In November I shall be ……

….. getting back into a proper blogging routine after dipping my toe back into the water in October.

There are lot of books that I really must write about, and a couple of things happening that I know will add more wonderful titles to that list.

First there’s …..

….. hosted at Coffeespoons and the Literary Stew.

The NYRB list is wonderful – one that I dare not look at too often for fear of buying far too many books – and the idea of a week to celebrate it is lovely.

Here are the books I have to hand that I might read:

• The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford
• Wish Her Safe at Home by Stephen Benatar
• Poem Strip by Dino Buzzati
• Victorine by Maude Phelps Hutchins
• The Post Office Girl by Stefan Zweig
• Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sea by Patrick Hamilton
• The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton
• A Month in the Country by J L Carr
• Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford
• Corrigan by Caroline Blackwood
• Alfred and Guinevere by James Schuyler
• Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang

I know I have a few books in my Virago Collection that have been published by NYRB too, but  I’m only counting books that I associate with NYRB first and foremost. Anything else would feel like cheating, and I’m spoiled for choice already!

And then there’s the November Novella Challenge, hosted once again by J.T. from Bibliofreak.

I loved this last year and I’m so pleased that it’s happening again. I love those little books that are more than a short story but not quite a full blown novel.

Here are the books that might fit this challenge that I’ve pulled from my shelves and ordered in from the library:

• The Devil’s Pool by George Sand
• The Awakening by Kate Chopin
• Beside The Sea by Veronique Olmi
• Seducers in Ecuador and the Heir by Vita Sackville-West
• Alfred and Guinevere by James Schuyler
• The Stepdaughter by Caroline Blackwood
• Stone in a Landslide by Maria Barbal
• Sitting in the Club-Car Drinking Rum & Karma-Kola by Paulette Giles
• The Rector and the Doctor’s Family by Mrs Oliphant
• Not to Disturb by Muriel Spark
• The Paper House by Carlos Maria Dominguez

I won’t have time to get to them all – and I have to admit that a few were on last years list and are still waiting. Are there any you can particularly recommend I wonder?

The Season of the Hat

Hats are definitely the  best knitting project for time of stress. They’re small and portable. There’s a fabulous range of patterns available. And results are pretty quick.

And so as  my life got complicated summer became the season of the hat.

Here are the results:

(I’m sorry that the quality isn’t great, but at the moment I only have a mobile phone camera.)

Here’s the chronology:

Bottom right: Medici by Woolly Wormhead

Now this was the hat that started it all. It was like no hat I’d seen before and it was love at first sight. Not my finest piece of knitting I’m afraid – I was raised to knit cables but I’d never twisted stitches before. More twisting practice is definitely required! I love my finished hat in lovely Flamboyance aran wool though. I think of it as a lovely tarnished antique crown …

Bottom left: Symmetrie by Woolly Wormhead

I never thought that I would knit a hat in fingering weight.  But this pattern grabbed me. And although I love sock yarn I don’t love sock knitting, so this seemed a lovely way to show off some variegated Fyberspates yarn that I hadn’t been sure how to use. Progress was slow but the knitting was easy. I loved seeing the pattern emerge and now I love my new beret.

Top right: 16 Cable Hat by Circé Belles Boucles

I knew that I had to knit this hat as soon as I saw it on Ravelry. I was entranced by those wide cables: exactly the same technique as traditional aran but such a different effect. I pulled out a couple of balls of Sirdar Peru and felt so virtuous as I knitted. It wasn’t another hat that I didn’t really need, it was stashbusting! Mine isn’t as sculptured as some I’ve seen - it came out larger than I anticipate and more than a light blocking might have rendered it unwearable. I love it as it is. I can sit it on the back of my head or pull it right down over my ears to keep the cold out.

Top left: Vernalis by Woolly Wormhead

My fiance, having observed me doing a lot of hat knitting asked for one for his niece’s birthday. I pulled up a selection on Ravelry and this was his clear favourite. It wasn’t the quickest knit. The cable necessitates holding stitches to the front and the back at the same time (tricky!) and the yarn (Artesano Alpaca 4 ply) was very fine. But the work was worth it. The finished hat is so light and pretty and I was sorry to have to give it away.

Centre: Propello by Woolly Wormhead

The yarn came first with this one. Hullaballoo by Colinette. It conjured up autumn leaves and bonfires and it just had to be a hat. A simple hat to focus on the colours. And this pattern appeared. It knitted up very quickly and became my hat of choice for walking Briar in the park….

Now winter is coming and life is settling down I’m back to bigger projects. But I am definitely a hat person and there are a good few hat patterns still in my Ravelry queue …

The Winds of Heaven by Monica Dickens

“When the winds of heaven blow, men are inclined to throw back their heads like horses, and stride ruggedly into the gusts, pretending to be much healthier than they really are; but women tend to creep about, shrunk into their clothes and clutching miserably at their hats and hair.”

Louise Bickford had felt the force of the wind of heaven. In her early fifties in the early fifties, she found herself widowed, penniless and homeless after the death of her brutish husband.

Her daughters, three very different women, knew that they had to their duty and so she spent part of the year with each and the winter months in a run-down hotel owned by an old school friend.

It’s a far from ideal arrangement, but there seems to be no alternative. Louise’s suggestion that she earn a living is swiftly dismissed by her family. She is unskilled and it is not what women of her class do.

And so she tries to help out, to be unobtrusive, but sadly it is unappreciated. Louise’ daughters are wrapped up in their own lives their own concerns and give not one thought to how their mother might feel, what she might want.

The lack of understanding, the lack of communication, is horrible but it is utterly believable. That made this an uncomfortable read at times, but it was always compelling.

And if Louise could hold on then so could I.

She finds support from two of the more sensitive members of her family. And from a salesman who become a friend after a chance encounter in a cafe.

Monica Dickens writes such lovely prose and she is a fine storyteller. Characters, settings, and scenarios are all utterly believable. And she picks up exactly the right details to bring the story to life, to make it utterly real. 

Eventually, inevitably arrangements break down and Louise finds herself in trouble …

More than that I am not going to say.

Persephone Books will be reissuing The Winds of Heaven later this week and it is a very fine selection for its list.

A book to engage both emotions and social consciences.

The  world may have changed since the fifties, but this is still a book with a lot to say about relationships and social conventions.

Yes, a fine novel that stands the test of time.

An A to Z of September

Time to reflect…..

Gerard the Goat looking for grazing on the Promenade

A is for ASHBURTON. A lovely little Devonshire town with a proper green sloping down to the river, a lovely secondhand bookshop and where we finally found the source of the wire animals that my mother coveted. There were two wire sheep on the mantelpiece of our holiday cottage and my mother so wanted us to find one she could take home. the sheep were out of stock, but she was pleased as punch with her wire goat.

B is for BORDER TERRIER, and indeed for BRIAR. There’s nothing like a dog for reminding you what’s really important in life and for reminding you how unnecessarily complicated we make the world sometimes.

C is for CHARITY, Most of the time I love working for a charity. The rewards are huge, but when time are tough they are really tough and it’s not easy to walk away. We’ll come through but it’s going to take time, toil and tears.

D is for DEVON where we had a lovely holiday. For the river DART where we walked and Briar had a few swims.  And for DUCKS on the river and in the village too.

E is for EVE THE APPLE OF MY EYE. My fiance and I have a habit of making lists along a particular theme in dull moments on journeys. A couple of Sunday ago driving home from a walk up the hill and around the woods at Trencrom we did songs with fruit in the title. I came up with this one and it stuck in my head for a long time afterwards.

Lovely Flamboyance Yarn

F is for FLAMBOYANCE.  Lovely yarn. I’ve knitted one skein into a hat and acquired a couple more.

G is for GREYLADIES. I read my first Greyladies title on holiday: Murder at the Flood By Mabel Esther Allen. It was lovely and I hope to have the chance to read some more.

H is for HATS. The best knitting project for time of stress. They’re small and portable. There’s a fabulous range of patterns available. And results are pretty quick.  I’ve knitted several (plus a scarf) over the last few months and I suspect they’ll be getting a post of their own before too long.

I is for IRISES. The lovely little wild pink irises that we saw growing on the banks of the River Dart.

J is for JANE. Fiance, daughter, friend, professional, canine lifestyle manager… But I need to find time to be just me as well. I lost it for a while but I found it again in September.

K is for KENNETH GRAHAME. A lovely book containing The Golden Age and Dream Days, the two books that made the author’s name. I had to bring it home from Devon.

L is for LEMON TREE. Back to the list of songs with fruit in the title. I was missing a song for lemon and I was sure that there must be something out there. I cheated, found this and fell in love.

M is for MAGGIE O’FARRELL. The Hand That First Held Mine was waiting for me on the library reservations shelf on my first post-holiday visit. My expectations were high: I’ve loved her earlier books and I’ve heard great things about this book. My expectations were met!

N is for NIGHTINGALE WOOD. I’ve started reading this before and not being hooked.I suspected that it might be a book that would benefit from being read slowly on holiday and I was right. I loved it and now I am going to have to track down more of Stella Gibbons’ books.

My One Mitten

O is for ONE MITTEN DOWN AND ONE TO GO. It’s years since I knitted mittens but I needed some and so I matched some yarn left over from a bigger project with a free pattern. The first looks lovely, it’s a perfect fit and it’s wonderfully warm. Now I just need to motivate myself to knit the second before winter sets in!

P is for PRINCETOWN. My fiance spent several years of his childhood in Princetown when his late father was a prison officer at Dartmoor prison. He hadn’t been back for more than thirty years and so when we passed through the area on holiday we made a small detour so that he could look around. It was an emotional return as both his parents and his sister have died since then, but many happy memories of his family and boyhood friends came to the surface and that was definitely a good thing.

Q is for QUIZZES. I could say this any month but Q is not the easiest letter. We do the quizzes from my mother’s Saturday and Sunday Telegraphs and my fiance’s Saturday Guardian every single weekend.

R is for REUBEN SACHS. Amy Levy’s book was high on my Persephone wishlist. So imagine my delight when I found a copy, complete with bookmark, in a temporary shop at the top of town!

S is for STITCH MARKERS. For many years I didn’t use them. Like my mother and my grandmother I counted stitches and read my knitting. But as I found more pattern knitted in the round I began to see the sense of a marker at the beginning of the round. And that maybe markers in other places would make life so much easier, Soon I was completely converted, thanks in no small part to the wonderful Fripperies and Bibelots.

T is for TENNIS. We have taken it up and I am afraid to say that we are equally terrible. But we are having fun!

U is for UTTER QUIET. I love where I live but there is always a certain level of noise. Traffic. People. And at the moment we are in the midst of our first autumn storm and I can hear the sea hitting the sea wall. But in an inland village in Devon it was completely quiet when the day ended.

3 VMCs join the collection

V is for VIRAGO MODERN CLASSICS. I’ve been collecting for years now so additions to my library are rare. But this month there were three. The Sheltered Life by Ellen Glasgow turned up locally. So did The Matriarch by G B Stern. I already have the sequel and I’ve been hoping this one would turn up for ages. And then I snagged a copy of That Lady by Kate O’Brien on Green Metropolis. I read a library copy but I really wanted one of my own. A very lucky month!

W is for WINDS OF HEAVEN. I was a little disappointed when I discovered that this would be one of two Persephone books this autumn. I love Monica Dickens and the book was already in my collection. I read it on holiday and I pleased to say that it is most definitely worthy of a dove grey cover. And I can see a direction for the endpapers.

Briar: playing legally in the dunes

X is for eXCLUSION. How do you explain to a border terrier that she isn’t allowed on the beach just outside the front door during the summer? We were counting down the days to the beginning of October when she became legal again!

Y is for WHY AREN’T THERE MORE HOURS IN THE DAY. I could really use then right now!

Z is for ZZZZZ

Thank you JoAnn for inspiration!

White Ravens by Owen Sheers

I was very taken with the first of a series of short works published by Seren Books, retelling the  stories of The Mabinogion for twenty-first century ears. And so I tracked down this, the second.

A short work yes, but there is much going on. Stories wrapped about stories, stories wrapped around stories, rich with themes and ideas. And at the centre is a striking modern take on the original story.

But let’s start at the beginning:

“Let me tell you something. If you wanted to curse someone, I don’t know why you would, but if you did, if you wanted to make their life hard, if you wanted to leave them as vulnerable to grief as possible, I reckon you could do a lot worse than make them a woman in a house of men.”

It’s quite a start. Rhian grew up on a Welsh hill farm and she had hopes and dreams. Her parents both died and she found herself pulled away from her friend and tied to her brothers and the family farm. A farm that would be decimated by foot and mouth. Rhian’s brothers take to sheep rustling: taking sheep from the hillside, butchering them in the back of their van on the road to London, and selling the meat to London restaurants.

The writing pull you in and takes you with Rhian as she finally reaches breaking point and runs away, leaving her bloodstained brothers in an alley, counting out their profits.

At the Tower of London she meet an old man who begins to tell her a story. A story set many years earlier, during the war. A very different story that I every bit as gripping, every bit a intriguing as what came before.

Superstition has it that if ravens leave the Tower of London the tower will crumble and disaster will befall England. But how could the ravens survive the Blitz with bomb raining down on the city of London? How could disaster be averted?

The true story, that I had never even considered until I found it here, and the fictional account are both fascinating.

But they aren’t the main event.

A young man named Matthew was sent to Wales to bring ravens back to the tower. There he meets a woman, Branwen, and their story will echo the much older story of Bran and Branwen that is recorded in the The Mabinogion.

The story is poetic, powerful and dramatic. Themes echo from the old legend, through the framing story to the contemporary retelling. And it works beautifully because the human emotions at its heart are utterly real.

I was so captivated by the wonderful storytelling that it was only when I read the fitting final words that I realised quite how much this little book had held.

My anticipation for the next two installments in this series, due to be published this month could not be higher.

My poor blog ….. I have missed you

… how I have neglected you. I didn’t mean to, but life got complicated.

Bookish thoughts were being crowded out of my head by practical concerns and worries. I found that the hours in the day were running out before could pick up a book let alone settle at the computer to read or write.

In time though I found a new equilibrium. I found a bit more time to read and soon I found that quotes, thoughts that I really wanted to share were floating around my head again.

A week’s holiday in a quiet Devon town was just what I needed. I made a point of only taking books I really, really wanted to read. One from Virago, one from Persephone, one from Greyladies, one from the Bloomsbury Group that used to be a VMC, and a Persephone in waiting. Each one a gem and I shall endeavour to write about them all sooner or later.

And so a lovely week was had by all. Walks on Dartmoor and by the river Dart and a lovely cottage with an enclosed garden for Briar. It was just what we needed.

We also found some lovely secondhand bookshops too. I brought home out of print books by Margery Sharp, Kenneth Grahame, Monica Dickens, Geraldine Jewsbury, Storm Jameson. Plus Willa Cather’s collected stories that had been on my wishlist for ages. And a much newer book from the wonderful Bitter Lemon press that I had read about in another of their books and failed to find in library stock

And so it was that my blog called me back. I decided that a little pampering was in order after such neglect.

I have tweaked the name (the url is the same as ever) to take the emphasis off books and reading. I shall still be writing about books, but I’d like to feel freer to write about other things too. My mother is quite frail now and so I am doing rather more knitting and a little less reading – it’s more companionable and it requires rather less concentration. Expect more Briar and more general rambling too.

And I’ve had the decorators in too. After nearly two years with the same theme it was time for a change.

So now I’m ready to go. Things may be a little different, posting may be less frequent, but I’m definitely still here!