Easter Greetings

I really enjoy Easter. This only started a couple of years ago; before then it was just a few days' holiday and chocolate eggs, nice enough, but no Christmas.
Since I have started gardening a bit more seriously though, Easter takes on new meaning; this time of year is so full of potential. We have planted seeds and are now hoping that they will grow, wondering how many potatoes, onions, courgettes etc we will be able to harvest, what they will taste like, what sort of summer we will have. Everything is beginning again.
It is a very domestic holiday, with lots of being at home, baking and pottering around the garden. I've begun baking bread for the first time and am excited about the possibilities. I always found it a bit intimidating before, but with Jane Grigson holding my hand via English Food, a wonderful cookery book that I have been enjoying reading the past couple of days, it no longer seems scary. English Food is one of those wonderful books where there are lots of recipes and information but the author's voice comes through strongly too, so that you feel connected to the person giving you the recipes. I always find that I put more trust in books like these, it's probably why I am so addicted to Nigella Lawson's recipe books.
Reading-wise, I've been in a bit of a slump recently. I have been slowly making my way through Varney the Vampyre, a Victorian Penny Dreadful, which is great fun if not great literature. The best thing about it is there is no mystery about whether or not Varney is a vampire, he's quite happy to admit it.
It is quite huge though, almost 2,000 pages on my e-reader, so I am spending the holidays with some old-technology books to remind myself of what it feels like to turn a page and to have a bit of a break from the villagers shouting 'Down with the vampyre'.
I re-read Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca on Good Friday, a wonderful book, although I always read it through the film, if you see what I mean. Maxim is Laurence Olivier, Manderley is the set from the film. It is one of my favourite Hitchcock films, and so faithful that reading the book does not destroy it as sometimes happens with less well-worked adaptations.
Currently I am reading Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451, which, if you didn't know, is about book-burning. J said he supposed this was the ultimate horror story for me, he may well be right.

More on the e-reader, and some ghost stories

My post about the e-reader led to some questions in the comments, which I thought I'd answer with another post so you can see them easily.

Most people seemed to be expressing the same concerns about it that I had, that it's not the same as real books and could never replace them, which is true. It is an addition to my reading habits, not a replacement but I have found that now, even though the novelty has worn off, I am still using it. It is very useful to have in my work bag for my daily commmute as it is light and I don't have to worry about finishing a book, there's always something else to read. With the snow the other week, it was a comforting thought as I was panicking about being stuck in the city that at least I would have plenty to read if I did have to spend the night there.

It has not replaced real books though, I am still reading proper books at home. The habit that blogging has led me into of having several books on the go at once means that I don't mind having a commute book and then reading something different in the armchair at night.

To answer some questions, it is a reader only. If you are someone who likes to scribble notes in books it is not for you, there is no facility to do anything like that. I'm afraid I am someone who gets slightly queasy at the thought of my books being scribbled in (apart from recipe books where I have to note what works and translate American measures) so this is not something that worries me but I know that a lot of bloggers like to note bits they particularly enjoy in books as they go along. There is a bookmark facility where you can electronically dog the ear of the page to go back to it later, but this is as much personalisation as I've found it will allow. This may also make it less useful for textbooks for courses, as a highlighter pen won't be much use.

When it comes to ease of reading I have been amazed with it. The screen is not like a computer screen, it is easy on the eye. The change between pages annoyed me a little at first but I soon got used to it and now don't notice it. As for knowing how far you are through a book, each page has the page number out of the total pages at the bottom, so you know that you are, say, 188 pages through a total of 288. I have found that I lose myself in the text as much as a real book; after all it is the words that do that and as long as reading them is easy that's all that matters.

So I am a fan. That said, I would not like it if I had only the e-reader and no books. I love books as objects just as much as I ever did and this will never replace the feel, look and sometimes even smell of a real book. As I said, it is an addition to my habits and one that I think will allow me to access some works that I just can't get on paper, and for that reason I am very pleased with it.

An example of this is A Stable for Nightmares, a collection of Victorian ghost stories I found on Project Gutenburg. I stumbled across it because it was showing as a collection by J Sheridan Le Fanu, one of my favourite authors. As I did not recognise the title I popped it into my e-reader and it turned out to be a collection of stories by various authors. The only frustrating thing is that apart from Dickon the Devil, which I know is by Le Fanu and have read more than once before, I have no idea who the others are by. However, this doesn't stop it being a very enjoyable collection of stories if you are a fan of old style ghost stories, as I am.

I particularly enjoyed Devereux's Dream, a macabre story of how someone was able to avenge the murder of his wife and The Secret of the Two Plaster Casts, which was quite a gruesome story. Neither of these stories have an actual ghost in them, but they are very good despite this! It is a collection that is well worth a look if you have exhausted collections such as the Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories and want more. One of the stories in this collection is in that book (Pichon & Sons, of the Croix Rousse); when I recognised it I was hopeful that I could put at least one other author to a story, but unfortunately that book just lists it as by Anon.

The machine age

My reading has moved into the 21st century this week with a bang - not through choice of reading material, that has sat firmly in the eighteenth century, but how I'm reading.
I've read a few of the debates on 'the death of print' over the past couple of years, hysterical pronouncements that print is dead and we will all now read electronically, which I find quite silly. I still looked with interest at the ebook Reader when bookshops started stocking it, but never thought it was for me.
My brother has one and when we all went on a trip to London last month he sat on the train using it, happy in the knowledge that he had dozens of books with him. On the other hand I carried the book I was reading, the book I planned to read next, a different book to read next in case I changed my mind, and a couple more just to be sure I didn't run out which, for a busy three night trip, was possibly a little over the top and certainly quite heavy.
At Christmas my father received a Reader and I had another look at it and bought some ebooks for him, which was very easy. So when my parents asked if I wanted one for my birthday I said yes, but still wondered if I would actually use it.
During the four weeks between Christmas and my birthday, though, it preyed on my mind quite a bit. The deciding moment was when I saw a trailer for Lark Rise to Candleford and realised it was written about the nineteenth century not the 1930s or '40s as I had thought. I suddenly really wanted to read it now and realised that if I had a Reader I could download it and read it now, instead of just wanting to (although, as it turned out, for that particular book I could read it now anyway, as I had a long neglected paperback copy of it hidden away on a shelf, and very good it was too - a big improvement for my second book of the year) and so the benefits of the Reader began to become apparent.
Now, after my birthday last week, I have my own ebook Reader, and it's great. Easy to read and I was able to work out how to get books onto it without spousal assistance, so full marks there. A CD of 100 classics comes with it; I expected to find very few books on it which I didn't already have, but was pleasantly surprised. Although there are the usual Austen and Dickens etc, there are also a number of unexpected books which I have neither read nor got on the shelf - my criteria for putting them on the machine. Hopefully now I will be able to remedy the shameful fact that I have never read Balzac as several works were included.
My first trial of the machine was with The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin which is a surprisingly good read and a very interesting view of life in eighteenth century America. I got halfway through it in a day, with no headaches or other symptoms usually associated with reading electronic formats, so all in all I am very impressed.
Then there is the potential for library expansion, albeit virtual. Project Gutenberg alone has so many out of copyright works to download which I can now easily (with a few formatting blips) read using the reader that it leaves me feeling a bit dazed. I have only downloaded a couple so far, but the new works opened up to me for free (although my conscience insists I donate to the project) are quite overwhelming. And in these uncertain times any opportunity to save money while still increasing my library is welcome.
All in all I am quite won over. I'm not saying that it will replace proper books in my life, that would be ridiculous, and I will, I'm sure, still buy plenty of old technology literature, but it is a good addition to my reading life.

The Year's First Book

The first book of the year has been read and it took a long time. When I picked it up I expected a quick afternoon's whizz through an adventure romp but it turned out to be a week-long slog.

I don't know why, but King Solomon's Mines by H Rider Haggard did not grip me. It had all the things that should be good, lots of action and very little soppiness but something was not there. It is a book very much of its time and perhaps the ethos of the empire did not sit right with me, but I don't think that was it. It is curious how sometimes you will just not click with a book, and this is how I felt about this one. Pleasant enough but not a book I feel has enriched my life particularly.

The story is of a small party setting out to discover the mythical diamond mines of King Solomon in Africa, on the trail of Sir Henry Curtis' brother. The adventures include nearly dying of thirst, a run-in with an angry bull elephant, and then being plunged into a local war. There are some great characters, especially the evil Gagool, a crone who appeared to have lived for centuries and who takes a great dislike to the hero. And there are some funny parts such as the first encounter with the people from the hidden land where the diamonds are. One of the party was half-way through shaving his face and had no trousers on and had to stay like that from then on, as they claimed to be travellers from the stars and his unusual appearance becomes part of the story.

H Rider Haggard's reason for writing it was to prove that he could write a story as exciting as Treasure Island but I don't think he managed it; if someone wanted a gripping adventure story I would point them to Treasure Island every time. However, it was quite an enjoyable yarn.

After last year's first book (Captain Blood) being such a treat, 2009 has got off to a slightly disappointing start; the next book will hopefully grip me more.

Rounding up 2008

So this year is drawing to a close and I can't help but feel this has been the fastest year I've ever experienced. Definitely far fewer than the usual twelve months. When I look back, though, quite a deal seems to have happened. And, as I usually measure time and capture events by the books I read, maybe it has been a whole year as it is certainly a very long time since I was reading Lady Chatterley's Lover.
So, in reading blog terms, what has this year consisted of? Well, let's first deal with the shameful: challenges. Yes I signed up for many in new year enthusiasm and the mistaken idea that my reading impulses could be directed. So how many did I complete this year? Not one. How many did I even make a start on? Oh dear, not too many. I apologise to all the kind people who set them up that I was so bad at taking part but it was just not to be; I have learnt my lesson, though, and fully accept that, now I have become comfortable with my blog-self, I am not a challenge person and will not be signing up for any in 2009.
I am also not a post-every-day blog-person. I began to feel that I should write about every book I read and post at least two or three times a week in 2008 which naturally led to long gaps in both of these, as I do not like feeling as though I have to do anything. So in 2009 I will post when I feel like it and write about books when I feel moved to do so. I will be listing books as I read them in my sidebar, though, for one reason only - that I forget them very quickly if I don't.
2008 was the year that I discovered that not all writers from the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond were unimaginative sex-crazed degenerates unable to string a decent sentence together. There are some wonderful books being written, especially in the fantasy genre, or, as it seems to be termed when it wants to be taken seriously, magical realism. Neil Gaiman, Susanna Clarke, Clive Barker and Ray Bradbury have restored my faith in the publishing industry this year, and the recent decline in the sales of mis-lit is starting to restore my faith in the human race altogether. I hope to discover more wonderful books and writers next year, and enter more magical worlds.
This was the year I finally set aside my prejudices and fell under Georgette Heyer's thrall. All I can say is I'm glad in equal measures that she was so prolific and that my parents have almost her entire works. Four books by one author in a year may not seem much to most of you but for me it is quite a ridiculous amount. I feel I may be reading even more by her next year.
It was also the year I rediscovered my love of poetry and I will never be able to thank Stephen Fry enough for that. My poetry collection has increased substantially and I have enjoyed reading it more than I can remember doing since I was a teenager and only read poetry or Kerouac, or sometimes poetry by Kerouac. I discovered wonderful poets this year, such as e e cummings, Robert Frost and Philip Larkin, that I had always ignored in the past going straight to the Romantics or the Beats. I hope for much more of this in 2009, as there are poets from other centuries and cultures whom I have yet to discover.
My main New Year's resolution last year was to get my TBR pile down and I have failed miserably. I didn't really think I would succeed and with books received at Christmas, as well as some book vouchers, there's little hope it will be brought down in the near future but it just means that I have plenty of choice for the year ahead.
I have counted up the books I read this year and it is quite paltry, little more than one a week on average, although if I added in the books I have got part way through - some abandoned and some just not yet finished - it would be substantially increased. I have been a bit of an intellectual butterfly this year, flitting from flower to flower but not always staying as long as I should. The amount of non-fiction I read decreased from usual years, although books like Colin Wilson's The Occult were quite chunky, and there has been an awful lot of very enjoyable escapism in my reading, and rather less intellectual challenge than is usual. Although, as I cast my eye down the list and see Anna Karenina, Proust's The Prisoner, Huysmans' A Rebours and others there, maybe I am being a little harsh on myself, but I enjoyed them all so much they didn't feel at all challenging to read.
And as for my writing, well, a quite pathetic amount has been created or edited; domestic issues, largely involving holding hammers and plasterboard for my other half, have distracted me too often. However, I have enjoyed working on the little I have written.
So what will I crown as my book of 2008? Last year it was a close-run thing between Sweeny Todd and Wendell Berry's Jayber Crow, with Jayber just winning out. This year I find it hard to decide again: I think it is a photo finish between Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita and Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. I really don't think I can pick a winner between them, and there are plenty of others that are up there with them, jostling for position. Which must mean that overall 2008 has been a very good reading year.
Here's looking forward to 2009 - Happy New Year everyone!

Impressions of Anna Karenina

It is a few months now since I read Anna Karenina, and I have been putting off writing about it. It was a book that I am very glad I read but when I had just finished it, there was too much of it in my head to be able to articulate it on e-paper. So I decided to let it sit for a while and then see what impressions I retained of it after a while. Books tend to slip from my mind like water through a sieve, and for a book to stay with me for more than a few weeks it has to be special.

And so - Anna Karenina is special. Despite the length of time I can still recall many incidents in this huge book and so much of the feel of it, when I am sure that six months after reading War and Peace I had little left but a confused notion of French troops shivering in Russian snow. For me, Anna Karenina is Tolstoy's masterpiece. Its focus is domestic: it concentrates on relationships, how they can develop differently and the emotions that people go through, and for this reason it is universal. The emotions are human and recognisable, and although the focus is on a small number of characters, it feels broad, as though it has taken in all people.

One chapter stood out above all others for me, one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I have ever read. It described one of the character's emotions as he waits for his wife to give birth; he is dazed, afraid, and feels pushed and pulled about by the other people dealing with the birth. He fears that terrible things are happening but people are hiding it from him, and cannot make sense of any of it until the wonderful moment when his child is born.

Politics are still present in the book, as one character attempts to find an answer to the problem of serfdom in nineteenth century Russia and with the benefit of hindsight, as often happens with literature from this period, it is easy to see how this country ended in revolution a few decades later. However, these points seem unimportant compared to the examination of people, people struggling to make sense of life, dealing with love and hurt, developing emotionally and sometimes finding life positive, sometimes suffocating.

I won't give you a precis of the story, partly because it would probably sound like a second rate soap opera if the events were detailed with all the adultery and hysterics; in a lesser writer's hands it could easily have turned into melodrama. I'll just say, if you haven't read this please do.

Season's Greetings

Christmas has arrived for me as I took some extra leave to finish work on Friday and by now (Monday) can't even remember what I do for a living. I remember once when I was quite little, nine or ten, my mum told me that she liked the run-up to Christmas better than Christmas itself. Well, of course, at that age that was just proof that my mother was crazy. There's no presents during the run-up, you see. And having five days off before Christmas just meant that the torture happened at home, not school, as I wandered around with a painful ball of excitement in my stomach wondering when, oh when, it was going to be Christmas morning!
Now, I realise how right my mother was. The run-up is by far the best bit, the pottering around the kitchen making brownies - my contribution to the Christmas table as my mother still does most of it - cleaning the house (yes I even find Christmas cleaning enjoyable, just not the rest of the year), listening to Christmas songs, watching the Christmas Nigella, wrapping presents, usually in front of a suitably Christmassy film. I always find it quite magical that you can buy something pretty ordinary for someone, wrap it up in Christmas paper and it turns into a delightful object of mystery, even though I know exactly what's in it!
I love Christmas films and try and watch at least one of Holiday Inn or White Christmas every year, but my Christmas wrapping film this year will be National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. I know it off by heart, having watched it a hundred times, but I love the fact that Clark wants the perfect Christmas that he remembers from his childhood, just as I do every year. Last year I did an internet quiz to find out which Christmas character I was and, yep, I was Clark Griswold, which made me happy.
And two weeks off gives me lots of reading time. I read Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book yesterday in front of the fire. It was wonderful, and puts Coraline in the shade, not something I would have thought possible. It is the story of a young boy brought up in a graveyard by ghosts and other creatures, while a mysterious and powerful group try and track him down to assassinate him. After reading this book, it felt like Coraline was Gaiman dipping his toes into children's literature and in this one he really lets himself go. If it's not a classic within ten years, I'll eat my hat. I can't wait to see what his next children's book is like.
Of course, it is the time of year that I need my Christmas Dickens and I had been pondering which to read - finally to read The Old Curiosity Shop, or perhaps to revisit one; last year was Master Humphrey's Clock, a collection of stories loosely linked together by Master Humphrey, which was just right. My indecision was sorted by the lovely people at Hesperus Press who sent me copies of A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire, and Another Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire. These contain stories and the occasional poem by Dickens and others, and were published as Christmas editions of Household Words.

Here they are, don't they just look like Christmas? I am really looking forward to reading them over the next couple of days; between Dickens and Clark Griswold this is going to be a perfect run-up to Christmas.

What ho, what ho, what ho!

It's been a while but I'm back. So where have I been and what have I been doing? Well, reading, of course, and then Fallout 3 took hold and I lost 100+ hours of my free time to this game on the Xbox; I even stopped playing Warcraft, so that is serious. It was a get-no-sleep-shaky-hands-obsession, which nicely coincided with a media moral panic about gaming addiction. But the difference, as several gamers tried to point out, is that it doesn't wreck your life. I am out the otherside of the obsession and am still married, have no long term medical effects, as I would with drugs or alcohol and, unlike a gambling addiction, the loan sharks won't be knocking down the front door. And, you know, I really enjoyed my time in the post-apocolyptic Fallout world.

Gaming suited my frame of mind which for some reason has been extremely frivolous lately. The main symptom was another addiction which I let run its course, Jeeves and Wooster. I mentioned previously that I was reading a book or two - it ended up being six books in close succession, while simultaneously watching the tv series with Fry and Laurie in the title roles. It was wonderful, Wodehouse was a genius. After the sixth book, though, I stopped and thought about this question - which would you rather be, Bertie or Jeeves?

Because, as is always the case in the best comedy, Bertie is not just a buffoon. You may smile as he says he is considered one of the shining intellectual lights of the Drones Club and that before Jeeves was on the scene he was the one his pals came to with their problems, but as you move through the stories and meet his pals, Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps for instance, you realise that Bertie is speaking no more than the truth.

Bertie is an extremely likeable character. He has no pretensions to be anything other than he is, he knows he is lucky and wants to enjoy his life without aspiring to things like a grand intellect. He likes lunch at the Drones Club, his snifter at 6pm, out for dinner and a thriller to read before bed. He knows his limitations and tries, when circumstances allow it (which is not often), to stay within them. You can't read these stories without becoming very fond of him.

And for a while I fell into the Wooster way of doing things (without the Drones, of course). Amongst the six volumes of Bertie and Jeeves I threw in a couple of good old fashioned thrillers, Edgar Wallace's Feathered Serpent and Bulldog Drummond by Sapper. Stories where men are men and women need to be rescued by the chisel-jawed hero from the evil clutches of the villain. Both great fun, but at the end of this junkett I started to wonder, am I cut out to follow Bertie's intellectual life? Or would I rather be Jeeves?

Because, really, Jeeves isn't so different from Bertie; he's created his little life which he protects fiercely, often at the cost of his master's engagements with unsuitably domineering women. The main difference (other than the employer/employee thing, of course) is that while Bertie likes to stay on a comfortable intellectual level, Jeeves likes to expand his mind, reading Spinoza for instance. I decided that Bertie's mind is alright for a visit but it is Jeeves' that I want to live in.

And so I left the frivolity behind and picked up volume five of Proust, to carry on my long term project of reading a volume every year or so. But that's another blogpost...

Finding books

There's going to be a whole slew of reviews coming soon, as I have half written a load of them. However, today I am engaged in tidying the living room and have just come across two bags under a pile of letters, one from Waterstones and one paper bag from a second hand shop, both of which had been put down when entering the house and quickly forgotten.
Opening them was like opening presents, as I had completely forgotten what I bought. It turned out to be the Mitfords' letters, Letters between six sisters, which I've read a lot of good things about, a Dennis Wheatley (Unholy Crusade), and a book called The Mysteries of Britain by Lewis Spence which makes claims about the esoteric past of this island, druid cults etc. Not sure I'll swallow most of it but it looked interesting.

Here they are with a little help from one of my rapidly growing kittens, and another recent purchase which I'm very pleased with: a box of adventure books, old tales from early last century published by Hodder. They are designed to look the pulp fiction part, even down to the advertisements in the back.
I read the excellent Edgar Wallace volume, The Feathered Serpent, last weekend, and it was the inclusion of one of his books that made me buy the set. I have mentioned before my penchant for hard-bitten thrillers of the early twentieth century and Wallace is another writer who, like Dennis Wheatley, was prolific but now seem quite hard to get hold of. It was great fun and I have high hopes for the others.
I must admit to being slightly worried about Zane Grey, Westerns are not my thing, but I'll try anything once. And you never know I might find a new niche to explore.

Vampires exist!

Trust me, they really do and I have been battling them for the past month. I'm not talking about dark cloaks and fangs in the neck though, and before you call the men in white coats I haven't spent the past month sitting in graveyards at midnight with garlic and a wooden stake thinking I'm a teenager called Buffy.
No, the sort of vampire I'm talking about are those people that suck the life out of you. Have a think, you'll know them too - people who seem to drain your energy whenever you have dealings with them. Psychic vampires is what they are, and they all seem to have been flocking around me recently like I'm Jonathan Harker and Count Dracula has just rung the dinner gong.
They are subtle, not aggressive, but they know where your weak spots are and how to make their quiet little demands and complaints in a special way that will gnaw away at your brain leaving you tired, confused and fretful. Sometimes they can be very nice people, which makes it difficult to fight them off, but dealing with them is so draining. I have returned home every day from work limp and feeble and collapsed into my armchair with barely strength to pick up my kittens and absolutely nothing left for literature - either reading it or attempting to write it.
This weekend, however, I decided 'no more!', and got out the literary equivalent of a bottle of holy water, a bit of P G Wodehouse, and it has worked a treat; I feel more energetic and able to deal with life once more.
I surrounded myself with the protection of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves just like Van Helsing in his circle of communion wafers, working my way through the Jeeves Omnibus number one. Thank you Jeeves was quickly dispatched and I am now half way through The Code of the Woosters. It is marvellous stuff, and Omnibus number 2 will be following sharply on the tail of number 1 - with 3, 4 and 5 to be ordered pretty quickly, as I think I need a real overdose. Expect blog posts in the near future to begin 'What ho!' - it gets under your skin.
It is also welcome light relief from Mr Aleister Crowley; I am half-way through the biography of him, and it has been slow work, partly because of the aforementioned vampire issue, but also because, fascinating though he is, the Beast is not someone you want to spend too much time with. His personality is rather overpowering, even through the printed page, and I need to take him in small doses - a feeling that appears to have been shared by most people who knew him!
The second part of my cure for the vampire problem is the prospect of a bit of homeopathy - treating like with like. First I bought the Hammer Horror collection, 21 films from that wonderful studio, and of course it has a couple of Dracula films in the set, with Christopher Lee as the Count. Then I booked off October 31st - or Halloween as some know it - and plan to spend the day soaking in vampires, hopefully topped off by a few of the local cherubs knocking on the door dressed as creatures of the night and demanding sweets. The prospect of this has also perked me up no end and given me the strength to (metaphorically) plunge a stake into the hearts of these energy thiefs.

Warwickshire's poets

Here is an Aleister Crowley quotation about Warwickshire (the county he was born in) from Lawrence Sutin's Do What Thou Wilt (A life of Aleister Crowley) to prove that the Beast could be funny - although until I've read more of the book I can't tell you if it was intentional or not! It made me laugh, either way.

'It has been remarked a strange coincidence that one small county should have given England her two greatest poets - for one must not forget Shakespeare (1550* - 1616).'

*As Sutin points out, Crowley couldn't even be bothered to get Shakespeare's birth year right! It should be 1564.

Long Weekends

This is the tail end of my second long weekend in a row, two four day weekends one after the other, wonderful.
However, before you get too jealous let me tell you what these weekends have consisted of. Last weekend, which began on Wednesday evening with a lovely meal at a Japanese restaurant to celebrate our third wedding anniversary, went on to involve me learning how to point the brickwork. There's not much to do, just half the house!
I'm doing okay at the moment at ground level but am not looking forward to going up a ladder. But it has to be done; I've been overdosing on Grand Designs on TV recently and began to feel guilty when I saw one wife nailing tiles onto a roof, and thought that while J was replacing floors I could be doing something more constructive than just breaking up kitten fights. So I am now a brickie.
Then this weekend, August Bank Holiday which we have extended to include today, there has been more pointing, more disentangling kittens from the curtains and, to top it off nicely, I am now recovering from the lorryload of insulation boards that we've just had to carry in. Don't you envy my life?
All this has not left much time for anything else, but I have managed some reading and have actually finished a book for the first time in weeks! Colin Wilson's The Occult, which has led to a number of other books on the subject that I want to read, a couple of which I've ordered: a book by Eliphas Levi (who, incidentally, Aleister Crowley claimed to be a reincarnation of) and The Mystical Qabalah by Dion Fortune which arrived on Saturday. I had always avoided her books because I think her name makes her sound like a Sunday supplement astrologer but Wilson said that this book is the best on the subject. Qabalah (or however you want to spell it) is something that has interested me since I read Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum.
At the moment, however, even writing this brief blog post is causing me pain because it is tearing me away from my current read, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. Elaine commented a while back that once I started I wouldn't be able to put it down and she was absolutely right. It is a wonderful world Clarke has created, with such a clever mix of historical fact and fiction that I am finding it hard to believe that magic did not really exist in the eighteenth century. The book is just over a thousand pages long but I can't help feeling that it will be far too short. It is nice to be able to feel this about a modern book.
So now, as the kittens have come down from the curtains and just fallen asleep, I am going to sneak back to it and squeeze a last few minutes of reading from this long weekend.

Andy Catlett: Early Travels by Wendell Berry

This book is a delight, warm and comforting, but it is also a thoughtful consideration of how life has changed since the middle of the twentieth century.
It concerns Andy, a nine year old boy in 1943, and a major landmark in his life: he is making a bus journey on his own. It is the period between Christmas and New Year and he is journeying a few miles to stay with his grandparents; first his paternal grandparents who live on a farm for two nights, and then he will stay with his other grandparents in Port William, before being collected by his parents for New Year. It is narrated by Andy as an old man at the beginning of the twenty-first century; he looks back fondly at this turning point in his life and the few days that he spent with his grandparents and other friends, most of whom have since died. He thinks back to the people he knew then, their kindness and love for him, and considers their lives from the perspective of the twentieth century; he took the way they lived for granted when young, but now recognises the hardship that they often went through.
This is not a book for thrill seekers, nothing of moment really happens, but everything is important to Andy in the way that days like these are for children. A major event for Andy is that while waiting for the bus after his father has left him Miss Angela, the waitress in the bus station café, buys him a cup of coffee. It is his first taste of the drink and something that makes him feel exceptionally grown up. The tale of his coffee drinking even becomes town gossip.

'The episode gave me a sort of fame, and of course my father heard of it. Two or three weeks later I happened to encounter him on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse. He was standing with his hands in the pockets of his overcoat, talking to his friend Charlie Hardy.
I gave them a wave and said, "Hi."
"That's Miss Angela's buddy, ain't it?" said Mr Hardy.
My father snorted. "That's him." He reached into his pants pocket, drew out a nickel, and handed it to me. "Here. Go buy yourself a cup of coffee."'

One of the major differences that Andy considers is the change in relationship between races since he was a child. As an old man he recognises the injustices in the 1940s in the way black and white families interacted that, as a child, he had just accepted. He also notes the different pace of life, one which was already beginning to change; his Grandfather Catlett who collects him from the bus stop in a horse and cart was already part of a way of life that was dying out.
The contrast between these grandparents and his other, younger, maternal grandparents who live in a modern house in town, with a car and other comforts, shows a new attitude to life, even though they work equally hard. Andy considers the differences between the periods and sees that much has been lost but it is not a rose-tinted view; he recognises that there were things that were wrong with the past age, hardships and injustice.
He also, from his later perspective, realises how protected from the world he was then. He describes his Uncle Virgil's wife, Hannah, who is living at his maternal grandparents and how nice she was to him, but from this later perspective he recognises the sadness of the hope she had that was not destined to be fulfilled. Her husband, away fighting, was killed soon afterwards. The Second World War is a slight shadow throughout the book; it does not have much direct impact on Andy himself as a small child, but people were missing from the town because they were away fighting, and he talks of the ones that didn't come back and the impact that this loss had on the town.
Port William life is shown through Andy's young eyes, and I revisited many of the characters that I met when I read Jayber Crow last year, but saw them in a different light as Andy decribes how these grown-ups seemed to him as a child.
The story is told in Berry's slow and absorbing style, with a beautiful use of language; the town and the period really live through this book. It was a perfect read.

The Beast Himself

There are some figures that are fascinating even though you know you should not be fascinated by them. If this wasn't the case, there wouldn't be such demand for books on serial killers, which personally I find quite horrific. However, I have my own weaknesses, and recently have given in to one of them.
With my taste in the paranormal and the occult, it is of course an occult figure about whom I am simultaneously wary of and curious about: Aleister Crowley.
His is a name I have always been aware of, although I really have no idea how or why. Until relatively recently I had great trouble distinguishing between him and Dennis Wheatley. When I think of all the times during my twenties that I hovered fascinated over Dennis Wheatley books in second hand bookshops but then left them because of this misapprehension that Wheatley was the occult practitioner, I could kick myself. Now that I know how great Wheatley's books are, I never come across them.
And of course reading Wheatley, specifically The Devil Rides Out, has only increased my fascination with Crowley because the villain, Mocata, was based on him. Wheatley knew Crowley and got on with him by all accounts, despite the dire warnings about the dangers of involvement with practitioners of black magic that he put at the front of his books.
Add to this Crowley's appearance as a character in the recent Alone in the Dark video game (albeit with an American accent) and my curiosity has now reached too high a pitch and I have given in. I am determined to move Crowley out of the shady recesses of my imagination and actually find out who he was, what he did, and see whether my instinctive feelings about him are justified or just some hangover from an impressionable childhood.
I also want to know what Crowley's writings are like; I have been writing a couple of short stories recently (which, as with everything I write, turned themselves into a Wheatly-esque thriller) that centre around a Crowley-like occult figure and I decided some research was in order. That was the excuse anyway, and a pretty fine one it is too!
So off to the bookshop I went, only to find that Waterstones has removed its Occult section and replaced it with 'Mind, Body and Spirit', which equates to angels, astrology and - just so I don't get too despondent- books on ghost hunting, hooray. While looking fruitlessly for all the Crowley books that I know were there only a few months ago, I picked up a copy of The Ghost Hunter's Casebook by Bowen Pearse, revisiting the paranormal investigations of Andrew Green. As J said quite rightly, most people probably find a section labelled 'Occult' off-putting or intimidating. Personally I found having one labelled 'MBS' quite dismal, but that's just me.
But back to the Crowley hunt and it was home to the internet and the marvellous Abebooks; three volumes were ordered and quickly dropped through the letter box.
First, a novel, as Wheatley was not the only one to create a character based on Crowley: The Magician by W Somerset Maugham. I am very happy about this; after reading Cakes and Ale last year I wanted to read more Maugham so I get to combine this with my Crowley obsession and it feels a little more literary and a little less prurient.
Secondly, some of Crowley's own writing, The Book of the Law. A lovely small red book with the title in gold leaf and inside, after the printed text, is a facsimile of Crowley's original manuscript. This book was 'dictated' to him by a spirit, he claimed. I am fascinated by things like this, despite being sceptical.
Thirdly, the book I am really excited about, Do What Thou Wilt: a life of Aleister Crowley by Lawrence Sutin. The picture on the front is not prepossessing, and it is hard to see how Crowley could have held such a fascination for so many people, but I hope this book will make that clearer.
I was too impatient though and began reading The Occult by Colin Wilson while I waited for the books to arrive. This monumental book covers all aspects of the occult in a fascinating and very readable style and describes the lives of a number of important occult figures such as Paracelsus, John Dee and, of course, Crowley. I am currently only a few pages away from a chapter called The Beast Himself, and I can hardly wait.
My only concern is that the story of Crowley is going to turn out to be a rather ordinary one of a charismatic but unstable drug-addict, with more self-belief than ability. There is something quite attractive about those shadowy figures of fear that we all carry in our heads, and a part of me wants Crowley to live up to it.