A Work in Progress

Shakespeare: Worlds Elsewhere Winner!

Forgive my tardiness in pulling a name from the virtual hat (or in this case letting random.org pick a winning number between 1 and 7) for a copy of Andrew Dickson's Worlds Elsewhere.  The Randomizer came up with #4 (I listed names as they appeared in the comments section of the original and then reminder posts).  Janet in Virginia is the lucky winner, so I will be emailing you for your address.  Many thanks to all who left a comment!

End of the Week Links & Other Misc.

Since yesterday's post was so long, I'll keep today's post short!

First, remember I have a copy Andrew Dickson's just released Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare's Globe to give away (US residents only this time around, I'm afraid).  Just leave a comment on this post though the end of today, and I will be drawing a name tomorrow!  This year is the 400th Anniversary of Shakespeare's death, so a little attention and fanfare is surely in order!

Tomorrow, Saturday April 30 is Indie Bookstore Day, did you know?  There are not many indie bookstores in Omaha anymore, but I will try and do my part and perhaps stop by my favorite indie used bookstore and see what temptations  might come my way (never a problem there!).

It seems a little early for this but Booklist is getting a head start on the year's best crime (so far?).  And just ten of the best crime novels for youth. What happens when you have already looked at a number of books on the list and on that first perusal they just didn't quite appeal?  Should I give a few of them a go anyway, because maybe I just didn't give them a chance?  Always a conundrum when it comes to prize and 'best of' lists.  I tend to mostly choose books based on my own mood and desires rather than something I have simply heard really good things about.  I should read more outside my comfort zone, and I do try--I wonder sometimes what good books I am missing.

Not on the list above but a case in point as I keep hearing about it all over the place is Laura Lippman's newest standalone, Wilde Lake, which comes out next week.

In keeping with the detective fiction theme I found an interesting article on Women Detectives in Fact and Fiction via Literary Hub.  They always have a very eclectic range of bookish topics.  Often they seem more highbrow than lowbrow but sometimes they surprise me by their variety.

So, I had mixed feelings about Paula Hawkins's The Girl on the Train, but I am very curious about the film.  Maybe it's a story that will work for me better on the big screen?  You can see the trailer here.

I've not been sharing my needlework progress of late as there has been no progress sadly.  I am so close to completing my poor winter sampler.  I am going to try and carve out stitching time this weekend no matter what!  I have Spring started but at the rate I am working I fear it will be summer before I make any decent progress.  And then there is this mystery sampler that starts in June for a Halloween design (and if I did it and stuck with it, I could have a finished sampler by the time the holiday rolls around . . .).  It sounds like fun, but should I spurge and do it?  You get monthly installments and watch the design emerge with each new chart.  Like a serial read, only with stitching!  Hmm.

Thank goodness it is the weekend as it has been a grey, dreary week and I have been feeling particularly grumpy.  Maybe this is the book I should pick up and read to fit my mood!

Four to Finish-Five New-Six Wishes

Four books I plan on finishing next and a few of them still this month, I hope!  With three days left in the month it is definitely iffy, but I like having a plan.  I guess my reading will always and forever be scattered.  At least for the foreseeable future as much as I try and get it all under control I just always have piles of books in various stages of completion (or starts/beginnings).  Before I started blogging I might have three or four books sitting on my nightstand, but that's it.  I was more a one or two book a week reader and would normally just be reading one or two books at a time and all without much thought or planning.  I wonder what life would have been like had not the internet (and access to So Very Many Books, oh my) not come along?!

So, from top to bottom:  I just picked up Lawrence Block's The Sins of the Fathers, which is the very first Matthew Scudder mystery.  I can't remember if someone recommended him or if I read about him via someone like Sarah Weinman, whose recommendations I eagerly and happily always accept as I think she is the goddess of crime literature.  Block is said to be one of the very best crime writers working today and as the stories begin in NYC in the 1970s (an era I am most recently interested in reading about or books set in) I was excited to get the book and start reading.  Now I think I need to start buying the rest of the books.  I just started this but I can see how it could be easily consumed in one lazy day of reading. 

I am nearly finished with M.M. Kaye's Death in Zanzibar and if you like Mary Stewart or Elizabeth Peters or even Susanna Kearsley you would find Kaye's work most entertaining and satisfying.  Very fun stuff and I am contemplating rereading all her books of romantic suspense again.  I had read them all except this one years ago.

Jean Giono's Hill is a bit more thoughtful but not hard going and I am trying hard to finish it this month just to stay on track.  Four months into the year and four NYRBs down on my subscription.  So far, so good.  Can I keep it up for the rest of the year?  I will be mightily pleased if I do.  I think it is my main reading goal actually.

I don't think I will finish The Green Road by Anne Enright this month, but maybe it will be my first May finish.  I am enjoying it immensely.  It is the first book by her I have read and it won't be the last.  It is also one of the Baileys Women's Prize shortlist books, and I hope to read one or two others before the award is announced in June.

Ah yes.  New books.  They seem to arrive at my house at a steady pace these days, and sometimes I even go out and find them myself and bring them home!  I discovered this quaint little bookstore that is tucked away downtown with very abbreviated hours.  I was lucky enough to be in the right phase of the moon on a rainy day at just the right moment and found the doors open and so spent a happy hour drifting about the store enjoying the very eclectic and literary selection of books.  Lots of classics, Booker winners, artsy titles, but fun things, too.  (Well, not that any of those former mentions aren't fun, but you know what I mean . . .).  I allowed myself two purchases and settled on The Collected Works of Nathanael West, which contains four short novels: The Day of the Locus, Miss Lonelyhearts, A Cool Million and The Dream Life of Balso Snell.   America in the 30s--"West's vision of American modernity is terrifyingly comical and diagnoses the tawdriness and meretriciousness of much of American popular culture."

I had never heard of The Lawyer's Secret by M.E. Braddon (of Lady Audley's Secret fame, a novel I enjoyed very much).  It is one of those slender Hesperus Classics books and will surely be a May read.  "Orphan Ellinor Arden is called from her secluded Paris home to London for the hearing of her estranged uncle’s will. To her surprise, she is named as the inheritor of his fortune, on condition that she marry his adopted son. Encouraged by her lawyer and guardian, the dashing Horace Margrave, she attaches herself irreversibly to this perfect stranger, but it soon becomes clear that her trust in a dead man’s wishes has been misplaced."

I probably don't need to say much about the wonderful Sarah Waters's The Paying Guests.  But I will say this purchase was quite decadent for me.  I had to have the US edition when it first came out as I was captivated by the cover design.  Shallow, I know, but I would have had to have it right away in any case.  Only it is a hefty hardcover and I hate dragging them about with me in my bookbag so all good intentions to read it right away were ignored.  The Book Depository has a "bargain" page and this appeared on it.  For just over $5 I now have a spiffy paperback that I can easily carry about.  It has immediately risen to the top of the pile and as soon as I finish one of my in progress books, it is slotted for the next place.  I shouldn't even ask this question, but I wonder (now that the last is out in paperback), if she is working on a New book?  Hmm.

The Sea Garden by Deborah Lawrenson came from that same bargain page.  "Romance, suspense, and World War II mystery are woven together in three artfully linked novellas—rich in drama and steeped in atmosphere—from the critically acclaimed author of The Lantern."  I read The Lantern so look forward to this one, too.

I've read and enjoyed Michelle Moran before, so when this galley copy of her newest book, Mata Hari's Last Dance, showed up unexpectedly in my mailbox I was thrilled.  "rom Indian temples and Parisian theatres to German barracks in war-torn Europe, international bestselling author Michelle Moran who “expertly balances fact and fiction” (Associated Press) brings to vibrant life the famed world of Mata Hari: dancer, courtesan, and possibly, spy."

***

And there are always new books being added to my wishlist.  I won't even tell you how long it is, but I think it runs well into four digits.  Here are six of the most recent "wish-fors":

Afloat by Guy de Maupassant -- Saw this one at that little bookstore and noted down the title.  It sounds right up my alley.  "Afloat, originally published as Sur l’eau in 1888, is a book of dazzling but treacherously shifting currents, a seemingly simple logbook of a sailing cruise along the French Mediterranean coast that opens up to reveal unexpected depths, as Guy de Maupassant merges fact and fiction, dream and documentation in a wholly original style."

Dancing on the Outskirts by Shena Mackay -- Short stories!  "Mackay's new collection of short stories showcases her genius for building comedy from terseness and compression ... her precise, unsentimental images, integral to her stories' themes, sum up entire lives ... A triumph! -- Michelle Roberts."  Will try and resist until it is out in paper . . .

Lady Cop Makes Trouble by Amy Stewart -- Did I already mention this?  I loved the first book and was hoping for another and yes, there is going to be another.  "Lady Cop Makes Trouble sets Constance loose on the streets of New York City and New Jersey--tracking down victims, trailing leads, and making friends with girl reporters and lawyers at a hotel for women. Cheering her on, and goading her, are her sisters Norma and Fleurette--that is, when they aren't training pigeons for the war effort or fanning dreams of a life on the stage."

Radio Girls by Sarah-Jane Stratford -- Thanks to LindaY for telling m about this one.  I have always thought it would be cool to work for the BBC!  "The Great War is over, and change is in the air, in this novel that brings to life the exciting days of early British radio…and one woman who finds her voice while working alongside the brilliant women and men of the BBC."

The Disappearance of Maria Glenn: A True-Life Regency Mystery by Naomi Clifford -- "Taunton, 1817. What seems a simple newspaper report of “elopement gone wrong” turns out to be a rollercoaster story of crime, coercion, illusory triumph and fraudulent defeat. Barrister George Tuckett wakes to discover that his 16-year-old niece Maria Glenn, reputedly the heiress to West Indian sugar plantations, is missing. He discovers that she has been abducted by the Bowditches, a local farming family, who intend to force her to marry one of their sons. Maria is rescued and Tuckett starts investigating the crime himself, uncovering a complex and disturbing web of lies and impersonation."

Murder in Time by Julie McElwain -- I think the premise of this sounds intriguing.  "When brilliant FBI agent Kendra Donovan stumbles back in time and finds herself in a 19th century English castle under threat from a vicious serial killer, she scrambles to solve the case before it takes her life―200 years before she was even born."

 Sometimes I think there are just too many choices in life.  Too many kinds of toothpaste, if you know what I mean, and do we really need all of them . . .  Strangely I rarely feel that way about books.

What We Talk About When We Talk About the Tube: The District Line

Well, moving right along in the Underground . . . I'm on a little roll.  Already I've hopped from the Metropolitan Line over to the District Line with John Lanchester's What We Talk About When We Talk About the Tube (and now have the Central Line at the ready), and so to keep all those Lines straight I had better tell you about what I've read before taking in yet more information.  Did I already say how much I am enjoying these little bites of social history via the London Underground?  Whoever came up with this idea for a series, which is in honor of the 150th anniversary of the Underground, should get a raise.  Or at least an enthusiastic pat on the back.  They may be slight little books, but they are so interesting and informative (and I mean that in a good way, not in a dry-imparting-of-rote-facts-only sort of way) and my list of books, movies or new subjects to explore seems to grow more with each new read. 

Did you know that there is a difference between the Underground and the Tube?  I thought the words were interchangeable, but there is actually a distinction.  Like me, Lanchester, who did not grow up in London, wasn't sure if the Tube was something other than the Underground, or if it was simply another word for it.  His impression was that the Tube was some other thing--more modern and cooler-sounding.  Londoners might use the terms interchangeably,  but upon doing research for the book he learned that there is indeed a difference.  The first Underground Lines--the Metropolitan (1863), District (1868) and Circle (1884) Lines were not actually Tubes.  

Here's where it gets technical.  They weren't Tubes because they weren't tunnels.  Tunnels being a hole carved out of the ground for a certain distance which opens back out again.  The first Lines were made using the 'cut and cover' method--"a hole dug straight into the ground, laid with tracks and brick walls, and then covered back up."  So these lines are not even all that far underground and are called 'sub-surface' lines.  Now the Tube uses a very different digging technique. 

"It features a shield, a huge frame, on which the twelve 'navigators' who dug the tunnels stood: the frame advanced gradually through the earth while the men dug, and then the other navigators bricked up the tunnel walls and roof behind them as they went."

***

"This was the birth of the Tube: the deep tunnels which were dug using the shield technique, and which run through the clay subsoil underneath London, are in the strict sense the Tube.  The Underground includes the Tube, but the Tube does not include the Underground."

How's that for sheer nerdiness?  You never know, you might just need this for a trivia question someday.  You can thank me (and Mr. Lanchester) later!  He notes that this difference is most useful to those who don't like being deep underground.  The Tube Line the author uses most often, the Northern Line, is also the oldest of them and is often called 'the Misery Line' as it was for some time the longest train tunnel.  It "disappears into the earth at Morden and then not popping up above ground again until Finchley, seventeen and a half miles later."  Now that is quite a stretch. 

I very much enjoyed reading about the District Line.  John Lanchester gives all sort of interesting facts yet he couches them in interesting stories and anecdotes.  And he throws in lots of the personal, too, which all overlaps with the Mabey book about the Metropolitan Line.  It's part history, part memoir, part social history and maybe even a little science thrown in for good will.  So the books tend to build on each other nicely.  Going back to the beginning and to share something of significance about the District Line--it stretches across very different social and geographical ends of London.  It goes from the poor East of the city to the rich West.  And it sounds like the areas it crosses is quite diverse, too.  I like the way one of the Underground workers described the demographic differences between the two ends. 

"Put it like this, if they're annoyed about something, at this end of the line--we were at Dagenham (East)--they yell at you.  You know about it straight away.  At the other end, they write letters."

Just like the Metropolitan Line helped create Metroland--those suburbs outside the city, a place for Londoners to enjoy the countryside yet still able to commute in to their jobs, the rest of the Lines did their part to create the city of London as we know it now.  That iconic London Underground map, which I am sure you can easily bring to mind makes you think that those lines were simply drawn as if superimposed on top of the city.  You would think that the city came before the map, whereas in reality "London as it exists today would not be the same place without the Underground."

"The Underground is what gave the city its geographical spread, its population growth, its clusters of spaces and places.  The new Underground stations became the places around which the city grew; they were the first gravitational mass, like the clusters of debris in the nascent solar system, which agglomerated and grew and thickened and became planets."

One other little bit of trivia, before I leave the District Line (and I have really barely scratched the surface of what Lanchester writes about), did you know the word Commute (as in your daily commute, or commuter) is an American thing?  The original meaning of the word commute means "to give something in exchange for something else, or to change one thing for another."  In the US regular travelers "began to swap day tickets for better-value season tickets; they 'commuted' their daily tickets into season tickets."

"The Oxford English Dictionary gives the first instance of the modern, dragging-your-weary-bones-to-work sense as in the American magazine the Atlantic Monthly, which defined a commuter as follows: 'one who purchases a commutation-ticket'.  A commutation-ticket was the American term for a season ticket.  Commuters commuted 'commute'."

Hah!  Anyway, Lanchester has a very engaging way of drawing you into this wonderful and lively little book!  I have once again switched lines and now will be stepping onto the Central Line with Danny Dorling's The 32 Stops.  I wonder where my journey will take me next.

In case you are wondering--yes, these books are great fun!  So far, I've ridden the Victoria Line, the Circle Line, the Metropolitan Line and here the District Line.

Teaser Tuesday: Hill

April's NYRB Classics Book Club selection is Jean Giono's Hill, which I thought I had better pick up and begin reading in earnest before May comes along and a new book appears in my mailbox.  I started reading and decided that it was going to be one of those books which is deceptively simple.  Slender though it may be, coming in at just over 100 pages, it is lush and brims with meaning.  So, I turned back to the beginning and read the introduction, which I normally save until after I have finished a book fearing potential spoilers.  Sometimes, however, introductions are really helpful before reading a book.   David Abram's introduction is really helpful, but he offers so much (very articulate) helpful information that I am going to have to go back and reread it when I have finished the story!

I think I could write a whole post about the introduction alone which is going to take me a while to process, but let me just share a few things from it, and then a teaser of Giono's writing.  I have read his work on a couple of occasions.  I started this year's reading with the fable (and I highly recommend it if you have not yet read it) The Man Who Planted Trees.  Several years ago, however, I read his WWI novel, To the Slaughterhouse, which was a raw, visceral sort of read.  It is a war story to end all war stories, and if you read it, you might find that you are a different person coming out of the book than you were going in.

Hill is Giono's first published work and I am very intrigued by it and will be curious to really get into the story.  Apparently in this as well as in his other first works "the primary actors are the elemental powers of the more-than-human earth that enable and and necessarily influence all the human happenings".  And a teaser from the opening page to give you a taste:

"Four houses, orchids flowering up to the eaves, emerge from a dense stand of grain."

"Up there among the hills, where earth's flesh folds in thick rolls."

"Sinfoin in bloom bleeds red  under the olive trees.  Bees dance around birches sticky with sap."

"A fountain murmurs and overflows in two streams that plunge from a ledge and scatter in the wind.  Gurgling under the grass, they reunite and course through a bed of rushes."

"The wind hums in the plane trees."

"These are the Bastides Blanches, the White Houses."

"The remnants of a hamlet perched halfway between the plain, where steam-powered threshers roar in tumult, and the vast, lavender wasteland, the wind's domain, in the frigid shadow of the mountain range of Lure."

"The land of wind."

Interestingly the story opens with lots of description of place--earth and wind and animals--an imposing vista and Mount Lure dominates the backdrop where the town sits perched.  It takes a few pages before the little village, what that it is, begins to populate with actual people and then there will only be a baker's dozen or so.  This story, I have read, will be about the beauty and the terror of nature.  Despite having been written in 1929, it is just as timely now as it was then and certainly most prescient.  How did he see, how did he know what is coming?  Actually, what is here now.  Maybe from his experiences during the war when he saw how man and mechanization could not just damage but literally wipe out the countryside and the people in it?

Okay, so since I am thinking about language and how Giono uses it, and this is something that is discussed in some detail in the introduction I will share just one more quote and I am afraid it is going to be quite a  mouthful.  (This is why I will be reading it again when I have finished the story).

" . . . Giono showed that by using corporeal and sensorial turns of phrase that mingle the flesh of humans and other animals with that of plants and earthly elements; by wielding metaphors that merge weather phenomena with sensations that we feel in our torso or our limbs; by combining in one extended metaphor terms are drawn from different sensory modalities (that is, by using audible terms to describe visual phenomena, or tactile terms to describe olfactory sensations)--such intellectual notions begin to be experienced as visceral, felt realities."

I think this is going to be a story that is not only easy to bring to the imagination but one quite thoughtful and using a language well ahead of its time.  I hope to make quick work of it this week and will be back soon to share more of the story.

Short Story 'Monday': Mary Costello

So, after much deliberation and consideration, I've decided to give the stories of Mary Costello a try.  I have heard good things about her from trusted sources and after reading the first two stories this weekend think this will be a perfect fit.  Maybe this is my year to read lots of Irish Literature as Costello grew up in County Galway and now lives in Dublin.  I plan on reading her first novel, Academy Street, at some point.  It won the Irish Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award.  The story collection I am now reading, The China Factory, was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award.  So, as you see the accolades for her writing abound.

As this collection, with just a dozen stories, is just over 150 pages, so I am hoping to make quick progress.  Most stories are only around ten pages, but in the hands of someone as talented as Costello seems to be, ten pages is a pretty wide canvas on which to paint quite a good story.

The collection opens with the titular story, "The China Factory".  This is in its own way a coming-of-age story.  Certainly by the story's end there is a feeling that the character has made a number of self-revelatory observations about her youthful behavior.

"The summer I turned seventeen I worked as a sponger in a china factory.  I walked to the end of our road every morning to catch my lift to the city with Gus Meehan, and every evening I came home with a film of fine dust lodged in the pores of my skin.  From the back seat I had a view of Gus's broad shoulders and the china clay caked in the creases of his neck and in his grey hair.  The air inside the car smelled of cigarette ash and stale masculine sweat."

Gus is shy and deferential with a bit of a stammer and by almost anyone's standards is something of a misfit.  But he is a gentle soul and I think the unnamed narrator recognizes this but is just too young an inexperienced to appreciate such accomplishments.  She's not cruel but she's not got the self-confidence yet either to stand behind her beliefs rather than fall in line with the poor regard of her young coworkers.

I think Gus holds a certain fascination and attraction for her.  She watches and notices from a distance, but being young she is still trying to find her way in the world.  She manages to get a prize position applying gold leaf to the china plates, a position coveted by her coworkers, which of course does nothing to endear herself to them.  Maybe for this reason that the girls now resent her, and the fact that all along she had planned to leave at the end of the summer for university that she so blithely 'throws Gus under the wheels' so to speak when the other girls make fun of him.  She tells her story looking back from her new life, wishing she might have been able to take them all with her into her new world. 

"You Fill Up My Senses" is the story of a mother's life as observed through the eyes of her young daughter.  Once again Costello's young narrator is a keen observer who only over time sees the real world of a woman she thinks of as someone "who understands everything about her".  Her mother may understand this child, but it will take the narrator time to fully understand the life of her mother.  Her mother's mother died when she was young, so she grew up motherless.  And sometimes the narrator fears the same will happen to her.  It's always interesting seeing the adult world through the eyes of a child.  They make interesting and often accurate observations but often misunderstand the nuances of what they see. 

As the wife of a farmer and the mother of several children there is never any rest, no matter how weary she may be.  Even when the farmer's/her father's day comes to an end, her mother is still has the family's chores.  What will it take to have her mother forget the five children and the arguments and the never ending work.

"She gazes at their faces in the honeymoon photograph.  They do not know what is ahead of them.  If they knew what was ahead of them they might have left the lakes of Killarney."

The book blurb says that Costello "examines the passions and perils of everyday life with startling insight, casting a light into the darkest corners of the human heart."

Next weekend definitely "Things I See" and hopefully, too, "The Patio Man".

In Honor of Shakespeare: 400 Years!

Today, April 23, marks the 400th anniversary of the death of Shakespeare.  It seems like there should be some sort of fanfare, don't you think?  Imagine what the world would be like had there not been a Shakespeare.  It's almost impossible to do really, so ingrained is he and his work in our culture.  Not just Western culture either.  I've got a celebratory treat to share and one that so very fittingly marks this day and his worldwide importance. 

I've just received a copy of the newly released Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare's Globe by Andrew Dickson to add to my reading pile.  Actually I have two copies.  One that I shall be eagerly dipping into this weekend and one to share.  So, if you are a US resident and would like to throw your name into the virtual hat to win a copy, just leave me a comment.  To get into the spirit of things, if you have a favorite work or sonnet or movie adaptation or literary retelling or a visit to the Globe Theater, or any other Shakespeare story, please feel free to share.  

The book has an interesting and unusual take on Shakespeare as Andrew Dickson traveled across continents and through the centuries to tell Shakespeare's story, so to speak.  While the Bard never traveled, his work has certainly made its way far and wide.  Worlds Elsewhere is both a cultural history and a literary travelogue that attempts "to understand how Shakespeare has become the international phenomenon he is--and why".

I have a little teaser to whet your appetite:

"The theatre was packed, people jostling for position. As I watched, three men detached themselves from the crowd and began slowly to climb the steps. A ripple of applause washed over them as they came up on to the stage. Acknowledging it, they glanced around – surprised, bemused to find themselves here in the flat grey light of an English summer afternoon. They were decently dressed, if perhaps a little shabby: long perahan tunics in grey and mud- brown, loose trousers, jackets, rubber sandals. Orange security lanyards flapped at their necks. They carried bags; one had a rug slung across his arm. They looked fresh off the plane, and dusty with tiredness."

You can read more about the book here and check out Andrew Dickson's website here.

I've not read nearly enough Shakespeare, but my own favorite is Twelfth Night.  You know how fond I am of female characters dressing up as boys.   Mistaken identities, adventure, romance, what's not to love?

I'll drop the names into a hat next Friday and pull a winner out, so make sure you leave a comment if you want to join in the celebratory reading.  While I can only pick a winner for a US reader, do check out Andrew's Twitter feed as there are other giveaways and competitions where you can try your luck.

Joy of Stories: Choosing a New Collection

So, so far two short story collections this year and I loved them both--the first by Tove Jansson and then the most recent stories by the inimitable Elizabeth Taylor.  How to follow up after two such remarkable women writers?  I could (happily) read more stories by either woman.  But I have so many other collections to choose from.  Here are the books I grabbed that were closest at hand and seem a reasonable length:

By the Light of the Silvery Moon edited by Ruth Petrie.  This collection was compiled in honor of the 10th birthday of of the Silver Moon Women's Bookshop (sadly now defunct).  This collection contains stories by a nice variety of women writers-from Elizabeth Jolley, to Lisa Alther, Liza Cody, to Shena Mackay to Hanan al-Shaykh.

A Few Days in the Country and Other Stories by Elizabeth Harrower.  Harrower is an Australian writer and this collection has stories published in journals in the 1960s and 1970s.  I read her story "Alice" in the New Yorker last year and was hoping to try more of her work and voila, here is the collection!

What's It Like Out? and Nobody's Business by Penelope Gilliatt.  I want to try something by Gilliatt this year and what better introduction to a writer's work than by reading a few short stories?  Also, I am hoping to read more Viragos (and Persephones, too), because I love the books both presses publish.  I so enjoyed Elizabeth Taylor and I want something like her work, but some other view of the world.  Anthony Burgess called her "highly intelligent, economical, poignant, highly contemporary."

The China Factory by Mary Costello.  I have heard many good things about her and this collection.  "Her prose is subtle, strong, and lyrical, while her knowledge of human nature yields memorable characters. Common themes in these stories are the shock of loneliness, the inability of people to communicate with honesty, the effects of shame, the fear of self-disclosure, and the strain of infidelity and cruelties on relationships. Through variations in style, using both male and female points of view, she depicts modern Irish lifestyles." (Booklist).

Dimanche and Other Stories by Irene Nemirovsky.  I have read a few of her shorter works and one or two stories, but I seem to be collecting her books without making much of a dent in that particular pile.  "  Written between 1934 and 1942, these ten gem-like stories mine the same terrain of Némirovsky's Suite Francaise: a keen eye for the details of social class; the tensions between mothers and daughters, husbands and wives; the manners and mannerisms of the French bourgeoisie; questions of religion and personal identity. Moving from the drawing rooms of pre-war Paris to the lives of men and women in wartime France, here we find the beautiful work of a writer at the height of her tragically short career."  I have the lovely Persephone Books edition.

Strangers by Antonia White.  I have already read two of White's novels this year and would be happy to further read some of her short stories, which I suspect will be thematically similar to the Clara Batchelor quartet.  "With uncompromising clarity, in her careful, delicate prose, antonia White looks at the pains and joys of growing up, of falling in and out of love, the borderlands between love and loneliness, sanity and madness, belief and the loss of faith."

The Rendezvous and Other Stories by Daphne du Maurier.  I have read quite a few of her short stories and I think I must own nearly all her books.  She is an excellent short story writer and I recognize a few in this collection I have read before, but I am always happy to revisit her work.  It has been far too long since I have read her, too.

How to choose!  Of course part of the pleasure of picking a new book is comparing and contrasting and dipping into the books and seeing which clicks at the moment.  And with stories you truly don't know what treats you are in store for.  I only hope whichever I decide on will be as stunningly good as both Elizabeth Taylor and Tove Jansson's writing.  Check back Sunday (or Monday . . .depending on how well organized I am this coming weekend) to see which will end up in my reading pile.

A Good Parcel of English Soil, Richard Mabey

It's amazing how chock full of interesting information, engaging stories, and even reading suggestions these slim little Penguin Lines (which celebrate the 150th anniversary of the London Underground in 2013) are filled with.  I am now embarking on the fourth book in a set of twelve (one for each Underground Line), so it is time to tell you about Richard Mabey's A Good Parcel of English Soil which I read a month or so ago before the Lines begin to get muddled in my mind.

Mabey, a nature writer who I've read and enjoyed before, takes as his subject the Metropolitan Line which was the first "urban railway to burrow underground".  Mabey points out that the Metropolitan Line opened the same year as Jules Verne's novel Voyage to the Center of the Earth came out.  Seems fitting, don't you think.  London's Underground is "an expression of nineteenth-century futurism."  The more I read about the London Underground the more I marvel at both the ingenuity of it (and more about that in my next post about the book I am reading right now) and the social history surrounding it.  It is iconic in so many ways.

I was particularly happy to read about the Metropolitan Line (and Mabey whose writing I like very much) as its history of why and how it came about is so very interesting. 

"The Metropolitan line does at least have a destination, and a mission.  It exists to take people out of a working city to live in a greener place.  The irony is that in doing so it has succeeded in wiping out, or at least dramatically changing, many of the green places that it used as bait for its customers.  So it's also ironic, I guess, that as a boy naturalist and then would-be Romantic scribbler, I've been endlessly enthralled by the strange and not always pretty negotiations between human and natural life that it brought into being."  [Mabey grew up in the shadow of the Metropolitan Line.]

And so we have the famous Metroland which has inspired books and stories and films.  You have probably heard the term, just as I had, but I didn't realize the significance or meaning behind it.  Back in its early days the Railway Company had bought up those vast stretches of land on which to build houses, which they hoped to sell to potential customers.  Genius in its way really, even if it didn't quite work out in the way they hoped and intended.  Mabey puts it so wonderfully descriptively--the Railway Company provided the "honeytrap" of land to lure Londoners out and then provided the beeline to the destination in the form of the Metropolitan Line. 

We're talking classic suburbia here.  Was it real or just faux-rural is the question. 

"Metroland was a grandiose and sometimes cynical concept designed to encapsulate the urban worker's dream of a country retreat, wreathed by wild flowers and birdsong but not too far from the office."

Mabey calls it Arcadia for profit.  What it ended up being is a margin between city and real open countryside.   Here's an early pitch (from a 1927 brochure) by the Metropolitan company to draw people out from the city.

"There is a good parcel of English soil in which to build a home and strike root, inhabited from old, as witness the lines of camps on the hill tops and confused mounds amongst the woods, the great dyke which crossed it east and west, the British trackway, the Roman Road aslant the eastern border, the packhorse ways worn deep into the hillsides, the innumerable fieldpaths which mark the labourers' daily route from hamlet to farm.  The new settlement of Metroland proceeds apace, the new settlers thrive amain."

I can imagine this Metroland, though I am not sure I am visualizing it quite as it is or was.  Suburbia holds a different image in my own mind, more city and less rural and I get the idea that this British Metroland was far more rural, or at least had hoped to be.  The creation of Metroland, which was meant to be a sort of rural destination in the end destroyed large sections of "ordinary farming countryside".  While it might have offered relief from being cooped up and packed into the city it only ever became "sub-rural".     

I think I could easily read this again and pull more information from it, but Mabey has provided me with further reading material.  One book leads to another, or in this case one book leads to a novel, a short story and a film.  In setting the tone and introducing his subject matter Mabey refers to a classic science fiction short story by A.J. Deutsch published in 1950 called "The Möbius Strip".  The story premise is that a Boston Tube train vanishes with more than 400 passengers and rematerializes some ten weeks later as if nothing happened at all.

"A mathematician brought in to advise the tube company believes the subway has become a four-dimensional version of the Möbius strip, the mathematical device in which a length of material is given a single twist and its ends are then joined, so that it has only a single surface, leading to all kinds of mysterious space-time anomalies." 

So of course I had to go out and find the story, which I photocopied and now must pull out to read.  And to really visualize Metroland there is the novel by the same name by Julian Barnes, which I found a copy of to read. 

"His first novel is a wryly funny and evocative account of what it felt like to be a self-styled existentialist teenager living in this suburban motherlode.  He also gives an exact description of how the 1960s trains still echoed, in their ornamentation, the fixtures and fittings of the rural dreamland they were bound for."

I can't wait to read it.  And for real visuals, there was "an eccentrically funny film" called Metro-land made in 1973.  I have taken a peek and it does look eccentrically funny and it can be viewed online here.  As you can see one small book (and I didn't even mention all the books he makes note of) is leading to a whole new (though related) reading path, which I do plan on undertaking.  For now, though, I have moved on to John Lanchester's What We Talk About When We Talk About the Tube, which promises to be equally as interesting and informative. 

I've written about the Victoria Line and the Circle Line.  The Lanchester is about the District Line.   

I Will Have Vengeance: The Winter of Comm. Ricciardi, Maurizio de Giovanni

When I first met Commissario Ricciardi I could only think, man . . . what a character.  And when I say character, I mean that both literally and figuratively.  As a character in a novel and a "character" (he being a quite distinct individual).  Can I endure a whole mystery about such a morose and curmudgeonly individual?  And then the story is about a murder that takes place in an opera house.  And while I love going to the opera, why did it sound sort of a stuffy locale to set a murder?  Okay.  Proven wrong am I on both counts.  And just for the record, and I have more than a few of these, Commissario Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi, is now my official newest fictional crush.  I Will Have Justice: The Winter of Commissario Ricciardi (Il senso del dolore translated from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel--my copy was first published by Hersilia Press by the way, but Europa Editions now publishes his books in the US) is the first of seven (at least there are seven that have been translated into English) mysteries featuring the Commissario.  Maybe there are more published in Italy and are yet to be translated?  One can only hope.

So, what should I tell you about first?  The mystery or should I tell you about Commissario Ricciardi and his milieu?  Okay, setting first.  Atmosphere and sense of time and place are high on my list of things I want from a good crime novel, and this one has it all.  And it is even the first book of a series, which are often a little clunky coming out of the starting gate (and this one is not).  It's Italy 1931, and Luigi Ricciardi was born the same year as this new century dawned.  He is the Commissario of Police with the Mobile Unit of the Regia Questura di Napoli.  Doesn't that just roll right off the tongue.  Forgive me if I spice up my post(s) about these mysteries with lots of Italian words if I can possibly slip them in as I love the way Italian sounds (and it is close enough to Spanish that I can work out the meaning of some words and phrases).  Il Duce and his Fascists are in power and the murder that takes place in this story has reached those upper echelons of society and caught his eye.  While his forbidding presence is there, he mostly only hovers in the background.

Can I share something, well reveal it more like, about the Commissario?  It is an unusual plot device which comes in handy in numerous ways.  It is a small spoiler, but if you read the book it will be revealed in the very first chapter in any case.   It regards The Incident.  The Incident will overshadow everything.  It makes the Commissario the man he is and it sets him apart from his colleagues.  They know there is something not quite right about him.  And being the superstitious place that Naples is, it would not be surprising that if he walks by, people might make the symbol against him to ward off the evil eye.

"The dead child was standing motionless at the intersection between Santa Teresa and the museum.  He was watching two boys who were sitting on the ground, playing Giro d'Italia with marbles.  As he watched them, he kept saying, 'Can I go down? Can I go down?'"

"The man without a hat knew the dead child was there even before he saw him . . ."

Luigi Ricciardi was born in Salerno and grew up in Fortino, the only son of Baron Ricciardi di Malomonte.  His father died when he was quite young and his mother when he was a teenager studying at a Jesuit College.  When he was just a boy, he saw something that will forever haunt him.  Such a fright, everyone put it down to an excessive imagination.  But the Commissario sees dead people.  That first murder when he was so very young was The Incident that will never let him know peace of mind or spirit.  Save for a very few dedicated friends, Commissario Ricciardi is a loner who dedicates himself to his job, to helping those who leave this world in a fit of violence to find justice.  His tata Rosa, now seventy but still the loyal family retainer, looks after him tirelessly and continually laments his decision to be alone.  And then there is the Brigadier.  Raffaele Maione is his second in command and will not allow a single word against the Commissario so deep is his loyalty and dedication to the younger man.  His colleagues are aware of his uncanny knack of speedily solving crimes.  There is a certain respect but also a certain fear.  Maione suspects there is some deep sadness in the Commissario's history that has made him the way he is. 

Slender and of medium height and build, Commissario Ricciardi has unsettling green eyes and a dark complexion with black hair slicked back with Brilliantine. "His small, almost feminine hands were restless, always moving.  He kept them in his pocket, aware that they betrayed his emotion, his tension."

"His subordinates didn't understand his moroseness, his silences: never a smile, never a superfluous comment.  His methods were unconventional.  He did not follow procedures, but in the end he was always right.  Those who were more superstitious--and in that city there were many like that--sensed something unnatural in Ricciardi's solutions, as if his investigations proceeded backwards as if he went over the events in reverse."

It is the murder of Italy's most famous tenor, Maestro Vezzi, that brings the Commissario to Naples' famed San Carlo Opera House.  If there is an equivalent term for men, Vezzi is a "diva" extraordinaire.  Talented and aware of his talent, he takes what he wants and makes demands that must be filled at his momentary whims without a thought to anyone else. It's a curious and bloody murder, made all the more strange by finding a scarf and coat on the sofa of the dressing room that should be covered in blood yet is clean and dry.  And then the mystery of how the murder got into the room and out of it without having been seen by a single soul.  Even Il Duce has taken notice and the pressure is on Ricciardi's superior to catch the murderer quickly, and so therefore the pressure is on Ricciardi.  He can see the tenor at his last moment, a tear falling from his eye yet he cannot see the moment of death. 

Such a heavy burden Commissario Ricciardi must carry.  Seeing those last moments of pain and anguish.  He carries them with him in his mind.  The only relief he gets comes in the moments after his nightly meal when he looks out his window and into the window of the neighboring building where he catches sight of Enrica.  And it is this moment that he waits for that gives him a little peace and distraction.  It is what made him so very crushworthy for me. 

I've already started reading the second book, Blood Curse: The Springtime of Commissario Ricciardi, and it is better than the first!  I will tell you more about Enrica when I finish it and post again.  Now that I have the preliminaries over about the Commissario we can proceed on with the mysteries and filling in all the little details which makes these books so engaging.  These are definitely top ten reads sorts of books.  And a curious side note--it's interesting that the title in Italian is something along the lines of a sense of pain, which is a theme that runs through the book.  I might just read through the whole set of Commissario Ricciardi books this year!