Books we read in March

We’ve read :

‘A Kentish Lad’
by Frank Muir, published by Penguin 1997

You’ll need to be of a certain age to remember Frank Muir. I first remember him in a BBC radio comedy programme called ‘Take It From Here’, which ran from 1948 to 1960. I listened to the series with my parents, sitting round the solid fuel stove in the ‘living room’ and too young to understand the humour. I soon grew into it and, later, watched out for his name in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

The autobiography is a pleasant and easy read – not dramatic – but a chance for him to tell many funny stories and recount his experience of many fascinating people.

If you watched British TV comedy in the ‘60s, ‘70s or ‘80s, Frank Muir probably had a hand in your favourite programmes and this book will bring back fond memories.

Pat read it. Alan dipped in and out.

‘Monster Island’
by David Wellington, published by Snowbooks Ltd. 2007

This book was passed on to me by Tariq, a zombie mad grandson in a book swap for some Sci-fi.  To be honest, it is what we used to call pulp fiction, but, hey!, I gobbled up pulp fiction Sci-fi when I was his age and look how nice I turned out.

It is simply written, with the classic premise of zombies taking over the world and is set in New York. It rolls along very nicely, telling the story from two view points, and has some unlikely heroes in a group of girl warriors crossing the world from Somalia. Just over half way my ‘willing suspense of disbelief’ wasn’t quite strong enough to carry me through, but I was sufficiently interested to see how it ended that I did finish it.

There are 2 sequels - ‘Monster Nation’, which is really a prequel, and ‘Monster Planet’.  I will read them at some point as a bit of ‘light’ relief – but not at bedtime.

Pat read it.

‘Writing in an Age of Silence’
by Sarah Paretsky, published by Verso, 2007

Sarah Paretsky is the creator of the doyen of feisty, independent female private eyes – V.I. Warshawski.  I knew nothing about Paretsky till I read this series of essays, though it is obvious from her novels that she is familiar with the poorer districts of Chicago and that she writes a real page turner – every time.

I learned that she grew up in Kansas in a town obsessed with the threat of Communism (this was the McCarthy era) and more than a little racist.  She went to Chicago to do community work and witnessed and was involved in the Civil Rights Movement when Martin Luther King was in the city.

This is by no means a fun book, in fact is it bleak in places as she shares her journey in politics and social justice but she writes with such dazzling clarity that it is not easy to put down. In fact, I read it in one sitting.

V.I. Warshawski, Kinsey Millhone, Kay Scarpetta and many other feisty heroines have changed the face of crime fiction forever. It’s nice to know that Paretski walked the walk as well as talking the talk.

Reading this book sent me off to her website and I discovered that I’ve missed some of her releases.  I will be rectifying that soon.

Pat read it.

‘Demelza’ and ‘Jeremy Poldark’
by Winston Graham, published by Pan

 

Ross Poldark’s woes continue. Demelza’s start. Alan read both of these.

Alan also read Churchill’s Wizards which was mentioned in February.

Pat re-read The Honor of the Queen, the second in the Honorverse by David Weber. The series was outlined in February.

And finally NOT read was ‘Top 40 Bad books’ by the American Book Review .

I haven’t read their reviews because they want to charge me $35 for the privilege (only $24 if you are not ‘foreign’).

Quite frankly, from what the Guardian has to say about the reviews, they sound pompous and egotistical. I don’t necessarily revere ‘Great Literature’ just because I’m supposed to, but really – to say that ‘Women in Love reads "like someone put a gun to Nietzsche's head and made him write a Harlequin romance" is a bit much. Could the reviewer do better him or her self?

I’m inclined to agree with Alison Flood of The Guardian that “This is all a bit say-something-controversial-for-the-hell-of-it for my taste.”

The Great Book Sorting

A warning: Don’t come and stay with us if you have a book phobia. Our spare bedroom has three walls of bookshelves – floor to ceiling. There isn’t a room in the  house, except the bathroom, that doesn’t have books in it.  We’re trying to reduce the number (and sheer volume) of books. A rough count shows well over 3,000 and I’ll swear they are breeding.

We can dispose of technical books which are out of date, of course – and don’t they go out of date quickly! Programming in Basic, anyone?. I don’t want my management or psychology text books anymore, so off to Oxfam they go! But we both have a love of history and travel and write about those subjects so we’re a bit leery of discarding any on those subjects. I love my cookery books and do use them so they must stay.

Then there are the books that have meaning in their own right. Do we discard Alan’s Biggles books? My Chalet School books? What about Swallows and Amazons? No way! Those books are our comfort blankets; they hold our memories; they hold our past – just seeing them on the shelves is enough to send us back into that golden glow of never-was that seems to hang onto everything we remember from childhood.

Over the years, we have read the biographies of the authors of these old books and it gave a different perspective to them – they are the more precious for knowing the background. We got into a conversation about Romany with Joy a few weeks ago and have just lent her some of them, which she is enjoying, having heard him on BBC radio in the ‘30s and ‘40s. If we hadn’t kept them through all the house moves, we, and she, would have been the poorer.

At the moment, we’re at the stage where things are worse than when we started, piles of books, boxes and crates everywhere. Books are moving down two flights of stairs from the spare bedroom to my study as I sort and winnow. And now the sun is shining and our good intentions are flying out the window – as books fly in because we’re still buying books.

Books we read in February

Some people say (read this in Jeremy Clarkson’s voice and insert a pause and raised eyebrow here) that we have too many books. We don’t agree, though will admit Alan has had to mend a bookcase this week due to overloading it.

We've read :

'Churchill’s Wizards'  by Nicholas Rankin, published by Faber and Faber, paperback 2009  
As the blurb says ‘This is the story of how the British really won two world wars – by conning the Kaiser, hoaxing Hitler and using brains to outwit brawn’.  It covers the development of camouflage and the technique of sticking a dummy’s head over a parapet to lure hidden snipers in world war 1, right through to the deceptions (including inventing an entire army to mislead the Germans) which preceded D day towards the end of World War 2.  It is full of anecdotes and character sketches and uncovers stories which remained secret for decades.
Above all, it turned out to be a really good read. If you read these stories in a novel, you would say it was not true to life.
Pat read it. Alan started it.



'Ross Poldark' by Winston Graham, published by Pan 2008 (originally published 1945)
Ross Poldark returns to Cornwall from America in 1783 to find his father dead, his estate impoverished, and his girl engaged to his cousin.  This is the first novel in a series of twelve and traces the first four years of a saga which continues to 1820.  The depiction of Georgian Cornwall gives a good view of what real life must have been like and the characters are well drawn.  Winston Graham has an understated writing style which makes the story even better.It was televised in the ‘70s and was very popular in several countries, including the US.It was good enough that we have bought the next two books already, having lost/lent the series somewhere along the line.
Alan re-read it.


'On Basilisk Station' by David Weber, published by Baen Books 1993
This is the first in a series, known to aficionados as ‘The Honorverse’ after the heroine Honor Harrington. If you like your Science Fiction as a rip-roaring space opera, galactic in scale and with a strong heroine, this is for you.  David Weber makes no bones about the fact that the series, is to some extent, a tribute to C.S. Forester – Horatio Hornblower in Space.
As this is the first of the series, Weber has to spend some time explaining how the FTL technology works in his universe but he does remain consistent throughout the series and it is easy to follow, if you suspend disbelief – and you wouldn’t like Science Fiction if you couldn’t do that.
I have to warn you that, as the series progresses, Weber has no hesitation in killing off some of his more likeable characters and not all the books end on a happy note.  The books are best read in sequence and I strongly recommend that you start with this one.
If I were to say anything negative about the series, it is that there are too many explanations particularly of spaceship combat. It makes for dull moments with lots of numbers. On the other hand, his accounts do give a sense of the sheer distances in space.
The best place to find all about the series is at Baen Books, which publisher I highly recommend for contemporary Science Fiction.  You will find the first two books in the series for download in a range of e-book formats in the Free Library.  Yes I said FREE.
Pat re-read it.


'The Eagle of the Ninth' by Rosemary Sutcliff,  published by Oxford University Press, paperback 2004 (first published 1954)
Somewhere around A.D. 117, the Ninth Legion (Legio IX Hispana) marched north into Scotland and (so legend has it) were never seen again. Nearly 1800 years later, a wingless Roman Eagle was dug up at Silchester.
Rosemary Sutcliff wove the two stories together by telling the tale from the perspective of a young Roman Centurion Marcus Aquila and his attempt, 20 years on, to discover the fate of his father’s legion in Scotland and recover its standard.
Although it was written over 50 years ago, it stands the test of time and the geography can be traced through the Roman place names.  As for the history – well, 50 years on, we know that there are records of the Ninth Legion later than 117 and it is thought it met its destruction in the East of the Roman Empire.  The museum housing the Silchester eagle states that it "is not a legionary eagle but has been immortalized as such by Rosemary Sutcliff.”   She also assumed that the legion's title of "Hispana" meant that it was raised in modern Spain, but the title was probably awarded for victories there.
You will hear more of this tale in 2010 as no less than two films are being released based on the story of the Roman Army which crossed the border in a campaign against the Picts and the legend that they never returned.
One is ‘The Centurian’, which had the working title of ‘The Ninth Legion’.  This is directed by Neil Marshall who says it isa straight-up action thriller which just happens to be set in the 2nd century AD.
The second film is directed by Kevin McDonald and is called ‘The Eagle of the Ninth’.  It is supposedly ‘based on’ Rosemary Sutcliff’s book – we shall see.
Both films did some filming in Scotland so the Ninth Legion returned twice in a year after a gap of nearly 1900 years.  Not bad for a book that was intended for children.
We both re-read it.

We've also enjoyed this reproduction of an 1844 Panorama of London.  

Crete - In Praise of Books

Every so often, I curl up and ride with Irma Kurtz on Greyhound buses across America, travel the very edge of Great Britain with Paul Theroux (or laugh at our British foibles with Bill Bryson).  I sometimes sail the Aegean Sea with Mimi Lafollette Summerville.  I may never do any of those exact journeys in the flesh but, in my imagination, I have been there -  thanks to the authors.

Sometimes, it works the other way.  I bought a new copy of ‘Aegean Summer’ in a bookshop in Heraklion and turned to the chapter ‘Cretan Interlude’ while having a coffee and read ‘Noon found us, as planned, at the Taverna in front of the Morosini Fountain.’  I looked up – and there it was.  I was sitting where the author sat with her family in the summer of 1965.

My interest in Crete didn’t start with a travel book, though.  It was Mary Renault’s first novel about Theseus, ‘The King Must Die’ that sparked my interest in the Minoan civilisation when it was first published in 1958.  At that time, most of the books I read were borrowed from the Public Library and I finally bought my own copy in Heraklion in 2005 when I fulfilled my ambition of visiting Crete and Knossos.

Books mentioned:
The King Must Die by Mary Renault
Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson,  
The Kingdom by the Sea by Paul Theroux
Aegean Summer by Mimi Lafollette Summerskill 
The Great American Bus Ride by Irma Kurtz


My trip was a Christmas present from Alan and Jon.   As it happened, one of Alan's students came from Crete and her parents met me from the plane and took me to my hotel in Heraklion and said, quite casually, "You must come for dinner with us tonight."  This was all in a mix of their inadequate English and my even less adequate Greek!  I was a little reluctant to impose but, having sampled Greek hospitality before, I knew better than to refuse.

"We'll pick you up at 10 o'clock." To cut a long story short, they insisted in taking me out every night (at 10 o'clock) and each night I rolled back into the hotel at about 2 in the morning having been to a different restaurant and being the only non Cretan there. It ranged from large places - in one of which I was toasted with shouts of 'Manchester United' by a group of youngsters, who were celebrating their own success in a local league, to a small cafe where you could hardly raise your elbows but served the most gorgeous fresh seafood I have ever tasted. That was the one where a young man suddenly produced his guitar and played a succession of traditional songs and everyone joined in.

On hearing that Vickie (Alan's daughter) was getting married and I needed an outfit, the student's mother marched me off to a local boutique and I was treated to a hilarious couple of hours where I tried on various outfits and more and more women arrived and poked me and tweaked the clothes and expressed quite blunt opinions till I had chosen one which met their satisfaction. It didn't quite fit so the proprietor got on the phone and within 10 minutes a seamstress had arrived and I was wearing the dress, inside out, while she adjusted the seams with pins - with advice and comments from all the locals. Two hours later, it was delivered to the hotel, fitted perfectly and was duly worn at the wedding in North Carolina and was worn for many formal occasions after that.

Winifred Holtby, Rudston

Winifred Holtby was born in Rudston and was a writer. Her bestselling novel, South Riding, was written using Rudston as a backdrop. She was born in 1898 and died at the young age of 37 in 1935 and was buried in the churchyard. Sadly, she knew she was dying when she wrote the book and it was published after her death.

I read the book years ago but, sadly, can't find my copy now. It is back in print so I might be tempted. It gives a good view of life in 1930s England and her writing is superb.

Added later : Thanks to Rosie, I have a new copy of South Riding.