that Dorothy Dunnett's Johnson Johnson mysteries (or the Dolly mysteries) have been released as e-books. (Wheeee!) As a rabid Dunnett fangirl I simply had to check them out, never mind that I already have them as print books. (Some of those are pretty grubby, though, and in one case, I had to cut the corners of some pages because of the truly disgusting stuff sticking to them.) (Really, what do some people do to their books?!?!?!)

I decided to get the Kindle version of Roman Nights (or Dolly and the Starry Bird). Here's the blurb:

Ruth Russell, an astronomer working at the Maurice Frazer Observatory, is enjoying herself in Rome – that is, until her lover, Charles Digham, a fashion photographer and writer of obituary verses, has his camera stolen. The thief ends up as a headless corpse in the zoo park tolleta. Johnson Johnson, enigmatic portrait painter, spy and sleuth, is in Rome to paint a portrait of the Pope and is therefore on hand to investigate in one of Dunnett's usual thrilling and convoluted plots that grips the reader from cover to cover. There is something far more deadly at stake than just the secrets of a couture house …

As all of the Dolly books, Roman Nights has a female first person narrator (in this case, Ruth), and the opening sentence concerns the bifocals Johnson Johnson is wearing:

I have nothing, even yet, against bifocal glasses. I know some very nice poufs and a couple of stockbrockers and a man who keeps a horn moustache comb in his jumpsuit. I'm a girl who doesn't shock easily.

Or so I thought until I first met Johnson Johnson, which was outside the Rome zoo in November. 

He was there because he was waiting for me, although I didn't know it. I was there on a day's leave from the Frazer Observatory. If I'd stayed on leave, none of it might have happened.

And so it starts. All of the Dolly books are fairly eccentric (think balloons filled with lethal gas), with impossible twists and turns. The "hero" of the series, Johnson Johnson, portrait painter and (former) secret agent, often stays in the background and we only get to see him through the eyes of others (which is typical for Dunnett's heroes). As with all of Dunnett's novels, one of the great delights of the book is how language is used. Dunnett has a way with words that is awe-inspiring: both witty and intellectually challenging. As  reader you really have to stay on your toes. But you're rewarded with gems like this one:

Every ruin [in Rome] is packed like a biscuit box.

Or,

The railings of the Palazzo Barberini are upheld by marble weightlifters with beards and grimaces of incipient hernia.

Or,

In Rome, there is a pathological shortage of small coins. For change, the little shops tend to use candy.

Aren't these delicious?

I gave the book four stars. It is somewhat lengthy, but it is full of wonderfully eccentric scenes and it has a very nice twist at the end. 

Urban Sketching, or, The Cool Things You Can Discover with Flickr

A few months ago I created a Flickr account (oh well, it was more, like, over a year ago, but who's counting, I ask you?) as part of my desperate attempts to kickstart my creativity. I thought that sharing pictures of my crafting projects might do the trick. (It didn't, not really; but hey, I did teach myself using a sewing machine. That's something, right? And frankly, I'm tickled pink that I can sew. *g*) (I'm also tickled pink that my humble creations seem to have inspired others to tackle crafting - yay! Surely that's the best compliment ever!)

Though I don't upload pictures on a regular basis, I love Flickr. You can discover so many interesting things there. Like these

1. Twin Spruce Dress: Simplicity 3965, 2. Picnic Dress: Simplicity 3965, 3. Prairie Girl Dress, 4. Finn the Human, 5. Peony Prince de Galles, 6. Granny Stripe Blanket - edging detail, 7. P1100441, 8. Untitled, 9. SSS1, '11, my original Peony, 10. Sorbetto Dress, 11. Crochet Chinese New Year Dragon, 12. Heart Kitty, 13. Quilt for baby - detail, 14. Felt hamster, 15. at petit morpho, 16. berries and butterfly stumpwork, 17. Loulouthi Quilt - handquilting, 18. House tape measure by Poppyprint, 19. my book 1, 20. Jasmine muslin, 21. Jasmine Colette, 22. Monkey Man, 23. New Pattern!, 24. Purple Embroidered Cuff with Glass Button and Gold Beadwork, 25. Chevron Embroidered Necklace, Beaded Fringe, Turquoise on Moss Green Linen, Gypsy Boho, 26. macaron, 27. Crumm, 28. Bowl Bear Amigurumi is looking at U

(Did you see the itty-bitty crocheted dragon? Isn't it cuuute???)

On Saturday I browsed the pictures of the group Moleskinerie and happened to stumble across some absolutely stunning sketches of urban landscapes, like this one:

Or this:

Or this:

Aren't these awesome?

I did some research (I'm good at that *g*) and discovered that there is not only a whole blog dedicated to urban sketching, but that there's also a book called The Art of Urban Sketching


Now, you know that I've got this thing with books, right? And because I'd fallen in love with the works featured on the blog, I naturally ordered the aforementioned book. It arrived today, and let me tell you, it is absolutely and utterly stunning. After a short exploration of what urban sketching is, the book takes you on a journey around the world via the sketches of the various contributors.

It's one of those books that you can open again and again, and every time you will discover something new. *happy sigh*

Lovely, lovely books

Today I bought/received these two books:


The first one has been written by the wonderful Laura Vivanco, dragonslayer assisstant extraordinaire (i.e., she was one of the poor people who volunteered to proofread my PhD thesis). Laura has been reading and studying Harlequin Mills & Boon romances for a long time, and judging from her postings at Teach Me Tonight and our e-mail discussions, I am certain that her book will knock my socks off. I'm thrilled to pieces for her, and even though I wanted to wait until the POD edition would become available, I've just bought the Kindle edition because I simply couldn't wait.

The second book arrived in today's mail:


As you know, I've become a bit obsessed with sewing lately. So far, all I've ever sewn are bags and softies and some really simple quilts, but I do love the idea of sewing my own clothes. So for the past two or three years, I've been steadily building my library of sewing handbooks. All I need to do now is to brave the actual process of sewing clothes.

Which, to be honest, scares me witless.

Sewing softies is fairly easy and cotton is a very forgiving fabric, too. If you've made a mistake in the construction of the softy, you can always improvise and the result will still look good (well, except for that one doll pattern) (and the sock kitty with the strange head) (hey, but the embroidery on said kitty's belly is rather good!). But with clothes? That you want to wear???? Uh-oh.

So I'm still scared, still not sewing clothes, and still finding excuses. Ah well ... one day ... :)

Howards End is on the Landing

This morning I stumbled across Susan Hill’s HOWARDS END IS ON THE LANDING – though "stumbled" is perhaps the wrong word as this book sits comfortably on my coffee table, on top of THE FOLKLORE OF DISCWORLD and THE LORE OF THE LAND. Hill’s book is about books, about the books she owns, the writers she has met, the books she has never read. Some passages are somewhat snobbish, and she could be accused of rather heavy name dropping, but still, I like her book because it always makes me think about my own library. (Besides, you can’t really blame her for babysitting Arnold Wesker’s children back in the 1960s.)

And thinking about my library this morning, made me realise that, for somebody teaching English Lit at university, I have rather plebeian tastes. Sure, I love Ludwig Tieck’s "Blond Eckbert", and I adore E.T.A. Hoffmann’s KATER MURR as well as Gaskell’s NORTH AND SOUTH and CRANFORD. I have read and enjoyed Austen’s novels (yet I don’t like all of them). I prefer Thackeray to Dickens, and thought THE NEWCOMES a lot of fun. I’m very fond of Anna Seghers’s DAS SIEBTE KREUZ, which I once knew by heart (years I helped to prepare the centennary edition and had to read the whole novel about six times in as many weeks...). I have always enjoyed medieval literature, and thanks to Dorothy Dunnett I have fallen head over heels for late medieval and Renaissance poetry as well. Despite his suicidal maidens, I’m also very fond of Tennyson, and love a score of other poems and ballads.

Modern literary fiction, however, leaves me stone-cold. As a student I gave up on a seminar on Virginia Woolf because I considered her books tedious in the extreme. Robert Musil – dear heaven, when I struggled to get through DER MANN OHNE EIGENSCHAFTEN, most of the time I didn’t have the faintest, foggiest clue what the author was talking about (if any novel ever deserved the title of "loose, baggy monster" it’s this one!). Ondaatje, THE ENGLISH PATIENT – uhmm .... what’s the point??? And A.S. Byatt’s POSSESSION bored me to tears because I thought it was so utterly predictable. I’m currently reading Alan Bennett’s THE UNCOMMON READER, which is funny, sure, but IMO, a short story would have done the trick just as well, or rather, even better. I’ve reached about the middle of the book, and I’m already getting impatient and wonder what the point of this story is. Where does it go? Indeed, I find that this is my biggest problem with a lot of mainstream as well as literary fiction: a story that kind of ambles along without a clear goal (e.g., solve the crime, get the two lovers together, kill off the hero, etc.) makes me itchy. What’s worse, a lot of it is pretentious and utterly depressing. Why the heck would I want to read a book that’s utterly depressing? If I want to get depressed, I switch on the news, thank you very much.

I wonder why literature written by dead people works so much better for me. Probably because said dead people were dependent on writing stuff that actually sold (don’t get me started on publishers‘ policies in regard to advances for literary fiction vs advances for popular fiction! sufficient to say that it makes my blood boil). Hence, they had to be entertaining. Moreover, I can more easily stomach the world view of dead white men, whereas I really don’t see the point of involving myself with the world view of living white men.

See? I admit it: when it comes to reading I’m a shameless sexist, with only a few exceptions, among them Terry Pratchett and Guy Gavriel Kay

This might not be so very obvious in my study, where the classics live and all my books on literature and British history. The other, the older, half of the inhabitants of the study are, perhaps, much more interesting: there, books on on doll houses and on building castles huddle next to books about wolves, dogs, and snails. There are books about nineteenth-century fashion, cooking and historical erotica, about Roman plumbing, mythological creatures, the history of gardening and about European china. This is the collection that goes back the furthest into my own history, the collection that was started twenty years ago or even more. No wonder then that I always get a warm, fuzzy feeling when I stand in front of these shelves and contemplate their contents.

Though the study contains the majority of classics I own, traces of classics can also be found in the library: Louisa May Alcott lives there as well as Frances Hodgson Burnett. WINNIE-THE-POOH hangs out somewhere, too. But for the most part, the library is filled with rows upon rows of romance novels (which can hardly come as a surprise to anybody who reads this blog!), some fantasy novels and mysteries. There’s Christie, of course, but also Sayers (a more recent addition) and Kerry Greenwood’s wonderful Phryne Fisher series. Next to Phryne, you’ll find some old green Penguins squeezed into the shelf. I got them secondhand a few months ago and thought about starting a collection of green Penguins, but quickly abandoned the idea once I saw how grubby the copies were that I got (and they had been deemed to be in good condition on abebooks!).

On another shelf rests a string of Mrs. Pollifax novels (written by Dorothy Gilman). I got the first of them ages ago on a holiday in Spain back in the 1980s. It was so hot that summer that all you could do was sleep or read, and naturally I chose to do the latter with the result that after a few days I had run out of reading material. So I snatched one of the novels Dad had brought with him. Now, THE PERFUME is a book that’s not exactly meant to be read by young teens, and so, not surprisingly, my parents took it away once they figured out what I was reading (that was the one and only time they forbade me to read a particular book). The very next day the family drove to Benidorm in search of suitable books for me. There wasn’t much on offer, really, that might interest an adolescent girl. I chose an anthology with short stories about cats, I believe (or was it an anthology about hobgoblins and ghosts?) (anyways, it obviously didn’t make much of an impression), and an omnibus edition of the first three Mrs. Pollifax novels. The subtitle read "3 heitere Romane in einem Band“, i.e. “three amusing novels in one volume“. “Amusing” sounded nice enough, if slightly old-fashioned, and the book certainly didn’t disappoint. A few years later I was thrilled to discover that Gilman had written even more Mrs. Pollifax novels, though none of them, imo, is quite as charming as THE UNEXPECTED MRS. POLLIFAX

Several of my favourite novels are grouped together in a cabinet in my hallway, right next to the dining table. It contains some childhood favourites – Rosemary Sutcliff, Auguste Lechner, and Henry Winterfeld, who made me fall in love with historical fiction. There are the German editions of Gillian Bradshaw’s Arthur trilogy and her BEACON AT ALEXANDRIA, Diana Paxon’s WHITE RAVEN, Penelope Williamson’s KEEPER OF THE DREAM, and Margaret Hodges’s AVENGER. On a lower shelf you can find Anne Rice’s vampires, Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series, and German translations of Susanna Kearsley’s novels (for some strange reason, I’ve never read her in English). But the best-loved shelf of this cabinet is that which houses Dorothy Dunnett’s novels. I simply love the sight of the bright, colourful spines of the Penguin edition of the Lymond Chronicles (another sight that is bound to give me warm fuzzies). On top of her Johnson Johnson mysteries rest Tom S. Hall’s TRAMPING HOLIDAYS IN SCOTLAND, which I bought because it once belonged to Dunnett’s husband, Alastair Dunnett, and Mary Stewart’s THE WIND OFF THE SMALL ISLES, which I bought because it came with a letter from Dorothy Dunnett: in 1974 she had sent the book to a friend after a dinner invitation. “I don’t know anyone else,” she wrote, “with such a gift for sending their friends away at the end of a dinner not only full of lovely food and drink, but pleased with themselves in the bargain! Bless you both.” Judging from the letter, Dorothy Dunnett, bless her heart, was just as charming in real life as her novels lead one to believe. :)

Mr Punch has arrived!!!

Today the lovely UPS man brought me five packages filled to the brim with books, and thus I spent the afternoon dusting and squeezing 70 kg of Mr Punch into my bookshelves. For such a short man, he sure is heavy!

(The image is "Mr Punch portrayed by different hands" from Spielmann's History of Punch)

Anne Mather, The Reluctant Governess

Several years ago I bought this in the British Bookshop in Mainz. Thanks to the decade-long presence of the US army nearby, the shop had accumulated a nice collection of older Harlequin titles (most of them in desperate need of a dusting - or, in more severe cases, of a wiping down with a damp cloth), so consequently I've accumulated a nice collection of older Harlequin novels as well. Most of which I haven't yet read, I have to admit.

But this morning, I was in the mood for an older romance and picked Anne Mather's The Reluctant Governess, first published in 1971. As you can probably tell from the cover it is set in what today would be deemed an "exotic" location for a category title: in Austria. In winter (hence the lovely snow-covered views of steep rocks and the castle). In a remote castle. And I have to say, the castle on the cover even looks like an Austrian castle!

Our dashing hero is Horst von Reichenstein, an embittered and impoverished baron with a ten-year-old daughter, Sophie, the bane of all governesses. Victoria Monroe, the heroine, comes to the castle as -- guess what! -- Sophie's governess and is somewhat appalled by the lack of central heating and electricity in the majority of rooms (most certainly in her room). There are also big, huge wolfhounds around (one of which is called Fritz). And a pair of elderly servants, Maria and Gustav, who seem to inhabit the kitchen. So far, Victoria hasn't had much success in making Sophie behave and instead is currently going for a walk around the castle, with Fritz on her heels.

More to follow!

Acres and acres and it's all MINE!

One of the bad things about going to conferences is that you might run into people who are working on similar things as you do and who are very, very enthusiastic about what they do. If bad comes to worse, they might actually pass this enthusiams on to you. Or, if you are already enthusiastic yourself, might rouse your enthusiasm to fever-pitch. If you hate it when something like this happens, you should better steer clear of the conferences of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. For these people are bad: they not only fill your head with ideas (oh dear!), but they also inspire you to do research (oh dear, oh dear!).

In case you wonder where this all leads, well ... I just want you to be in possession of all facts in order to show you that I'm blameless. Completely blameless. Because, as you all know, I have generally an abhorrence of books and never buy the things (after all, they fill up your shelves in this rather disorderly fashion and then they start to mulitply like rabbits and that creates an entirely new set of problems! ghastly things, books!!!). That leaves only one possible solution: during my last stay in the US I've been bewitched by these Victorian periodicals people. In other words: IT'S NOT MY FAULT!

For today I've finally succumbed and bought these: 26 volumes of Punch. *happy sigh* (It's a good thing my shelves are so empty - because I never buy books, you know - because where would I store those beauties if it were otherwise?)

Currently digging: Jacqueline Gilbert

... and it's all Laura's fault! :)




Between 1976 and 1994 Jacqueline Gilbert wrote twelve novels for Mills and Boon. I started with Poppy Girl (isn't that a sweet title? note that there's no mention of Spanish billionaires, French millionaires, or Greek tycoons!), fell in love with Gilbert's writing (how can I not love somebody who's a fan of Dorothy Dunnett?) and thus ran to the computer to order more or her novels. So far, I've read The Chequered Silence and Capricorn Man (still no tycoon! nor any secret wives or babies!!) and really enjoyed these, too.

More to come!

Charming, Indeed!

Didn't I tell you that the world is full of meanies? Here's another one: Susan Elizabeth Phillips. Not only does she have a name which I never know how to spell (Is it two Ls? Or two Ps? Or both???), no, she also writes books that you can't put down, like this one:

How mean is that?

Last night, after a long period of not reading or buying any e-books, I switched on my Cybook once again and browsed the titles I have stored on the reader. That's when I stumbled across NATURAL BORN CHARMER, which I hadn't read before. I just wanted to have a little peek inside the book. Read the first chapter perhaps, as a kind of Betthupferl (you know, that itty-bitty piece of chocolate that you eat just before you go to bed) (only this was a Betthupferl of the non-chocolate variety, of course). So, just an itty-bitty peek. No more.

Then I read this first sentence:

It wasn't every day a guy saw a headless beaver marching down the side of a road, not even in Dean Robillard's larger than life world.

Now that's mean, isn't it? Uber-mean, in fact. How can you start a novel like this? It's so not fair to your poor reader!

But that's not the worst! This is what follows:

"Son of a"" Dean slammed on the brakes of his brand new Aston Martin Vanquish and pulled over in front of her.

The beaver marched right past, her big flat tail bouncing in the gravel, and her small, sharp nose stuck up in the air. Way up. The beaver looked highly pissed.

She was definitely a girl beaver because her beaver head was missing, revealing sweaty, dark hair pulled into a scraggly ponytail.

See what I mean? Things like this should be forbidden. Not only is it highly unfair to other authors, who might turn green with envy while reading this novel, but it's also highly unfair to the poor reader who gets sucked into the story before she even knows what has hit her.

As you have probably guessed by now, I found NATURAL BORN CHARMER highly enjoyable. What's more, it reminded me why I love romance so very much. It reminded me that a good romance displays an optimistic attitude towards life and leaves the reader with a big, happy smile on her face. :)

Mean Authors

Some authors are incredibly mean. Really, really, really mean.

Take Lisa Kleypas. Boy, is she mean! Not only did she distract me from reading those medieval romances (btw, did you know that when you are a royal baby in disguise, you glow in the dark? Really! That's what I learnt from reading medieval romances this week! *g*) by producing books like this:

No, she then also made me buy those:

And if that weren't enough, I was also forced to buy all the Lisa Kleypas books which I have already read in digital format as dead-tree books. Just because they're so good. If that isn't mean, I don't know what is. :)

Goodies

You can probably tell that I'm going to teach a class on drama and (most likely) a class on the 18th- and 19th-century novel this summer. :)

Preparing for Winter

Each month the arrival of the credit card statement tells me that I'm spending too much money on books. It could be worse, I guess. Like other women, I could have a serious passion for shoes. Or bags and purses. Or jewellery. Books are relatively cheap by comparison (welllllll, if you love buying rare 19th-century editions of the Brothers Grimm's fairy tales, you might find that books can be horrendously expensive, too!).

So the piles on the top of my piano continue to grow and make me smile with satisfaction whenever I enter my little library-cum-music-room. (The Kitteh is less satisfied, I'm afraid, since the piles tend to be in her way when she climbs about on the piano and the lower bookshelves.) The sight of books has always filled me with warm, fuzzy feelings and thoughts of happily snuggled up on the couch with a cup of tea and a nice book (and a Kitteh).

Of course, at the moment I don't really have time to actually read all these new books thanks to the Dratted Exam that will hit me over the head in three or four weeks' time (*gasp* so soon??? Waaaargh!). So for now I regard those lovely piles as my winter hoard to be enjoyed over Christmas and in the new year. :)

Which reminds me of this lovely story:



Not that I would ever need an excuse to drool over the lovely Mr. Armitage. :)

Good Bed-Fellows

In one of the last chapters of Susan Hill's Howards End Is on the Landing, titled "Bad Bed-Fellows", you find the following passage:

A child's nursery rhyme books does not have the language in which to speak to a Latin dictionary. Chaucer does not know the words in which Henry James communicates but here they are forced to live together, forever speechless. [...] Does Elizabeth Bowen find Swift congenial company? Ah yes, surely, they were both Irish, they have a lot in common. I should like to sit here on the landing in the last glimmer of daylight and listen to them whispering together. [...] Can books learn from one another? Can they change as a result of sitting on a shelf beside another for years?

What an intriguing thought, isn't it? To test the idea I'd want to sandwich Anne Bronte's (please imagine those two dots over the e; I've no idea how to insert an e with dots here in Blogger) The Tenant of Wildfell Hall between Elizabeth Taylor's At Mrs. Lippincote's and Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Making of a Marchioness. One hopes that this would improve Bronte's angelic heroine (hey-ho, I run away from my husband because he's a beastly sadist, but when he's about to kick the bucket I'm going to return to mop his brow and make sure he doesn't kick the bucket after all *head desk*) and that, upon opening The Tenant the next time, one would find that Helen has bashed in her beastly husband's skull with the chamber pot.

Not that Burnett's heroine isn't any less angelic - in fact, she's a much better person than Helen: always smiling, always being grateful to other people, always happy to run errands for others. No, in The Making of a Marchioness you have to turn to the secondary female characters to get women with some more bite (and, eventually, one dead beastly husband).

Reading both At Mrs. Lippincote's and The Making of a Marchioness has finally convinced me (if I needed any convincing at all!) to teach a course on women writers of the early 20th century. Next winter, perhaps?

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The picture was taken inside Barter Books in Alnwick, a gigantic UBS inside an old railway station. I could have spent hours inside there (instead I went to see Alnwick Castle and then travelled on to Berwick-upon-Tweed - that latter point definitely not one of my finer ideas)

Karen White, The Lost Hours

I spent the better part of this afternoon and evening (except for the ... eh ... 10 minutes it took me to re-read the first chapter of Nicoll's British Drama and for one pee pee break) reading Karen White's The Lost Hours. This is the first time in years that I literally couldn't put a book aside, and read it in one go instead. It's a great book, a wonderful book. As expected, it put me through an emotional wringer, but in a good way. I enjoyed every minute of it, even when I was crying my eyes out towards the end of the novel.

More tomorrow.