"The Dark Winter," by David Mark

Stuff and Nonsense by Amy Cockram is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

 I thought that it was time that I had a dutiful dig into my review pile.  "The Dark Winter" was the one that I most fancied reading at the moment.  It seemed like a serendipitous choice when I read the words "a fortnight until Christmas" in the first chapter, as this was the time of year that I started reading the book. 

David mark's hero is Aector McAvoy, a policeman in Hull.  At the start of the novel he is out with his young son when he hears screaming from a local church, which he instinctively runs towards and confronts a killer who has stabbed a young girl.  A murderer seems to be targeting people who are sole survivors of tragedies, killing them in the manner of the death that they had previously evaded.  But who is the mysterious killer with tears in his eyes, and what is his motivation?

This is a good mystery, with a strong sense of place (although, as I've never been to East Yorkshire, I can't attest to its verisimilitude). I did guess a couple of developments along the way, but the denouement was still twisty enough to be satisfying and did have elements that, to me (as a fairly regular reader of crime, but not an expert), seemed pretty original. McAvoy is an interesting central figure, refreshingly free of the alcohol problems or broken marriages that seem to haunt fictional detectives, but he is a man with a mysterious past (being viewed by his colleagues with suspicion, hatred or awe due to his hushed up involvement in bringing down a corrupt policeman).  I also enjoyed Trish Pharaoh, his superior officer, who is a particularly strong and memorable character.  This book does read as if the start of a series, as both McAvoy and Trish Pharoah are well realised figures and I can imagine that David Mark could certainly develop a series with McAvoy at the centre if he should want to (and a quick Google search suggests that might be the case).

I enjoyed this book, but I think that it might be destined for the book swap shelf at work.  It was worth a read, but I'm not sure that it is one that I would be tempted to return to and re-read.

Thank you to Quercus Books for sending me a review copy of this novel.

Falling into the New Year's resolution trap...

Stuff and Nonsense by Amy Cockram is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that hardly anyone, ever, keeps their New Year's resolutions. 

And yet we still continue to make them, because it is in our nature to want to believe in the power of change and to hope that the coming year we will an improvement on the gnarly bits of the last year that we didn't like.

I'm not going to include the obvious - eat healthily, exercise, lose a bit of weight - because that will be a given to anyone who knows that:

• I bought a Food Doctor diet book with book vouchers that I got for Christmas

• I have been wearing skirts and dresses to work for a while now because my trousers have all made the fateful journey from uncomfortable to unwearable. 

I did the resolution thing last year here, and I feel chastened to notice with a sense of deja vu that what I am writing now is disturbing similar to what I wrote then.  A little part of me shrivelled inside when I read my challenge to the reader at the end to ask me if I kept my resolutions.  Since you ask, I didn't.

But I am still going to naively make a resolution, which is based on my experience of reading Susan Hill's, "Howards End is on the Landing."  In this book, Susan Hill decided to spend a year of reading from home: she would only read/re-read books that she has on her bookshelves, not buy anything new and not be swayed into buying the latest fashionable title or borrowing books from the library.

As I have many books on my shelves that I have not read - I get tempted by books from the library rather than reading the books that I take for granted at home - this sounds like a good idea.  However, I don't think that I can do this in its pure form as espoused by Susan Hill.  My mother did make the point that, as libraries are having funding cut, this would not be the best time to stop frequenting them.  So I think that I will set down some ground rules for an adulterated version of Susan Hill's challenge:

• I will continue to support the library but, for every book I borrow, I will read one from my shelves that I have been intending to read for ages
• I can't give up my weekly pilgrimage to Smiths to check what the book of the week is, but I will only buy it if it is something that I already wanted (I pretty much do that already, so that shouldn't be too difficult to keep)
• I am still allowed to buy any new book by my favourite authors, as I would normally do.  So if Janet Evanovich has a new book out I am allowed to get it (highly likely, as she is very prolific), likewise Howard Jacobson (possible) or Michael Ondaatje (highly unlikely, as "The Cat's Table" came out in 2011 and his books tend to have a long gestation period)
• I'm still deciding on whether I am allowed to buy an e-book a month, as I decided a while ago.  Maybe I can convince myself that I need to support authors and the publishing industry, as well as libraries?

Actually, now I think about it, this has been adulterated so much that it isn't much of a resolution.  I might actually manage to keep this....

"A Time to Keep Silence," by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Stuff and Nonsense by Amy Cockram is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Earlier this year I read Susan Hill's "Howards End is on the Landing," and wrote about it here.  In this collection of pieces on her favourite books and authors she wrote about her forty books - the forty books that mean most to her, which she could subsist on if she were allowed no other books for the rest of her life - and I made this choice of forty books myself on this blog.  Of her choices, the one that intrigued me most was Patrick Leigh Fermor's "A Time to Keep Silence," a short book comprised of three pieces of writing about the author's experience of travelling and being a guest at a selection of monasteries.  I borrowed this from the library - by coincidence on the day Fermor's death was announced - and I am just now finding the time to read it.

Patrick Leigh Fermor says in his introduction that these recollections have been assembled, in some cases verbatim, from accounts he wrote to a correspondent at the time (who later became his wife).  The first piece deals with a stay at a Benedictine monastery, the Abbey of St Wandrille de Fontanelle, the second with a brief sojourn at Solesmes and a longer stay at Cistercian abbey La Grande Trappe and the final, shorter, piece recalls a visit to the uninhabited rock monasteries of Cappadocia in Turkey.  His introduction to these recollections indicates his unease with whether the publication of these articles is an invasion of the monks' privacy and solitude (he has received both monastic censure and recognition).  A revised introduction in 1982 (the original publication was 1957) acknowledges that he feels he should maybe have written differently, or not written at all.

Now, I know my reviewing style is more personal than analytical, and I wouldn't have it any other way.  I believe that all reviewers, for all that they try to be impartial, will come to a book with their own preconceptions and predilections.  And, again, I wouldn't have it any other way - it is what makes us all unique.  I have the luxury of being more partisan and emotional in my responses because I am not affiliated to any particular publication, and because I am not edited by anyone else (though some of you may wish I was).  My reviews are undisciplined and personal and, because I feel that my state of mind is pertinent to an emotional response, I'm going to write a little bit about why I was drawn to this book.

I wouldn't say that I have any strong religious belief, so it might seem strange that I felt drawn to a travel book about life as a guest in a monastery.  Instead, I came to this book as someone who, for reasons neither interesting nor appropriate enough for this blog, currently feels that she is losing the war of attrition with modern life.  I am on holiday from work, and I feel tired and lower in confidence than I have done for a long time.  I'm finding it hard to relax into being on holiday - so I thought that this might be the right time to read this book.  The religious aspect of monastic life is outside my experience and understanding; instead I was drawn to the idea of solitude, escape and silence.  I hoped that reading this book now as an oasis of calm in a hectic world might, to use a hackneyed simile, be like plunging into cold, refreshing water on a hot day.

As an outsider to the way of life he describes, I found his book fascinating and in no way disrespectful.  It is an interesting account both of the monastic way of life, and his own personal reaction to being immersed in their lifestyle: at first exposure to their regimented way of life was oppressive to him - a state which lasted for days - until he relaxed into the solitude and the freedom from the demands of everyday life.  The reverse process - leaving the peace of the abbey to return to modern life - was an even harder, more traumatic experience (although he writes that subsequent retreats to monasteries have been easier than the first time).  He finds differences between the lives of the Benedictine monks - whose work and prayer is accompanied by a devotion to scholarship - and the harsher lives of the Cistercian, Trappist, monks who undergo even more extreme deprivation and live sparsely, atoning for the sins of the world.

I was interested both in the monastic way of life, and in the psychology of the acclimatisation process that he undergoes.  However, I was also struck by how beautifully written this is.  He writes evocatively both of the architecture and atmosphere of the monasteries that he visited, as well as of the natural wonders of the surrounding countryside.  I haven't done this in many reviews, but I am going to quote a bit from one passage to illustrate what I mean.  I was struck by the beauty and calm of this passage in particular:

"It was a wonderful room to wake up in.  Dreamless nights came to an end with no harsher shock than that of a boat's keel grounding on a lake shore.  Sunlight streamed in through the three tall windows and, as I lay in bed, all I could see was layer on ascending layer of chestnut leaves, like millions of spatulate superimposed green hands, and the crystalline sky of October framed by the thin reflected blue-white, or thick milk-white, or, where the sun struck, white gold surfaces of the walls and window-arches and embrasures." (This is on page 46 of the 2004 paperback edition, published by John Murray, which I have borrowed from my local library).

I read this book indoors, but I felt that, to truly appreciate its beauty, it should be read outside, sitting on the grass, maybe by a river, on a clear spring day.  Few books for me - the only other that readily comes to mind is Elizabeth Von Arnim's "Enchanted April" - so clearly suggest that they should best be read in a particular location and atmosphere.

So did this book succeed in helping me relax?  In all honesty, I'm not sure that it did - maybe I need to get me to a nunnery.  But it did have a curious effect on my reading style.  I'm usually a quick reader, with a nasty habit of sometimes skimming hugely descriptive passages to get to the action and the plot.  I'm not proud of it when an author has put so much time and craftsmanship into their work, but I'm aware that I still do it.  This book might not have calmed me and lowered my heart-rate - I'm too expert a worrier for that - but it did have the effect of consciously making me slow my reading and take in the beauty of his descriptive writing.  I wonder if that lesson might help me to find more solitude, peace and reflection in my future reading (which is likely to include more of Patrick Leigh Fermor's travel writing).

My forty books. Part 4: fiction

Stuff and Nonsense by Amy Cockram is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Firstly, a little bit of housekeeping. If anyone should discover this blog with this post about 40 books, you might be a bit confused. If you read the post on "Howards End is on the Landing," or "Starting to think about my forty books," then the idea behind this might make a bit more sense.

So far I have:
- 6 plays (I have decided that I enjoy "The Tempest" too much to ditch it, and for sentimental reasons I can't let go of "Twelfth Night")
- 1 poetry volume
- 5 non-fiction

That is 12 books so far. That leaves me with about 28 fiction choices to reach my 40.

I am going to start by discounting series of books from a purely practical standpoint. I'd rather have some variety than have, say, 7 of my choices taken up by the Harry Potter series. If it can't stand alone in its own right, then I am not going to chose it. That does leave me with a bit of dilemma over Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker books, Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series or Terry Pratchett.

I also have a dilemma over whether to chose fun books that I love, or worthy books so that someone reading this might think I am smarter than I am (if you don't know me; if you do know me then you will recognise if I am being fraudulent). I'm going to try to make an honest choice of the 40 books that I would be happy - well, not exactly happy - to subsist on for the rest of my life. You need a bit of fun to leaven out the intelligent stuff.

There is no particular significance to the numbering; they are just in the order that I thought of them / saw them on my shelves.

I'm going to break it down into a couple of categories - and I am going to start numbering them from here on. I'm far better with words than numbers, and I am starting to lose count.

Old favourites:
13 Daphne Du Maurier "Rebecca"
A really good story and Cornish too.

14 Donna Tartt "The Secret History"
I love this book. A friend gave it to me as a present - thanks Claire - and I have read it at least 4 times. I can't imagine reaching a point where I wouldn't want to reread it.

15 Elizabeth Kostova "The Historian"
Mark bought this for me and, as a fan of gothic horror with a penchant for vampires, I love this book.

16 Michael Ondaatje "The English Patient"
I haven't read this for a while, but I loved it when I first read it. Ondaatje's descriptive prose is extraordinarily vivid and imaginative, and I loved the characters of Caravaggio and Hana (more so than the titular patient). If I could wish a fictional character into existence, I would be hard pushed to chose between Caravaggio and Sherlock Holmes.

17 James Joyce "Ulysses,"
I can almost hear people thinking "What, really?" And "I thought you were going to choose honestly, and not out of intellectual pretentions?" However, I read and enjoyed "Ulysses" when doing teaching practice for my PhD. I'm not too keen on the sections with the pompous and prissy Stephen Daedalus, but I like the polymorphous Bloom and his wandering wife.

18 Charlotte Bronte "Jane Eyre,"
I've never taken to the other Brontes, but I like Charlotte a lot. I have read and enjoyed "Villette," "The Professor" and "Shirley," but "Jane Eyre" is always the one that I would want to return to the most. I'm not a Heathcliff kind of girl - never came to terms with Emily and "Wuthering Heights' - but I am quite partial to a bit of Rochester.

19 and 20 At least one Howard Jacobson - there is no better chronicler of male, middle-aged angst (not even Philip Roth). I think that I would have to pick "Peeping Tom," as this was my introduction to his writing and has a Cornish setting. Of his more recent books though, I am going to be controversial and pick "Who's Sorry Now?" and not his recent Booker winner (I think "Who's Sorry Now?" was longlisted). "Who's Sorry Now?" is a good example of what I love most about Howard Jacobson. He is very funny, but he can also take you by surprise with a moment of insight or tenderness. Sometimes to say that an author has done something that surprises you is a bad thing - it can mean that they have made their character do something inconsistent with what they have already told you about him or her - but with Howard Jacobson I always felt these moments are organic to the character.

21 I think I should have a Dickens. I read and enjoyed "Bleak House" when at university, so I think I will stick with that one.

22 Douglas Adams "The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul"
I refer you back to my comment about not choosing a series of books. I love Douglas Adams, but I don't think that you can isolate one of the Hitchhikers series and read it in the same way as you could a Dirk Gently. This might be heresy, but I think I even prefer Dirk Gently to Hitchhikers (although I might change my mind on this tomorrow) - and I would argue that it isn't so much a series as it is a couple of books with a recurring character.

23 I need a Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, but which one? I prefer the short stories to the novels, so I might pick the collection that has the majority of stories that I love. I've just trawled through my collection. It's a really hard choice. "The Adventures...' for "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" and "The Man with the Twisted Lip"? "The Memoirs..." for "The Musgrave Ritual" and "The Greek Interpreter"? I think that it might be "The Case-book of Sherlock Holmes" for "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire," "The Adventure of the Creeping Man" and "The Adventure of the Lion's Mane" (set in Cornwall). Although even now I am starting to doubt my choice because it doesn't have "The Adventure of the Dying Detective" or "The Adventure of the Devil's Foot" (both interesting insights into the friendship between Holmes and Watson) from "His Last Bow." I might have to rethink this one. But, even so, I can't do without a Sherlock Holmes, and I wish he did exist even more than I wish Caravaggio from "The English Patient" existed: the world needs a violin-playing, drug-taking, slightly sexually ambiguous genius detective in it.

24 Stephen Fry "The Liar"
His first book, and still the one I like best.

25 Tim O'Brien "The Things they Carried"
I try to recommend this book to people, but I don't think anyone has ever taken me up on it. A brilliant selection of postmodern short stories set in the Vietnam War, and worth it just for one of the stories, "How to Tell a True War Story." Tim O' Brien has written quite a few books that I enjoyed - he was in the Vietnam War, and most of his books touch on the war to varying degrees - but this is still, I think, his most effective and moving.

26 Paul Auster "New York Trilogy"
I remember enjoying this a few years ago. I have Casanova's memoirs to remind me of a holiday in Venice, and this can serve to evoke a holiday in New York last year.


Books I mean to read:
27 Nicola Barker "Darkmans"
I bought this a couple of years ago, but haven't had the chance to read it yet. It sounds interesting and odd. It was Booker shortlisted, but didn't win.

28 Cervantes "Don Quixote"
One that I feel I should read, but also which I think I will enjoy when I get around to it.

29 Herman Melville "Moby Dick"
Ditto.

30 A.S. Byatt "Possession"
This was bought for me by friends to read in hospital when I broke my ankle when I was 17. I'm ashamed to say that I haven't read it yet. I'm now 35. I have re-watched the film recently during my current Jeremy Northam obsession, so reading this has the added bonus that I can imagine him as Randolph Ash.

31 Steve Toltz "The Fraction of the Whole"
Another Booker shortlisted tome which I think I will enjoy, but haven't read yet.

32 Thomas Pynchon "Gravity's Rainbow"
I like "The Crying of Lot 49," and want to tackle this one.

33 Don DeLillo "Underworld"
I have read and enjoyed a few DeLillos - "White Noise" in particular I remember enjoying - and want to get around to this one. This has the added advantage of being another New York book.

34 Michael Chabon "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay"
Again, like De Lillo, I have read others by Michael Chabon but not yet read this one (which I believe won the Pulitzer and is one of his highest acclaimed). I also have "The Yiddish Policeman's Union" to read, which is hovering around the fringes of this list.

Now I have a problem, which isn't the one I expected to have when I started this list. I thought that I would hit 40 and be able to keep going, and have to condense the list. But actually now I have compiled all the books I feel strongly about, and have the difficult task - maybe even more difficult - of choosing a final 6 from the myriad books that I like a lot, but don't necessarily feel are indispensable. I think I need to think about this for a further day or 2 before I unveil my final 6, and I think I might also compile the entire list into one blog post. I may even change my mind about some...

Starting to think about my forty books....

Stuff and Nonsense by Amy Cockram is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Since reading "Howards End is on the Landing," I've already started to think about my forty books. The idea behind this comes from Susan Hill's "Desert Island Discs" inspired list - she set out to make a list of 40 books that she could subsist on for the rest of her life, if she wasn't allowed to read anything else. This is, of course, a hypothetical list. If someone told me I could only have 40 books, I might have to punch them and then start crying.

In "Desert Island Discs," the guest is allowed "The Bible" and "The Complete Works of Shakespeare." Under Susan Hill's rules there are no givens, and the complete works would be cheating. A Shakespeare play counts as one of your choices.

This might take a few posts to work through - I'd hate to rush into this and be stuck with 40 bad books.

I think I would need:
- some favourites that I know I like and would be happy to re-read. Comfort reading...
- some books I have always intended to read
- I'm not a huge poetry fan, but I think I might at least need some John Donne
- there would have to be a bit of Shakespeare. But what?
- any other plays?
- what percentage of fiction to non-fiction?
- at least a couple of really thick books to keep me going for longer?

I think I need to think about this for a bit longer....

"Howards End is on the Landing," by Susan Hill

Stuff and Nonsense by Amy Cockram is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

This post is so meta that it is starting to make my head hurt. Let me see if I can get this straight. You are reading a blog, written by me, about my reaction to reading a book which has been written by an author about her experience of reading books by other authors. I think that makes sense.

I have read very little of Susan Hill's fiction. In fact, I think I have only read "Strange Meeting," which I had to study at school. I didn't enjoy it much, but I do wonder if I might appreciate it more as an adult; it is very different to read something of your own volition, than it is to be required to study it to death. With some exceptions, I think most of us probably find the books we love most through chance and choice - not through being told to read something. I have, of course, heard of "The Woman in Black," but I have not yet read it. I tried "Mrs de Winter," as I love "Rebecca," but I didn't get very far into it because I did not enjoy her writing style in the novel.

In the light of this, it might seem odd that I chose to read this book. However, after reading "Outside of a Dog," I was predisposed to enjoy reading books about books. The starting point of "Howards End is on the Landing" was Susan Hill searching her copious bookshelves for a particular book, and instead finding vast numbers of books that she either had not read, or wanted to re-read, or had plain forgotten that she owned. Thus began her project to spend a year reading from home - to eschew the library, and resist buying the latest fashionable book or Richard and Judy promotion in order to rediscover the books on her own bookshelves. This is a laudable aim, and one that I have sadly not followed. I am fully aware of the irony that I borrowed this book from the library, instead of exploring the unread books on my bookshelves.

So was it worth shunning my own books to read this? I feel rather ambivalent about this book. This is not your average person's year of reading from home. In a chapter about James Bond, she recalls being at a party and seeing an aging Ian Fleming lounging against a mantelpiece with a cocktail. In a chapter on things that fall out of books, she finds inside a book a postcard from Dirk Bogarde - which is surely not a regular occurrence for most people. I never have exciting things like that fall out of my books. Maybe a bus ticket used as a bookmark, and that is about as thrilling as it gets. So hers is a very rarified year of reading from home. At first I was fascinated by her stories of encounters with famous writers, but it did begin to pall as a kind of glorified name-dropping.

This is not a flattering reflection of my own personality, but I think I was also alienated by jealousy. Her descriptions of her big farmhouse filled with books, and of reading in her idyllic garden in the sun, primarily made me envious. The chapter when she pours scorn on e-readers made me seethe with anger. She derides ereaders as being "monotonous-looking" and "small, flat, grey," and says that if she had one she would only need a small house which would be very tidy. Coming at this from the other angle, where I don't have a seemingly endless farmhouse of books, I would stand up for my ereader: maybe if you have a small house, then you need something small, flat and grey to store your books. She is very eloquent on the pleasure of a paper book as a physical object, and I am firmly with her on this. However I read a lot - I think I might have bypassed being an avid reader and progressed straight to obsessive - and, as such, living in a smallish house with limited bookspace, I would rather have a book on something small, flat and grey than no book at all. I was slightly mollified by her chapter in which she remembers having to choose the books she bought carefully, as they had to justify themselves in terms of bookshelf space and financial outlay. So she obviously does know how that feels - I'm just not totally sure that she remembers too well what it is like.

When writing on "Outside of a Dog," I wrote that a good book about books should make you want to read more of them. And, in the midst of my ire, I did not feel that this book did that. However, now that I have calmed down a bit, I have to admit that it did. I have reserved a book by Patrick Leigh Fermor about staying in monasteries from the library after reading her recommendation. I have also got a couple of Graham Greene books from the library which she recommended - although this is also largely due to enjoying an audiobook of "Our Man in Havana" being read by the very talented and, incidentally, very sexy Jeremy Northam.

I do have a further caveat. This book was published in 2009. However, for a book written so recently, it seems to concentrate more on the classics and feature very little contemporary writing (off-hand, the only names mentioned that really spring to mind are Ian McEwan and Martin Amis). If I did a year of reading from home - which isn't such a bad idea - my year of reading from home would involve a lot more recent fiction.

It has probably become very clear that this is a very personal review of her book, coloured by my own jealousies or preconceptions, but that is in keeping with the way that she writes about books. Her approach is not overly analytical, but rests more on what the book means to her and its context in her life. I'm conscious in re-reading some of my blogs that I feel I have evolved more of sense of my own authorial voice in these posts, which I hope feels quite personal. It isn't that different from her style of writing about books - just without so much name-dropping. But if I had met W.H Auden at a party when a student and he had offered me guidance on his poetry, I sure I would have also felt that worth dropping into this blog.

She also makes a list of the forty books that she could survive on, if she was only allowed 40 books to read for the rest of her life. I have been thinking about this as well - not really coming to any conclusion yet - but I might make this list in a future post.