Ignorance

I’ve spent the week bemoaning how badly read I am.

I give away books every week. I read, on average, a book a day. And yet I will never read, or come close to reading, all the good novels that will be published this year or any year. That’s a bit depressing.

Never mind the good books published this year, but what about the classics? I’ve got through a fair few of them: the Brontes, Austen, Dickens, George Bloody Eliot…I have never understood the fuss that people make about Middlemarch. Dorothea and her inherent goodness bother me.

And that wouldn’t even begin to dent the canon.

During the summer, for instance, I got very annoyed when Vintage did that big ‘21’ reissue of all their ‘good’ books. I hadn’t read quite a number of them; one I’d actually not heard of. It was the same when Penguin brought out those lovely Essentials books. To my shame, I’d never heard a whisper of Cats’ Cradle. The English Department would have me stoned.

The problem is surely quantity. If you go into a big high street bookshop, you’re surrounded by more books than you could ever hope to read in a lifetime-hell, in two lifetimes, realistically. A girl has to eat. And sleep. And apply glittery eye shadow. There are great books published every week. How can you ever hope to read all the ‘good’ books? And I don’t just mean the ones that get loads of attention. There are that many decent works of fiction in print that you’re guaranteed to miss some of the great ones.

This fills me with a cold sort of fear. What if there was a great book out there, one that had exactly what you were looking for, and you missed it because there are so many books jammed together on the shelf? How awful. What if I’d never read a book by Penelope Lively? Or my beloved Susan Hill? Surely I’d be dead by now.

Then you have literary snobbery, and that’s a whole other kettle of fish. Some of what I read is classified by high brow types as ‘rubbish’. Books are not rubbish. Empty milk cartons are rubbish. My cooking is, by and large, rubbish. Books are not. Books are good things. Any book is better than no book at all.

Spent the weekend in work bored to tears and trying to read under the counter without getting caught. Harder than you might think!
Got through a couple of good books though. As well as a bit of Virginia Woolf and Baudrillard for college (epic sigh) I also read Texas Gothic by Rosemary Clement Moore and Velvet by Mary Hooper.

Velvet was very sweet. A bit young perhaps, but the story was excellent. The plot concerns a young orphan called, you guessed it, Velvet, who works in a Victorian laundry. One of her clients, a medium of some repute, takes her on as a personal maid, along with the very handsome manservant George. It quickly transpires, however, that things in the house are not all as they seem and Velvet doesn't know who she can trust...
If you like historical fiction, give this one a go. I'd never realised quite how covert an operation Victorian mediums ran, or how popular they were. The book is excellently researched and well written; a nine out of ten I think. I've also received a copy of  Grace by the same author and I'm looking forward to giving that a whirl.

Next up was Texas Gothic, and I made my self laugh a bit as I started reading it because I really do seem to come to books in themes. TG is another novel with a historical slant, though this one is set in the present day with the historical detail woven into the plot. The Goodnight sisters (you just know they can't be fully normal) are house sitting on their aunts Texas ranch when the younger, Amy, is visited by a ghost who wants to give her a message. There's been the discovery of a burial ground on a neighbouring farm and it seems to have stirred up all kinds of supernatural trouble. Aided by the handsome rancher Ben, Amy quickly discovers that something icky is brewing in the state of Texas...

I liked this lots. Clement-Moores' last novel, The Splendour Falls was also excellent so I was expecting great things from this, and I wasn't disappointed. Like Velvet the novel was incredibly well-researched, and because of this the characters and the plot felt authentic. Most definitely worth a read. See links to both below!

Velvet: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Velvet-Mary-Hooper/dp/0747599211/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1329261975&sr=8-1

Texas Gothic: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Texas-Gothic-Rosemary-Clement-Moore/dp/0552564931/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1329262036&sr=1-1

Happy Reading!

Uni Update

University update.

This semester we’ve been required to do a critical theory module. This means we have to read lovely books and essays by people who wrote about people like Marx and Engels. Basically we could all go into the final exam in January, write ‘capitalism is bad’ on the answer book and get good marks.

Well, we might want to throw in some stuff about men and nipples, just to cover the Judith Butler part of the course, but stick to a good rant on the evils of consumerism and you’re on course for a solid upper second.

There’s a fairly hefty seminar element to this module, which means that I must spend odd hours sequestered in a windowless room with lots of girls arguing, bizarrely, over DH Lawrence. Don’t really see what he has to do with capitalism but hey…

Anywho, the lectures on the module are taken by Dapper who has the mature student ladies all of a twitter. Dapper wears tweed sports coats with elbow patches. He speaks in a lilting Northern accent that sends Matron, Superior and Pleased to Be Here into a sort of sexual frenzy. He is an attractive man, we’ll give him that. He is also a very snappy dresser; the tweed sports coat is very on trend.

I, however, must endure my seminars with Matron, Superior and Pleased to Be Here, and their love of him is all rather tiresome. Now, when Superior isn’t wittering about how she sometimes only speaks to her children in verse or has themed Shakespeare nights for her friends, she’s on a tirade about the wonders of Dapper. She’s aided and abetted no end by Matron, who thinks her sixty plus years on the planet lend her a kind of authority when it comes to men. Please to Be Here is never allowed an opinion, which just goes to show that clique-iness doesn’t die with age. She is only ever allowed to agree with the other two, but she does this well.

Thus, Beige, our put-upon seminar leader, is now forced to endure having all her opinions countered with ‘yes, but Dr. Dapper says’…it’s exhausting.  I’d expect it from teenagers but these ladies are surely old enough to know better. Poor Beige. She spends most of the classes trying to steer the conversation back to DH Lawrence, but that’s not even what we were supposed to be discussing in the first place. Mind you, the Mature Triumvirate could probably teach Lady Chatterley a thing or two.

I can’t wait to see what happens when the essay titles are released.

Eliot must die!

Stupid TS Eliot. The man may be umpteen years dead but he's taken over my life in a major way this month. Him and his Waste Land. Since when are poems fifty pages long?? Thus, actual books read have mostly been college realted because of my lovely essay about TS Eliot being mad. His wife was having an affair with Bertram Russell, fact fans.

Anyway, I have managed to buy a massive stack of books but only a couple have actually been read: Siren by Patricia Rayburn, Divergent by Veronica Roth and The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson. Siren was excellent, as was Divergent but they've been reviewed to kingdom come so I won't review them now. Even though I loved Tris and Four a ridiculous amount and have already ordered the sequel to Siren (it'll be here sometime next week, along with my copy of Jekyll Loves Hyde by Beth Fantaskey).

The Name of The Star I hadn't heard of til I picked it up on my way into work last weekend. I'm amazed I hadn't; it was a great read and worthy of much more attention than it's getting here in Dublin. I know Maureen Johnson is much more popular in the US though, so maybe that's why.

I'll give you the basics: the story is about a girl from Louisiana who moves to a London boarding school at the same time that a Jack the Ripper copycat killer is stalking the city. Then it emerges that the killer may be a ghost. Sounds a bit out there but honestly, give this one a go. I loved it. It was all very Torchwood in the second half, according to my friend who is a huge fan of the series. I'm inclined to agree, even though it was so much more than that. The characters in this book are so believeable, too. Always a bonus.

I'm also on the hunt for any other novels that feature Jack the Ripper. I like to read in themes, see. I read Lost by Gregory Maguire a while back and that was in the same vein, but I'm on a mission now.

Next in my reading pile: By Midnight by Mia James, Starcrossed by J.Angelini and about forty modernist novels for college. Wish me luck.

Hilly Ground

Ooooh, joy unbounded.

Have finally got my greasy mitts on a copy of the new Susan Hill and I’m delighted with life.

Well, I got my mitts on it the day it came out but I had three essays due that week. So it’s taken me a few days to get around to it; I didn’t want to rush it, see.

Susan Hill, as you may have guessed, is one of my all-time favourite writers. The last couple of weeks have been excellent for anybody who is similarly inclined, with the release of a paperback edition of The Shadows in The Street, a collectors edition copy of The Woman in Black, and the aforementioned new novel, the sixth in her Simon Serailler series.  These are seriously popular novels, which heartens me because they’re not your average whodunit. There’s more of a literary fiction vibe about the series, but not in a scary way; think Kate Atkinson and her Jackson Brodie novels and you have the right idea.

Anyway, The Betrayal of Trust opens with massive flooding in the south of England, which causes a landslip that exposes some skeletal human remains. These remains are likely those of the daughter of a lord and lady who disappeared some fifteen years prior. Our hero is no faced with a cold case, in a police department plagued by cutbacks and dwindling resources. There’s also a secondary storyline about assisted suicide that I imagine will raise some debate; it’s not an area that people seem to be very comfortable with, but Hill tackles it with her usual skill and a sense of firmness that I quite liked. There’s also an economy of prose to the book; what other writers say in fifteen words, Hill will say in five. Five decent, fleshy words with not a wasted apostrophe. I approve heartily of this skill in a novelist. There aren’t many writers out there who can write so sparsely but so well.

If you haven’t read any of this series yet, I’d go out and get the first one, The Various Haunts of Men post haste. They are proper winter books for long nights in with the central heating on full blast and a nice glass of red wine. The new book is a solid eight out of ten-not the best in the series but still a damn good read.

War on Waste

Very productive reading day.

In between the Irish financial crisis and Judith Butler at college, and some stupid event for shmoozers at work, I got through the whole of The Waste Land, and Tomorrow When The War Began, by John Marsden.

The Waste Land I shall skip. I will not pretend to even have the faintest idea what’s going on in it, and I’ve read it about ten times. But then my lecturer hasn’t a cue either, so I’m okay with that.

Obviously I missed something fairly major as far as TWTWB is concerned, because until I watched the film with my little brothers I’d never heard of it. Apparently though, according to Google, this book is a very big deal. It’s a recommended secondary school text in countries the world over and in Sweden it was doled out to every schoolchild of appropriate age in an attempt to promote literacy.

God, in my school they just gave us fifty pence book vouchers.

Anyway, in its’ native Australia this book is like, I don’t know, Goodnight Mister Tom, or Under the Hawthorn Tree if you went to school in Ireland. It’s a rite of passage type of affair.

And deservedly so I reckon. The book is pacy, believable and boasts a likeable narrator in Ellie, our eye on the world.  The plot concerns a group of Aussie teens who head into the bush for an end-of-summer camp out (which is soooo what I did with my mates at school) only for the country to be invaded by unnamed forces while they’re off cosseted in the wilderness. The novel then becomes an account of the friends’ attempt to win back the freedom of their homeland, as well as their fight to stay alive.

The book is the first in a series of seven, the second of which is due to be reprinted in January-the books first appeared in the nineties and are widely out of print in the UK and Ireland now, which is a pity; I’m actually quite excited to read part two. The film adaption is also quite good if you’re not feeling up to a whole novel this late in the week.

In other news, I'm waiting to get my paws on Susan Hills' The Betrayal of Trust, which is out this week. I'm really looking forward to this, so stay tuned for a review early next week.

Sex-y Time

How did I not know about Barbara Trapido? How?

I blame my parents. They're heathens who think that the daily tabloids constitute a proper reading diet. I mean, I didn't discover Susan Hill until I got access to the internet, so I'm fighting a losing battle, but even so; Barbara Trapido is so amazing that I can't believe I've only just found her.

It all started last Monday. I was hiding out in the conveniently located Uni bookshop, watching out the window for signs of an approaching bus, when my gaze happened upon this pretty little book with ballet shoes on the cover.

Now, I have a serious weakness for ballet. I spent much of my adolescence badgering my mam for lessons, only to be told that she didn't think ballet was for me. This was perfectly sensible of my mother. I am Irish, which means I am part potato; there was no way I would ever be able to pirouette and not shame myself. Still, when I saw those magic shoes on the cover of Sex and Stravinsky I felt, just for a minute, the wistful yearnings of my childhood.

Naturally, I bought the book.

I took it home and under the guise of 'doing up my notes on TS Eliot' I read the thing cover-to-cover in one sitting. And guess what? One of the characters is a little girl who wants to do ballet and her mam won't let her! I admit it, I wept a little bit.

The book-child, Zoe, is much more proactive than me though. She gets herself a ballet instruction manual from the library and teaches herself the basics in the hope that her mother will relent. I never did this; I used to just throw myself on the sofa and have hissy fits before storming off to re-read Ballet Shoes.

Of course, the book is about alot more than just wanting to do ballet. There's partner swapping, a really sad story of an arranged marriage, the most loathsome mother to ever grace the pages of a novel and an amazing Amazon called Caroline.

I finished it in a blur of excitement and immediately acquired Frankie and Stankie and Brother of the More Famous Jack (which induced similar fits of glee).

I can't believe I haven't been reading Barbara all my life.

Seriously though-read Sex and Stravinsky. It's properly good and it's going in the 'for keeps' stack.

Why? Why?!

I don't understand why the University is doing this to me.

The addition of a second hand bookshop to the Student Union is bad. Very bad.

I’ll concede to some redeeming features. Firstly, some of the texts are extortionate if you buy them new-and here I point the finger at the Geography textbook that cost me the best part of one hundred squids in First Year (I was young, new and naïve. How I’ve learned). Plus, for the people on Educational grants, the sundries allowance has been slashed this year, so make your savings where you can.

Secondly, it looks like a good spot to pick up secondary reading material, which the lovely old lecturers mention is passing and then put on exam papers, just ‘cause they can. They don’t always have the recommended texts in the ‘real’ bookshop, and the last time someone ordered one in, they had three kids and a mortgage before the thing arrived. Thus, I’m happy to let someone else do the initial buying, and then pass it on cheaply when they are done and I am in need.

Downside?? I already spend the equivalent of the national debt of small European nations on books. I don’t need any more. If I didn’t buy another book until next October, I’d still have plenty to keep me going. And then some. So I went in to this new musty bookshop today, making a solemn vow to myself that I WOULD NOT BUY ANYTHING.

Fittingly I emerged ten minutes later with two Marina Warner paperbacks and a new pen.

Sigh. My book buying is a standing joke with everyone I know. My parents keep threatening to throw me out because my collection has spilled over the boundaries of my (tiny) bedroom and expanded onto the landing. The girls in work at the weekend use me as a library (only they never seem to remember that you’re supposed to give the books back). My grandmother just takes paperbacks unashamedly from the stack beside my bed, safe in the knowledge that, due to sheer volume, they will not be missed. We once had a book related accident, where my bookcase collapsed (I think it was the addition of Richardsons' Clarissa that did it) and I was buried in an avalanche of paperbacks.

This brings me to Kittys’ Bookshelf, where I intend to share with the whole internet (rofl) what I am reading at the moment. This is purely self indulgent, yes, but hopefully we will all learn something.

See you back here soon for the first proper instalment.