Back to reality...

 The greater majority of my reading for pleasure involves fiction. I love to read newspapers, although as I rarely have the time, when I do I just get the ‘i’; I was also a subscriber during my NQT year to the TES (Times Education Supplement) but again, there just isn’t enough time... I also read a variety of blogs, and books about spiritual matters. Other non-fiction reading generally falls into four categories for me: societies/travel, literary, biography and cook-books. Sometimes those categories overlap. Here are one or two I’ve been reading recently...

The Secret Life of France, by Lucy Wadham

Bought for me by my old housemate for Christmas when we were both on our years abroad, this is a reflection on French society as expressed by a Brit who moved there in the middle of her university studies after marrying her Parisian boyfriend. Some parts are insightful and interesting, but on the whole I find it far too Paris-centric and struggled to recognise the French people I have lived and worked with in my two times living there in her description of the adulterous, pleasure-seeking Parisian bourgeoisie she knew in the 80s. There is also a massive amount later on about international politics which is only loosely related to the overall aim of describing French society, and which appears to be more about showing off about some of the high-up acquaintances Wadham made during her journalistic career. There are some sweeping generalisations, as with any book which sets out to describe a society, but the comments about French TV definitely made me smile!

The Brontës, by Juliet Barker

Believe it or not, I have had this book out of my local library since I moved to this flat last summer. By dint of returning the book every time I reached my renewal limit, and then immediately reissuing it to myself (tricks of the trade learned during my part time library job as a teenager!) this has been done with incurring only minimal fines when I couldn’t get myself organised enough to renew it on time. It’s a whopper of a biography, spanning 1000 pages (plus another 200 of notes), and a 90 year period beginning with the birth of Patrick Brontë. Despite the time it took for me to read it, it was genuinely fascinating stuff (particularly once you get past the very long quotes from the juvenilia!) and, despite not being so interested in the passages about local Haworth politics, I was mesmerised. Barker evidently feels a responsibility to set the record straight, particularly about Patrick Brontë, Arthur Bell Nichol and Anne and Branwell Brontë, arguing that their reputations were created by Charlotte’s embittered friend Ellen through Elizabeth Gaskell’s posthumous biography of Charlotte. She uses lots of really interesting extracts from letters, and even when she ventures into the realms of speculation is able to back up her ideas with other evidence which gives a good idea of the psychology of the subjects. Charlotte particularly comes across as very human, with her strengths and weaknesses shown very clearly!

 

Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady, by Kate Summerscale

I don’t think I would have chosen this book to read by myself, despite having read and been intrigued by The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, but it was one of two books we were going to discuss at my school’s book club, so I bought it (another lady bought the other), read it and we swapped. Like Mr Whicher, it’s got a very factual feel about it, which the other ladies at the book club didn’t like as I think they’d prefer to read a love story! Unfortunately the subject matter didn’t interest me much – the book centres around one of the first divorce cases in England after it became possible to divorce through the law courts, where the main piece of evidence was the woman’s diary. In this diary, Mrs Robinson (the lady in question) had written about an affair she claimed to have had with a married doctor, over a period of years. Summerscale’s interest appears to chiefly lie in the way in which Mrs Robinson seems to have used her writing as a tool – to create happiness for herself in an uncongenial marriage – and in the arguments put forward by the defence that Mrs R was ill and had imagined the events of the affair. Although I didn’t dismiss it quite as quickly as the ladies in the book club (!), the most I could say of this was that it was “OK”.

A Soup for Every Day: 365 of our Favourite Recipes, by the Covent Garden Soup Company

I love soup. Yum. So I bought this with a Waterstone’s voucher, and it is lovely. It looks delightful, and many of the recipes look really inspiring, tasty, and some downright unusual (chocolate and rhubarb ‘soup’? Hmm). I’ve only tried making one so far but have loved flicking through it to decide what to try next! As the soups are laid out one for each day of the year, care has been taken to choose ingredients which are seasonal, topical and would be at their best that time of year. During the ‘big snow’ in January I made the spicy sweet potato soup, which was lovely – most of the spiciness came from the rather large amount of ginger it contained! – but my only gripes were that it was really, really, really thick, and that the recipe said it would serve 4 (it served my American housemates and me, so – 3). I definitely followed it right!

Coming up in non-fiction I have...

Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl, by Donald Sturrock. Another doorstop book! I love Roald Dahl’s children’s books of course, but also his short stories for adults – although I do find many of them very creepy (‘Royal Jelly’ – yuck...)

North Africa, by Barnaby Rogerson. I have a longstanding interest in North Africa so am looking forward to finding out more about it – am hoping the writing style will be engaging and not too battle-based!!

Of course, this is while trying to read Ian McEwan’s Solar, re-read Les Misérables and keep up the light relief with a Dorothy L Sayers (Five Red Herrings) I’ve been trying to finish for ages!! Oh, and that little matter of a more than full-time job...

Poetry

So I just found this blog post that I wrote way back in July and never published on here, so here we go...

We’re back on poetry again. It’s been a while.

In my recent selection from Sheffield city centre library (which was incredibly Lit-geeky and which I’ve already blogged on two texts from – Planet Narnia and O Pioneers! ) I took a random book about poetry: The Strength of Poetry by James Fenton (2001). The contents page promised writing about Philip Larkin, W.H. Auden, Wilfred Owen and Sylvia Plath amongst others so I thought, let’s give it a go. The first chapter talks about Michelangelo and other Italian Renaissance artists; the way they learned from, or were secretive towards, each other. By the end of the first page we feel that Fenton definitely has a unique way of looking at things. His writing can be by turns beautiful and amusing, and he’s always brutally honest. He picks up on usual things about poets – Owen’s juvenilia (hilariously pompous), the way Larkin is credited with expounding things everyone thinks but no one says but how ridiculous that actually is when you think about what he is saying, Auden’s dual influences of William Blake and Henry James. Seamus Heaney’s Irishness is discussed, the influence of life on poetry in Plath and, running through all, what it means to be a ‘poetess’. Fenton points out that feminising nouns like this can completely change their meaning: a ‘priestess’ is not at all the same thing as a ‘priest’ as it has much more pagan connotations. Similarly a ‘poetess’ is not the same thing as a ‘poet’. He charts the struggles and differences of opinion amongst several women poets as to what it means to be a woman and a poet, quoting Germaine Greer: ‘The more women adored poetry, the less able they were to write it... It is less crucial for women to work out how men did this to women than it is to assess the extent to which women did this to themselves.’

All in all, it is at once varied and coherent as a selection of thoughts on modern poetry. It is also amusing, clear and – wonder of wonders for a book on poetry! – interesting. It also made me want to read more Larkin, Plath and Heaney and to discover new writers (for me) such as Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore.

While on the subject of poetry, let’s talk Donne (again). In the same lit haul I picked up John Stubbs’ biography Donne: The Reformed Soul (2006), which I’ve been after for a while. ... My main gripe with it is that Stubbs uses Donne’s poetry to prove things about his life. I can understand this in that it is difficult to write a biography about a man who’s been dead for nearly 400 years and who lived in an age where documentation was not seen as especially important (hence why we have so little information about Shakespeare). However we are always being told not to confuse the poet and the voice in the poem, and although it seems reasonable that Donne drew from his own experience and potentially parts of his own personality in his poems – which are known for their startling voices – to use lyric poetry as proof of some particular personal opinion on Donne’s part seems to me a fallacy. Poets don’t always say what they mean in their poems and are notoriously unreliable; we never know when they are using their own opinions or assuming someone else’s and unless we have other biographical evidence to prove our point I feel we would be better off leaving our insights of a poet drawn from his craft out of it.