Book World

Inspired gifts from Hesperus

I had the delight of finding two volumes of Christmas stories from Hesperus Press in my post this morning.  If you're looking for a last minute present for a bookish friend then this and this look just the thing:

   

Many thanks to the good people at Hesperus for making my day!

Many bookmarks

A quick scan of the bedside table reveals a total of ten books with bookmarks sticking out of them.  I used to be much more disciplined about just reading one or two books at a time, but nowadays I seem to be a fussier reader and must have a half dozen or more books in progress in order to be assured that one of them will suit my mood.

The Art of the Personal Essay edited by Phillip Lopate has been a fixture on the bedside table for some time and is destined to stay even longer.  It is a wonderfully rich selection of essays and has already led to my falling in love with Montaigne (and yes, I am waiting to read Jenny Diski's Apology for the Woman Writing).  Lined up elsewhere in the house are volumes dedicated to individual essayists I have discovered through this marvellous anthology.  So many that it would take me years to read them all.  And for once that is a comforting rather than a depressing thought.

The Road Washes Out in Spring by Baron Wormser, combines two of my fascinations: poetry and living in the wilds.  I can't remember where I first heard of the book, but I do recall that it instantly sprang off the page as a book I would love.  And I do.  Of course it makes me want to read Thoreau all over again.

Jeanette Winterson's The Passion I picked up in the London Library when I meant to bring home Written on the Body (I had left my list at home and so had to reconstruct it from memory; this was the only muddle I made in a list of 15 books), but so far I am enjoying Napoleon and Venice equally.  And am reminded what a talented writer Winterson is.

Browsing the London Library's numerous  "Biog Woolf" shelves produced Leonard and Virginia Woolf by Peter Alexander.  A book about Virginia Woolf's slightly mysterious, or at least ambiguous, marriage was of course irresistible, and reading the introduction on the train on the way home piqued my interest even more as the author nails his colours firmly to the mast: much of Virginia's output and virtually all of the rest of the Bloomsburyites achievements have been vastly over rated and he is on a mission to redress the balance.  I'm halfway through and learning much and arguing with more.  Great fun.

Amos Oz's A Perfect Peace will, I fear, fall by the wayside.  I have struggled halfway but I'm unarguably stuck.  I am not the right reader or in the right place.

Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children was one I started to race through and then put down one day and somehow couldn't pick up again.  Another recommendation from Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer, I think.  A very distinctive voice and style but I am struggling to get the characters into focus in my mind.  Thinking about it though revives my desire to persevere.

Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude is a book I have nearly finished and I raced through it until I got bogged down in some Old Testament dullness towards the end (Nineveh, and whales may have been involved).  I'll be annoyed with myself if I don't finish it but the biblical stuff is tiresome.  I have never got on with Auster's fiction, but this memoir is gripping and supremely well written.

I am on a Janet Malcolm binge at the moment.  I enjoyed In the Freud Archives (who doesn't love a good internecine feud?) and Reading Chekhov is one of the best books I've read all year.  Obviously I now have to read all of Chekhov's stories and plays.  The book mark sticking out of Psychoanalysis: the Impossible Profession, is in the early part of the book but already I am happy and wondering if I should dig out some Freud, or maybe Ernest Jones's biography on my next visit to St James's Square.

The slimmest volume is a Hesperus Press edition of previously unpublished sketches by Virginia Woolf: Carlyle's House.  The foreword by Doris Lessing warns that this is early stuff and Virginia at her least likable (ie anti-Semitic, snobbish and judgmental), but in the manner of a true addict I will read it anyway.  And as ever there is the lurking idea that I might start the final volume of her diary, the only one I haven't read.  But the fear of finishing it and not having it in reserve stops me.

And finally, War and Peace, with its bookmark a mere 13 pages in.  It has been in the back of my mind for a few months to re-read Tolstoy and so when I saw a new fat, silky paper volume on the Books in Translation table at Waterstones the other day, I couldn't resist.

Christmas Present

My combined present for Christmas and birthday is, for the third year running, membership of the London Library.  And on a day like today, with husband and children all out for the evening, when I settle down with a heap of 15 austere looking volumes, stripped of their covers (and gaudy graphics and alluring blurbs) and read, read and read some more, I wonder how I ever lived without this treasure.

I finished Jane Bowles's novel Two Serious Ladies earlier.  A very unprepossessing volume to judge it by its cover, and not borrowed once between January 2005 and November 2008.  Any municipal library would have weeded it long ago and denied me the pleasure of being charmed and baffled by it in equal parts, having been desperate to read it since I read excerpts from it in Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose. 

This refusal to give up on the out of fashion, or slightly obscure, is the strength of the London Library.  The current magazine reports, to my mingled delight and sadness, that as a result of the cretinous policy of our current government, libraries are getting rid of evermore of those inconvenient books that clutter up the space between computer terminals and DVD display racks:

"The public library service used to pride itself on its national 'Joint Fiction Reserve', whereby each library authority in the UK was assigned certain letters of the alphabet and was expected to keep a copy of each fiction title by authors with surnames in its alphabetical section, so that there was always a copy of an older title available to satisfy a reader's request via the inter-regional lending service. "

As these reserves are now being dispersed (ie thrown away) the London Library has been able to acquire around 200 older fiction titles from the Tower Hamlets library system, which was responsible for authors with surnames St- to Th-.  And this means that they have acquired a number of books by Rosemary Sutcliffe, one of my all time favourite authors as a child.  I will be raiding those shelves soon.  But my gain (as a paying member of the London Library) is undoubtedly the loss of far more people who depend on the public library system (and fund it with their taxes).