'Leading the Blind' by Alan Sillitoe

I love it when you pull a book from a shelf where it has sat neglected for ages, wondering why you bought it, but give it a go anyway and it turns out to be a real gem. This is the case with Leading the Blind, A Century of Guidebook Travel 1815 - 1911 by Alan Sillitoe (ISBN 0-333-66211-3) which I am currently reading. I think I was put off because I associate Sillitoe with rather depressing black and white English films from the sixties, but this book is charming.
It takes a look at what travel was like for the English tourist in the nineteenth century from the descriptions in contemporary guidebooks. In case this sounds a bit dull, here are some of the events described in the first chapter: a young lieutenant is eaten by a bear, Shelley thumps a rude foreign traveller, and a subaltern friend of R F Burton wagers he can run across a lake by jumping from alligator back to alligator back, and he does! And that's just the first chapter!
Now, to be fair, things calm down a little as the book progresses, but it is a fascinating look at life in the nineteenth century portrayed sympathetically by Sillitoe. There is no criticism of the traveller of the time, no judgement of their way of life, just curiosity about their experiences. Here is a typical passage:

'Some of the remote inns were so bad that one wonders why travellers ventured into such regions, but a guidebook left no viable route undescribed. At Brussone the inn was said to be the most detestable in Piedmont. "Filth and its accompanying goitre, disgust in every direction, and the Cheval Blanc with its dirty hostess cannot be forgotten."...The inn at Macugna "which may be endured by an alpine traveller, and which may subdue an alpine appetite, offers all its bad accommodations with so much civility as almost to reconcile the traveller to disgust, starvation and want of rest. Myriads of fleas, and non-descript food do not bode well for rest and refreshment; but the little host who keeps the inn - of whom Aesop was the prototype - boasts of his having studied the cuisine at Lyons; he seems to have fitted himself for the study of Harpagon[1]. Still the inn may be endured for the sake of the palace of nature in which it is placed."'

The guidebooks of the time that Sillitoe quotes at length were well written and informative, and not above giving the English tourist a bit of advice about how to behave themselves or ticking them off for not being able to speak the language of the country they were visiting - something we British tourists are still criticised for. They warn about hotels that are bad and recommend the good ones, and the book points out that the great improvements in accommodation for tourists that occurred during the century were in large part due to the influence of these guidebooks.
The difficulties of travel at the time are fascinating: the trouble with passports especially if one visited Paris where it had to be surrendered at the port and then reclaimed in Paris with the appropriate visa if you wanted to be able to leave the city again; the bewildering number of different currencies one had to deal with just in Switzerland; and the constant trouble with porters, unscrupulous hoteliers and beggars attempting to extort money from the rich English tourists. The chapters portray different parts of the world as described in the various guidebooks, the sights that tourists would have seen, their modes of transport, the sort of accommodation they stayed in, and anecdotes about events from the region; for instance, one guidebook gave descriptions of the circumstances of all the deaths of people falling from glaciers in Switzerland, which is a little gruesome but may have persuaded visitors that they should be prepared before attempting to climb the mountains.
This is the perfect gentle read before I throw myself into the gothic horror of my RIP II challenge books, a wonderful book that I am very glad I finally pulled down from the shelf.

[1] The miser from Molière's L'Avare.

You want me to read what?

I had an email from Amazon today trying to get me to buy books that a lot of people who have the same book as me have also bought, I'm sure we all get them. Usually with these emails I end up adding to my ever-expanding wishlist but today I think something went a bit wrong.
Now I know it's wrong to judge a book by its cover but I'm afraid I made a snap judgement about today's suggestion; the cover art consists of a photograph of a naked couple writhing in bed together. From this I gathered that this book is a romance of the steamy variety. Out of curiosity, in case I was wrong, I had a look at what the book was about; it has no write up yet but other books by the same author had words like 'sizzling romance' and 'mass market paperback' attached to them, which suggests to me that, although I'm sure it's an excellent example of its genre, it is emphatically not the type of book I ever buy; as I have mentioned before, my taste is decidedly Victorian.
So why did they recommend this book to me? Because I bought Poor Miss Finch by Wilkie Collins! So I buy a nineteenth century sensation novel, and am recommended a twenty-first century 'sizzling romance' - have Amazon confused Wilkie with Jackie? Or have a lot of Wilkie Collins fans got a naughty little literary secret?
Maybe I should be more open-minded, I could be introduced to a whole new world of literature via recommendations like these. Then again, maybe I'll stick to the Victorians.

Put that light out!

I always find it amazing when I have a day off just how many people come up to our front door. Yesterday there were leaflets for computer courses, people offering quotations for work on the house and one really interesting caller. We had a letter from our energy company a couple of weeks ago saying that someone would come round at some unspecified time to fit a gizmo to our meter to show how much electricity we're using, if we want it. We definitely wanted it as we're always trying to be more green, but the chances of us being in were slim so I didn't give it much thought.
Luckily the man turned up to fit it yesterday. He clipped a little thing that looks like a doorbell to the electricity meter and then set up a battery operated display that we can stand anywhere in the house to show us how much energy we're using per hour, how much greenhouse gas we're creating (oh, the guilt), and - my favourite setting - how much it is costing us an hour.
All of this meant, of course, that when J returned from work we ran round the house switching things on and off to see what effect they had, so our energy consumption probably sky-rocketed! The kettle, unsurprisingly, added about 11/12 pence an hour to our electricity costs. The dishwasher hardly anything but with occasional bursts, which I assume must be when it's heating in some way, and we were able to solve the age old argument of whether my bad habit of leaving the television on or his bad habit of leaving his computer on uses the most energy. Ha! It's the computer.
It does work though, as I was turning lights off every time I left a room last night because that thing was sat on the kitchen worktop nagging me. It will probably end up hidden in a cupboard somewhere, so that we can put the kettle on without a guilty conscience.

Plutarch's Pompey

The first forty years of Pompey's life are covered in glory. He was given the title of Pompey the Great, as a general who had conquered the known world, with three triumphs for his successes in Europe, Africa and Asia. The beginning of the Life is a stream of praise for his talents as a general and the restraint he exhibited in his personal life. To be honest, it becomes a little tedious. Then he hits forty and, as Plutarch says, it would have been better for him if he had died then, at the height of his fame and glory, rather than to have sunk into luxuriance and nepotism. This is where it gets interesting.
From here Caesar's presence in the background is constant as they head towards the final confrontation but he seems a distant threat, an impudent puppy yapping around Pompey's heels, which is how Pompey's followers portray him. This is Pompey's great weakness during the conflict with Caesar; he listens to his sycophantic followers with seemingly no idea that they might just be saying what he wants to hear. During the last years of his life Pompey is playing a political game but with no political acumen. He may have been a great leader on the battlefield but he was not a great politician, which is why Caesar, who excelled as both, dominated.
Pompey does not seem to be portrayed as as great a general as Caesar in this Life; he does not inspire the same level of loyalty in his men. This is where we must beware, however. History is always written by the victors, in this case literally, as Caesar wrote his own account of the Gallic Wars that described the fanatical loyalty of his legions to him and it is generally accepted that his account was politically motivated - political spin is nothing new! In the final battles Pompey is pitiful, though. He allows Caesar to dictate where the battle is fought, despite having the potential to dominate with his navy, and he misses the opportunity to win the war by pulling back from certain victory; Caesar noted wryly that the war would have been won by Pompey at that point if there was anyone on his side who knew how to win it. Caesar's troops are more organised and he astutely assesses the weaknesses of the enemy to Pompey's downfall. For instance, noting the youth and vanity of Pompey's cavalry he orders his men to aim their spears and swords up at their faces, judging that they will not risk being struck in the face and will flee in panic. He was right.
I know it's not fashionable to admire a man whom many see just as a mass-murderer and tyrant, but I do admire Caesar. I admire his intelligence and the way he single-mindedly pushed for his ambitions and got there, but was still able to be generous to his enemies. His tears on being handed Pompey's head after Pompey's ignoble flight and murder in Egypt testify to that.
The view of Pompey that I am left with after reading this Life is of a man who should have stood back from public life after his military career and been more careful about his friends; he is a former great man who became the puppet of others. It is a sad story, wonderfully told in Dryden's translation of Plutarch. It shows another facet of the end of the Republic, complementing the Life of Caesar. I'm glad I read the two of them close together and would recommend anyone reading Plutarch for pleasure to do the same rather than following Plutarch's Greek/ Roman comparison structure.

The grand harvest

I must have picked the worst possible year to begin gardening. It all seemed so promising at first; I started to dig over our jungle of a garden and planted potatoes, onions and lots of seeds on the assumption that the summer would be a scorcher. Then the rain came.
We live on a hill, so we didn't have the complete disaster of a garden under two feet of water as a lot of people did, we really got off quite lightly, but too much rain means potatoes and onions are all leaves and my seedlings were washed away. Those that weren't washed away were choked by the weeds that loved the rain; as a novice gardener I wasn't sure what was weed and what was baby cabbage or broccoli, so I let them get a hold and then they were too much for me.
Finally there came the plague that has all but killed my new love of gardening: slugs. They ate everything. Entire lettuces disappeared overnight, my potatoes and onions were stripped to the ground. Almost nothing survived. Almost nothing, because the tomatoes are doing fine. When the apocalypse happens, and J and I are fighting the zombies, I'm sure we will be living on tomatoes as even the ones I forgot and left in tiny three inch pots are trying to put fruit out. You've got to admire their spirit. Yesterday, however, I dug up the three remaining potato plants to see what we have.


Hmm, not exactly going to see us through the winter, is it? The ones that we dug up earlier (as the slugs destroyed the plants, we dug up the potatoes) were delicious, though, with a much better flavour than ones from the supermarket, so we're looking forward to them nevertheless.
The Bank Holiday weekend has been a success as far as my reading ambitions go. I have finished the Bierce and will write about it later in the week, ditto for Pompey. Both were very enjoyable. I also finished a short story; writing, that is, not reading. I write old fashioned ghost stories and am also halfway through a very silly novel about an exorcist. I used to dream I was going to be the new Italo Calvino; these days I have realised the limits of my talent and instead dream of being a minor (very minor) Dennis Wheatley. I enjoy writing much more as a consequence.
I don't think the Shakespeare is going to happen, despite having an additional day off today. I'm just not in the mood for him. Instead I'm in the mood for some Christopher Lee as Fu Manchu, and will probably spend the afternoon on the sofa eating chocolate and cheering on Fu Manchu's daughter, one of the best and most unrelentingly-evil villainesses ever.

The Song on my Brain

You know when you get a song stuck in your head, well I don't know if anyone ever gets a good song stuck there, but I certainly don't. For the past three weeks I have been wandering around singing 'I get all the girls, I get all the gir-rls'. Very annoying. And finally, today, I awoke free of that song only to have an even more annoying one there. As I fed the cat this morning I was singing: 'I've got love for you, if you were born in the eighties!' As the poor little thing was born in the nineties I've probably traumatised him. I believe, although I'm very out of touch with these things, that these annoying 'songs' are by the same artist. He shouldn't be allowed. On Saturday night I caught most of the prom on BBC2 which had some startlingly beautiful pieces by Debussy and one of the most moving pieces of Wagner I have ever heard (the Prelude to Parsifal). Why can't that get stuck in my head?

Yesterday was a nice day. Beautiful sunshine, J got lots done on the house while I did a bit of nasty clearing up, which I think counts at least triple for the fun DIY bits he does, and then read a handful of Bierce tales. His stories are like a box of Quality Street, very more-ish; I kept thinking 'that's it, I'll do something else, oh this one's only a page and a half I'll just read that; just one more, it's only two pages...' They are excellent stories, although I'm beginning to think my favourite, about a family that falls into thieving and murdering and is one of the darkest, funniest stories I've ever read, isn't in this collection. I'll have to dig it out and reread it - perhaps next Sunday for the RIP II Short Story Sunday challenge.

I got two thirds of the way through Pompey yesterday, as I managed to pick what must be the longest life Plutarch wrote. It is fascinating, though. The Roman lives are meshing together, and once I have read them all I should have a pretty good idea of what led to the end of the Republic, and all the different personalities and ambitions involved. I am now seeing the competition with Caesar from a different perspective. Cato the Younger is mentioned a lot, as he was in Caesar's Life, and I think his will be the next to read. This translation is excellent, as I mentioned before, and I now realise it is a (slightly modernised I think) translation by Dryden. Apparently it fell out of favour in the nineteenth century and a new but dull one was current. More fool the Victorians; Dryden's translation is excellent and clear, and makes this heavy Roman and Greek history easy reading.

H P Lovecraft: The Call of Cthulhu and other weird stories

H P Lovecraft is a writer who provides a bridge between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for lovers of horror. He will be read by devotees of classic ghost and gothic of the nineteenth and early twentieth century like me, and by readers of writers of modern horror, upon whom he has had a profound influence. Lovecraft's style varies, at time it is very direct, at others he revels in a use of language that rivals Ambrose Bierce, for instance [from Herbert West, Reanimator]:

'For it had been a man. This much was clear despite the nauseous eyes, the voiceless simianism, and the daemoniac savagery.'

First the Cthulhu stories. I have to say that I found these the least interesting in the collection. I'm glad I read them but they are not the ones that affected me; I am not now obsessed with the 'Cthulhu Mythos' as so many others are. Maybe it's the connection with the sea that just doesn't touch me; I have to say if they had been the only ones in the collection I would not have been able to see the attraction of Lovecraft. One water connected story that was very good, however, was The Shadow over Innsmouth: a young man touring New England visits Innsmouth, a town avoided by locals, on a whim. His terrifying flight from the bizarre inhabitants and subsequent discoveries was a masterpiece of suspense.

However, it is the dry land stories that I really enjoyed in this collection. Poe's influence is strong and perhaps most evident in Cool Air, which draws directly from The Facts in the Case of M Valdemar - the story of a man prolonging his life. The ending is quite hideous and wonderful. Herbert West, Reanimator reminds me of Bierce's more gruesome stories; I don't know if Lovecraft read Ambrose Bierce at all but the way in which he has given each subsection of the story a title as Bierce often did in his longer stories suggests that he may have. It is dark and thought-provoking, a tale of the horrors that scientists are prepared to inflict in the fanatical drive towards discovery and to prove their hypotheses. It is also grimly comic as the narrator calmly describes the experiments of West and himself, their successes and failures, and West's descent into murder.

The Rats in the Wall is perhaps his most traditional story in this collection, and the one which reminded me most of M R James in the setting if nothing else. A man has his ancestoral home renovated and attempts to live there but is disturbed by the movements of rats in the building leading to a horrifying discovery about his ancestors. A good story for late night reading.

I believe The Haunter of the Dark is the story that inspired the Alone in the Dark video game series but I could be wrong. It is very good and, while being similar to James at first in that it describes a bookish young man whose curiosity leads him to disturb that which should have been left undisturbed (such as in James' 'Oh Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad'), the scale of the story is much wider. James keeps his stories to small intimate circles, while Lovecraft has whole communities affected by the horrors. In this story it is the image of the residents from Italian quarter of the town surrounding the church in a candle light vigil to attempt to contain the terror that has been released that has endured in my imagination.

My favourite story from this collection is one that has no supernatural element. It is pure horror, and possibly the scariest story I have ever read. I had to put the book down part of the way through to collect myself and remember how to breath again. The story is called The Picture in the House, a tale of a young man forced to shelter in what he thought was an abandoned house when cycling through a storm. Inside he finds to his amazement an incredibly rare book in the sitting room. He looks at it with excitement at first, but is then unnerved:

'...nor would I soon have closed the book had not an exceedingly trivial circumstance upset my tired nerves and revived my sensation of disquiet. What annoyed me was the persistent way in which the volume tended to fall open of itself at Plate XII, which represented in gruesome detail a butcher's shop of the cannibal Anziques. I experienced some shame at my susceptibility to so slight a thing, but the drawing nevertheless disturbed me, especially in connexion with some adjacent passages descriptive of Anzique gastronomy.'

A moment later he hears footsteps and meets the owner of the book who, although unable to read the Latin text, is obsessed with this plate. The horror and suspense builds almost unbearably to the climax of this quiet story. This story was worth the price of the book alone.

These are tales of great imagination and power that have stayed with me for the year since I read this collection. I definitely recommend Lovecraft to anyone who has not read him before.

Saturday morning book shopping

J sent me out of the house this morning to do the shopping as he was about to do some potentially lethal DIY that it was better I wasn't around to witness. So off I go and, while picking up the necessities to keep the three of us fed over the Bank Holiday, I managed to sneak a little look at the book stall on the market. For a market stall it is remarkably good; the books are of the publishers' clearance type, but there are sometimes nice little history books or biographies to be found if you are prepared to wade through the piles of depressing mass market fiction.

With a crisp ten pound note in my purse that was just begging to be spent on books, I picked up four nice ones. First was a book for J, on the assumption that he would still be around when I made it home, Troublesome Words by Bill Bryson. It is a reference book about those words or phrases that people have trouble with, such as whether it should be 'fewer' or 'less'. J loves books like this and I have checked that the section about his pet peeve, people using 'an' before words beginning with H where the H is not silent (such as 'historical'), corresponds with his view. I shouldn't have worried; J is a big Bill Bryson fan and, at his insistence, I have read a few of Bryson's books and like him very much. He also always talks sense on Grumpy Old Men, and he didn't let me down over this matter:

'An is indisputably correct before just four words beginning with 'h': hour, honest, honour and heir. Some British authorities also allow an before hotel, historian, heroic and hypothesis, but most prefer a.'

I found a biography of P G Wodehouse by Robert McCrum that looked very interesting and had a quotation from a positive review by John Mortimer on the back, which was good enough for me. Also, it had a '2 for £5' sticker on it that meant I could also pick up another book I had noticed while browsing, English Food by Jane Grigson. Her writing is so good that I will probably read this cover to cover, as well as hopefully trying some of the recipes.

Finally, there was a Penguin Classic which looks fascinating, Trafalgar, An Eyewitness History. This tells the story of the battle from the letters, diaries and other documents of the people involved on both sides. I love first hand accounts of history, and am looking forward to this.

When I got home I was pleased to find that I had not become a widow, but while inspecting J's handiwork I managed to crack my head against the cellar doorframe so hard that I am feeling a little woozy now. A good excuse to sit still and read for a while.

Readers Imbibing Peril Autumn Reading Challenge

I have found my way to the RIP II Challenge and can't resist - as a challenge to read books of the gothic or ghostly kind by Halloween, it is right up my literary street. So I am putting my name down in the hope that I'm not too late to be included and am going to have a go at the first Peril- four books of a spooky nature.

The four I hope to read are:

Madam Crowl's Ghost - short stories by J Sheridan Le Fanu, edited by M R James, what could be more perfect!

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Haunting of Toby Jugg by Dennis Wheatley

Aylmer Vance: Ghost Seer by Claude and Alice Askew

A couple I've had for a long time and a couple of newish books, a good combination I think. I've put them in a pile of their own to spur me on over the next month, and am really looking forward to it.

Bank Holiday Weekend

We are coming up fast to the August Bank Holiday so, as well as plans being made in other quarters for more rubble clearing and skip filling, I am also making my own plans for what will be read.

I am itching to start on the book challenges but it's not September yet so I'll restrain myself. Instead, there's the Ambrose Bierce collection of stories that I am half way through to finish and more Slightly Foxed to savour. Then from my own personal challenges there will be time for more Plutarch. I think I will read about Pompey this time and try not to rush too quickly to the gruesome murder in Egypt bit.

Every now and again I like to read a play, generally Shakespeare. Despite having a degree in Theatre Studies I haven't read all of Shakespeare, which is quite shocking, so I occasionally attempt to remedy this. I think I might try Measure for Measure.

And finally, what will I begin to read if I finish the Bierce as my main book? There's a book that has been neglected on the shelf for quite a while called Leading the Blind, a travel collection edited by Alan Sillitoe, that I have been eying recently; I may give this a go. Lots to look forward to anyway.

Hidden Art in the City

J and I usually spend our lunch breaks wandering around Sheffield city centre; today we took a slightly different route and suddenly came across this lovely statue. Unbelievably, after 11 years of working in the city centre, I had never noticed it before. There are a lot of statues scattered around Sheffield but I think this is now my favourite, and I will be dragging J past it quite often in the future.

Now city art is not always good. Sometimes you can walk past a statue and think 'They paid how much for that?!' But, as with all art, what is 'good' is subjective. A piece of art that will make some people's skin crawl will be beautiful to others. Being a Victorian who was born into the wrong century, I love wandering down streets, especially in London, looking at the statues of famous historical figures. Yet a lot of people find them unbearably old hat, I know.

This statue is called Horse and Rider and is by David Wynne. I particularly like the elongation of the bodies which gives it a fantastic, fairy-like quality. It's the sort of statue that, without being childish, I can imagine children would like and I don't think that is a bad thing. I can't say that it says anything directly to me, but it made me feel happy to look at it and that is a pretty good achievement for any work of art. I remember Alan Bennett once saying that he judges whether a piece of art is good by whether, if he got the chance, he'd stick it up his jumper and run out of the gallery with it. If I had a jumper big enough, I would have done that with this statue.

The Hunt for Jayber Crow

The article about Wendell Berry has been haunting me since I read it at the weekend; I can't get that turkey line out of my head, it's so funny. I now need that book! So I decide to overcome my fear of new fiction, and go into Waterstones to look for it. Refusing to be distracted by the table of 3 for 2 Classics, I head for that area so rarely frequented by Eloise, no not Classics, not History, but plain old Fiction. We pass an entire shelf full of Nora Roberts ('she's a superstar!', says J, as so many train station posters have told us recently) which I wonder at slightly but eventually reach the Bs to find... no Wendell Berry.

Now I'm frustrated but, if I'm honest, also a little relieved. Apart from the Harry Potter disorder which I succumb to like most people on the planet I generally (and rather snobbishly, I'll admit) pride myself in not following the herd with reading, so it was comforting in a way to know this is still quite an unusual book. I overhear conversations about books such as The Time Traveller's Wife or that Julian Barnes one about Conan Doyle, or whoever it was, and occasionally will go as far as to pick them up and read the backs but that's as far as it ever gets, as I know they won't be for me. I'm sure they are great books, but the language will be too terse and modern, and the themes probably adult when I like my books to keep a sense of decorum - unless I'm reading something from the Restoration (I wrote my final year thesis on Restoration playwrights) or the eighteenth century, when the downright bawdy is perfectly acceptable. I suppose it's the same sort of hypocrisy that means I can quite happily watch or read about the crimes of Jack the Ripper, but anything about modern murderers gives me nightmares. Okay, so I'm a literary snob with double standards. Basically, I read to suit me and just me, and I think this is as it should be.

All of which rambling leaves me still Wendell Berry-less. So it's going to have to be Amazon, and when you take into account that I have just been paid and that their recommendations are awfully tempting these days as they keep throwing titles of ghost stories at me (I can't blame them, it works, I buy them) this is not going to be cheap. It will be worth it, though, when I open that cardboard box full of another pile of treasures. So I logged on and ordered another pile of Mystery and Supernatural books, Defoe's History of the Devil for the Index Librorum Liberorum challenge, The Worm Ouroboros by E R Eddison which someone else is reading in the Outmoded Authors challenge and the title fascinated me, and a Wilkie Collins. Unfortunately I didn't realise the Wilkie Collins is on a four to six week delivery, so I have to wait ages for them to come because I was tight (with money, not drink) and put supersaver delivery down.

And you may have noticed that there is still no Wendell Berry! He is not on ordinary Amazon, I would have had to go through the market place bit, so, as they all seemed a bit pricey, I thought I'd have a look at good old AbeBooks. Finally I found a reasonably priced copy of Jayber Crow and the order has been placed! It's still going to take a week to ten days, which might as well be a year when I want a book this badly, but at least I had the satisfaction of seeing the confirmation email today and know it is on its way. I can't wait.

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

This book suffered from the fact that I began this blog the day I began reading it, and I don't think it got the attention it deserved as a result. However, I come away from Walden Pond feeling glad that I spent the time there, but not in a rush to spend more time with Thoreau.

Thoreau is sometimes not an easy read; his contempt for his fellow man's way of life and the, at times, sanctimonious manner in which he describes his own simple life, which he only lived for two years after all, can get a little wearing. I think it might have been easier to take if Thoreau had lived up to this ideal himself. He let it slip at one point that, like the wasps, he would be escaping Walden Pond for the harshest part of winter, presumably to his family in the village. He would often, during this two years, dine with friends and family rather than off the land and, the introduction says, had all his laundry done by his family. He also seems to ignore the fact that many people will not have the opportunity that he has; after all, how many people are lucky enough to have a friend who owns a wood and is happy for them to build a house there?

However, it is not the polemic but the descriptions of a simple life in tune with nature that are the the truly memorable parts of Walden, and it is in these sections that Thoreau excels. His descriptions of a torpid snake sliding into the pond, the fish deep in the pond that he sees while lying flat on the clear ice, or the manoeuvres of a squirrel attempting to grab some discarded corn are beautiful. It is these passages that make you think, yes, a simple life lived in harmony with nature would be a better one.

Slightly Foxed No. 14: Major Problems

We are renovating our house, and this weekend was spent filling a skip with rubble, with frequent breaks for cups of tea and articles from my first subscription issue of Slightly Foxed. Every piece is beautifully written and a real delight, as I come across more and more potential treasures to add to the bookshelves. I am only about a third of the way through, but already my wish list is increasing and I am looking forward to the Autumn edition.

The first piece was about a book from the 1930s by Peter Fleming (Ian's brother), called Brazilian Adventure, about a trip he took in answer to an advertisement in The Times with a preposterously ill-prepared group. They were going into the jungle on a 'exploring and sporting expedition', with the additional aim of tracking down a fortune hunter called Colonel Fawcett who had disappeared some time before while on the trail of a lost city. It sounds hilarious and when the author of the Slightly Foxed article said that the nearest modern equivalent (although not as good) would be Redmond O'Hanlon's Into the Heart of Borneo I knew I was on to a winner, as O'Hanlon's book is one of my favourite travel reads.

A piece discussing Lawrence Durrell's portrayal of Alexandria in The Alexandria Quartet and how relevant it is to the Alexandria of today, from the perspective of both the article author and Alexandrians he talked to about it, was particularly interesting. I have had this book for about twenty years and as a result of this piece may finally get round to reading it.

Another for the wishlist, which may be slightly easier to come by than the Fleming, is Wendell Berry's Jayber Crow: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership, as Written by Himself. As it was only published in 2000 I should be able to pick it up easily enough. My usual rule is that I buy no fiction published after about 1955, but, then, rules are made for breaking. The book sounds charming, and this quotation from it about mosquitoes made me laugh out loud:

'You could swat them several at a lick and they didn't seem to mind. They were outlandish big. Burley Coulter used to say that they could stand flatfooted and deflower a turkey.'

Reading Challenges

Being new to the bookblog world, I was also new to the concept of reading challenges. I've been exploring them recently but they didn't really appeal, as I don't like the idea of being restricted in my reading. However, Imani from The Books of My Numberless Dreams has begun two excellent ones which really caught my fancy, and they are flexible enough for me not to feel constricted by the reading list.

First, Outmoded Authors is a six month challenge to read as many as you like from a list of authors who are perhaps slightly neglected these days. My reading list at present is this:

G K Chesterton: The Napoleon of Notting Hill
W Somerset Maugham: Cakes and Ale
J K Huysmans: A Rebours (Against Nature)
D H Lawrence: Lady Chatterley's Lover
George Bernard Shaw: Pygmalion
Radclyffe Hall: The Unlit Lamp
And something by Sir Walter Scott.

I may well be adding to this, as there are a number of authors on the list who I'm not familiar with and will be looking out for.

The second is Index Librorum Liberorum , a year-long challenge to read authors who have featured on the Vatican's list of prohibited books. Here is my initial selection, but it may well grow, as the list is fascinating.

Francis Bacon: Essays
John Stuart Mill: On Liberty
Laurence Sterne: Journal to Eliza
Jonathan Swift: A Tale of a Tub
Alexandre Dumas: The Count of Monte Cristo
Victor Hugo: Les Miserables

I will be posting reviews of these books both here and on the challenge sites. I'm quite excited about getting started in September; I've never done any reading as structured as this before that wasn't for an academic course.

Talking to authors

I've just been reading the wonderful Random Jottings of a Book and Opera Lover blog about her trip to Cambridge a few days ago. The entry includes a lovely photograph of a shop called The Haunted Bookshop that almost had me down at the train station booking a ticket to Cambridge! She was there to have lunch with an author and it started me thinking about my bookshelves, and how unlikely it is that I could have lunch with a novelist I enjoy reading without the use of a Ouija board (and having watched The Exorcist for the first time yesterday, I think I'll give that a miss).

I must admit I have met one of the two authors I love who are still in the land of the living: John Mortimer, who gave a very entertaining talk at the Sheffield Off the Shelf literature festival a couple of years ago. J (the husband) asked a question in the Q&A session that not only was not 'how do I become a writer?', which a depressingly large number of the other audience members asked, but also got a laugh for the response. I was very proud of him. Afterwards when I finally got my chance to speak to the great man as he signed a Rumpole book for me, all I could stutter out was that I thought Where There's a Will was the best book I'd read that year, (and I really meant it). He was charming and said I was very sweet but I walked away wondering why I can never think of intelligent things to say in these situations. I can never come up with something memorable that will start a literary discussion, I just sound like an awkward teenager confronted with a pop star.

The other living author from my favourites list is Umberto Eco; perhaps I'd better learn the Italian for something geeky and predictable like 'I really love The Name of The Rose!' just in case.

Plutarch's Caesar

I now realise that although I think I know a lot about Julius Caesar, there is still a lot about the history of his life I am quite vague about. This Life begins with Caesar as a young man showing the confidence and arrogance of the great leader and dictator to be. The tale about his brush with pirates as a boy (it doesn't say but I assume late teens) is amusing; he laughed at the amount they were going to ask for a ransom telling them to send for a figure two and a half times as much. While he waited for the ransom to be paid he behaved as though the pirates were in his control, rather than the other way around, ordering them about and occasionally threatening to crucify them. I can only assume they thought it was funny, a boy acting in this manner. The story is slightly less amusing and more shocking when, after he is freed, Caesar gets a ship, hunts them down and does indeed crucify them as threatened. Caesar is a ruthless man, as this early story shows, but he also knew the value of mercy and Plutarch's Life has as a constant theme the mercy Caesar shows to his enemies, including those he perhaps shouldn't have, such as Brutus.

I read Caesar's Gallic Wars recently (one of the clearest and most absorbing classical histories I have read, I could almost hear those town gates crash open before Caesar's legions), which seems to have been a major source for Plutarch, so that section was familiar but the story of the civil war with Pompey was an area I have never really read about. The description of Caesar and his actions throughout this conflict is ambiguous; he is certainly ruthless and incredibly ambitious, but he is also generous to friends, enemies and the populace. It seems that this was his main weapon during the early part of hostilities with Pompey, and it is unclear how much was cynical manipulation of the masses and how much was Caesar's genuine personality. He is not a cut and dried tyrant, at least in Plutarch's version.

There is a brief interlude in Egypt, where I discovered that the scene in Carry on Cleo where she rolls out of a carpet in front of Sid James' Caesar is based on fact (which I probably should have known before but there you go). This part of Caesar's life is brushed over and then he is back in Rome heading fast for the Ides of March. The details of Caesar's death are very well known and Plutarch does not dwell on it, but he does describe some of the aftermath. The description of the horror of the other senators who weren't in on the plot but were in the Senate and watched the murder is particularly striking. Plutarch's style (at least in this translation) is very engaging and direct, making it a very readable history. He refers to several other Lives during this one which gives me pointers of where to go next. Pompey's Life was given a number of teaser trailers, particularly around his murder in Egypt, and I think that may be next on the list of Lives to read.

Book-hunting at the Flea Market

I was thinking about books, for a change, this morning during my five o'clock bout of insomnia and reminiscing about how I used to spend my Thursday school lunch breaks from sixteen to eighteen years of age haunting the second hand book stalls of the weekly flea market in the market square. It was the beginning of my obsession with literature with a capital 'L', after a childhood of Nancy Drew, Agatha Christie, then no reading just Indie music until I was fifteen and rediscovered books.

There used to be a couple of wonderful stalls, with rows and rows of old, good, second-hand books. I got some beautiful turn of the century Dickens editions, the majority of my collection of Lawrence Durrell and, something which I will always feel guilty about, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Now I don't feel guilty about buying this wonderful book, but I remember asking the old man who ran one of the stalls for a copy one week. Then I bought it at the other stall, as the woman had one there and then. When I went back the week after the old man had three editions of it waiting for me. Oh well, I think I probably spent enough money there to make up for it.

So, today being my DAY OFF, I thought why don't I go and see if there are any bookstalls still there. In the intervening couple of decades the flea market has changed, mainly due to the popularity of those antique programmes on daytime television, but it is certainly thriving with many more stalls now than I remember. Not proper bookstalls though, which seem to have gone the way of second hand bookshops in the area. However, there was a stall that was a combination of bric-a-brac and books, and I found a gem: an autobiography of a Victorian clergyman called Yet Not I. I love coming across old forgotten books like this that take you back a hundred and fifty years with their descriptions of life as it was lived by ordinary people, without the perspective of the historian layered over the top. I also found a couple of 1930's hardback Robert Graves: I, Claudius (one of those books I've been intending to buy for years) and Claudius the God. The very nice stall holder only charged me a pound for the pair, although I'm sure he had priced them at a pound each.

Walking around the rest of the market there were bookstalls but they were full of mass market paperbacks, Dan Brown and the like, which do not interest me in the slightest. I was about to go home when a name on a paperback caught my eye in the distance - could it be?...Yes! A Dennis Wheatley! I love Wheatley but he is ridiculously hard to find, whereas I remember constantly coming across his books in the '80s and '90s when I didn't know his writing and had the vague idea that he was Aleister Crowley. The wonderful 'Mystery and Supernatural' list at Wordsworth that I have previously mentioned has a couple available now, but apart from this I don't think he's in print. This volume was The Haunting of Toby Jugg - to make it even better, one of Wheatley's black magic stories. Fantastic, and only 90p!

Ghost Stories of Henry James

Henry James seems to be a writer who inspires strong feelings, both positive and negative, in people yet I feel quite ambivalent about him. He is neither brilliant nor awful, and I think that sums up this particular collection [The edition I read is a Wordsworth Classics collection ISBN: 1840224223 / 9781840224221]. For those interested in reading ghost stories rather than just Henry James, there are much better Victorian authors of this genre; anything by Sheridan Le Fanu will beat this hollow. As always with James, the psychological element looms large in these stories and, in my opinion, it becomes slightly wearing. By the end of the book I felt unsatisfied and wanted a proper ghost story.

That said, I do enjoy James' writing and there are certainly enough good stories here to make it worthwhile. The Turn of the Screw is a well-known classic: the tale of governess who sees the ghosts of two former servants attempting to continue to extend the evil influence over the children that they exerted when alive, and her desperate fight to save them. It is never entirely clear whether she is insanely hysterical or genuinely fighting evil spirits and, despite my comments above about the psychological aspects of James' work, this is what gives this particular story its power, as each scene can be viewed from both perspectives. Are the children being tempted and manipulated by the dead servants, or merely trying to get away from an over-protective, slightly crazy governess? It is certainly a story everyone should read, yet I wonder at its inclusion here when it is so freely available in other forms, and will be for many a duplicate purchase and therefore potentially off-putting. (I must have it in at least three different books now, if not more).

From the other shorter and less well known stories Owen Wingrave was my favourite. This story's power is in the build-up and characterisation of Owen, for whom you feel genuine sympathy as he takes a pacifist line in a military family, against disapproving relatives and friends leading to a futile and tragic attempt to prove he is not a coward.

The Third Person was also enjoyable as two spinster relatives find themselves sharing a house with a deceased relative and dealing with the fact that this man has come between them and eventually wondering how to free themselves. The ending is very good and amusing, which I find a rarity in James. The final story is a case in point: although called The Jolly Corner, a title which for me conjures up a vision of Dickensian comfort and humour, it is instead a depressing story about a man confronting a dark truth about himself in an old family home, and is possibly the main reason for my sense of slight disappointment after reading this book.

The Plutarch Project

This is a very grand name, which I have just thought up, for an ambition of mine that developed a few months ago. Plutarch's Lives was sitting on my bookshelf taunting me with the fact that I haven't read it in a good five years of owning it, but I know that, at nearly 1300 pages of quite small text, if I try to read it all at once by about the 800th page I will be merely skimming my eyes over the words, epecially if it is a life of someone I have never heard of. So I came up with the very sensible (I think) idea of reading lives as and when the mood takes me or if I want to learn more about a particular figure, and by this method gradually read the entire book.

So far, the project has not prospered; the only two lives with little (very light) pencil ticks next to them are Marcus Cato and Alexander. However, on Thursday I have a DAY OFF! I am very excited and always like to plan what I will read when I have time off; for this day I thought that as well as hopefully getting close to finishing Walden, it would be a good opportunity to pick up this ambition again. So on Thursday I will read Plutarch's Caesar, and then write about it on this blog. And as I've blogged it I have to do it, so there'll be no getting distracted by World of Warcraft and wasting my day running around the Outlands shooting out frostbolts (it's an online game for the uninitiated). Well, maybe a bit of that, I need my fantasy fix.

I will also have a flick through the two I have already read at some point in the near future and note them here, which, with the ghost story notes, should keep me pretty busy. If I can work out how to do it, I might put a little project list to the side of the posts, as inspiration.

Ghost Stories

It was only two glasses of champagne, but I am paying now as I cannot sleep. However, three o'clock in the morning seems like the perfect time to write about ghost stories.

I have developed a serious addiction to ghost stories; it came upon me suddenly a couple of years ago and I can trace it back to one man, M R James. I've always had a taste for classic Gothic (Vathek, Dracula etc) but would have always preferred a story about vampires or human monsters of some kind (such as Uncle Silas, one of my favourite novels). Indeed I have an obsession for the creature of the night which I believe stems from the terror induced by the 6pm advertisements for Hammer Horror Draculas when a small child. Thirty seconds of Christopher Lee with his sleeked back hair, white face, piercing eyes and fangs appearing out of the darkness; that sort of thing can play havoc with a six year old's imagination. I have never since been able to sleep with the window open; I say it's because of insects, but it's not, it's vampires. As a result between the Penguin Book of Vampires and the one of Ghosts, it is the former that was read, and the other bought just because it was a companion.

Then I read M R James. His stories are the most wonderful short stories of any genre, never leaving the feeling that they are less satisfactory than a novel, never going on too long. They are comforting in the Victorian/ Edwardian world they evoke, and unsettling, as unspeakable things enter this world and upset the calm: a dancing madman in the hotel room next door, a doll's house that comes to life, a strange noise in the woods... It is never too much and harm rarely comes to the protagonists, but it still causes that delicious tension in the back of the neck and I feel scared. I'm sure it's that feeling that's addictive, and it's probably some sort of hormone that I have far too slight a knowledge of biology to know about, but whatever it is, I need more of it. Of course the problem is I began with the Master, and I fear I may never find anything as good as that first reading of James, but I must continue on, always hopeful that I will come across something wonderful.

As a result my collection of ghost stories is growing (see the 'ghost' tag in my catalogue), mainly thanks to the brilliant 'Tales of mystery and the supernatural' list that Wordsworth Editions have recently put out. I am working my way through it, to be honest buying pretty much anything on it as I am reasonably certain that they will be books I want. Most are Victorian or Edwardian, and either by lesser known authors or more famous authors whom I was despairing of being able to get in a collected form and had resigned myself to hunting out in anthologies. Ambrose Bierce is a case in point; apart from the Devil's Dictionary I wasn't sure if he was in print and he writes some wonderfully macabre, gruesome, and at times brilliantly heartless stories that I had come across in anthologies; now I have a collection of his called Terror by Night courtesy of Wordsworth, which is almost certain to form my reading material once Walden is finished. My recent box of books from Amazon contained the Dexter novel mentioned in a previous post, and then this Bierce collection and three others from the same list by H D Everett, Gertrude Atherton, and Alice and Claude Askew (ghost stories also seem a great place to find female writers who deserve more attention). They are all neatly piled up on a shelf beside me now, calling to me. But if I read them too quickly it is like eating a whole box of fudge at once, delicious at first, less and less satisfying as you go on, and in the end you regret it. So, in the interests of savouring the stories more, and remarking on the ones that really have that chill factor, I will pull out the various volumes that I have read since my addiction took over and post some reviews of them here over the next few weeks.

Do I believe in ghosts though? Sitting alone in the study of my Victorian house at twenty to four in the morning without even the cat for company I suppose I should, but I am from a family that does not have supernatural experiences, so whether they exist or not is a moot point for me as I am reasonably certain I will never see one. So I am sceptical but happy to be convinced otherwise. As M R James said: 'Do I believe in ghosts? ...I am prepared to consider evidence and accept it if it satisfes me.'

Shooting Stars

I am sipping a very nice glass of champagne, disgustingly decadent for a school night but it is my wedding anniversary, and am writing this before it goes to my head - so this will be short! Our glamourous night begins with champagne and then will go on to a Domino's pizza delivery - we know how to live! Going out in the week just seems too much hassle nowadays. I am putting my foot down at watching Dirt on my second wedding anniversary, though; it's bad enough watching Courtney Cox doing that to herself when it's not a special occasion, she's not ruining tonight for me.

An update on the Perseides (am I spelling that right?); we went outside last night at 11pm and waited. And waited. It was beautifully clear, I could see so many stars, but no meteor shower. Then, just as we were about to give up, we saw a beautiful one shoot across the sky just above us. It was amazing, I hadn't been sure what to expect never having seen a shooting star before but it was beautiful and worth standing in the back garden in my dressing gown for.

Slightly Foxed

Well this Sunday's had it's ups and downs.

Down: the washing machine has stopped working. I feel quite helpless whenever one of my mechanical servants dies like this. I know people coped for centuries without them but they didn't have shooting pains up their hands when they wrang out clothes caused by too much button-bashing playing Tekken in the '90s.

Up: I finally got round to subscribing to Slightly Foxed, a quarterly on books. I discovered it just before Christmas on one of my occasional work trips to London. I had half an hour to kill before the train went and as usual I went to the British Library. As it was just before Christmas I spent the time in the gift shop rather than an exhibition and, of course, bought more for me than anyone else. I bought the Winter edition of ...Foxed and The Christmas Fox, which was a fascinating little piece by Jeremy Lewis about his experience writing a biography of Cyril Connolly. Slightly Foxed suits me to a tee, the website's 'about' describes me perfectly and I'm very excited about receiving it on a regular basis.

I've been looking at some other people's blogs over the past few days - fellow book addicts - and there is a lot of excitement about the Booker Prize listing. This prize doesn't move me at all, but I wonder if I'm missing out? Looking at my shelves I think the only Booker book I own, or at least have read, is Utz by Bruce Chatwin. That said, I enjoyed it a great deal, perhaps I should be braver. I can't help feeling they will be full of sex and depression though, as that seems to be what modern literary novels consist of, which is why I'll always go for a Scott in preference to any book written over the past fifty years. I'd be very happy to be proved wrong though, if there are any cheerful, sex-less ones on the list.

Walden keeps improving; the chapter on Reading rings as true for here and now as it did for Concord in the mid- 1800s.

The International Space Station

Last night J (the husband) and I went out into the back garden to watch the space station pass overhead. It was actually quite amazing: we found Venus (well, he pointed it out and I tried to keep my eye on it while being divebombed by a low flying bat) and a few minutes later something just as bright appeared a little way away from it, except it was moving slowly and steadily through the sky. It passed over our heads and over the roof of our house. J said he wonders how many people think it's a UFO as it moves very deliberately but is obviously not a plane. It looks like a star that has decided to go on a journey. It was only a dot of light but it was quite moving to think that there are people in that dot looking down at us. I waved, as I don't want them to think that we take them for granted.

About midnight we went out again to try and see the Perseides (may not have spelt that right) but it was too cloudy. It seemed quite a romantic thing to do on our wedding anniversary weekend, though, looking for shooting stars. Tonight is supposed to be the best night to see them, hopefully the cloud will have cleared. But at least I have seen a spaceship now.

Between the cellar preparation and painting I managed to spend some time with Walden and got past the first few page of rants against people who live in houses and on to his actual life in the woods; it is much more interesting. It seems slightly hypocritical to preach about the native in his wigwam being so much more sensible than people in houses and then to build what sounds like a very comfortable, if small, wooden house. The description of the build was certainly more intricate than the rough wooden cabin I had envisaged. But then I suppose we all rant about things sometimes but then don't live up to it. I have to say his point about people working to enjoy their lives in the most useless part of it, rather than enjoying the whole of their lives, struck a chord. I try not to do this, but must admit work takes too much of my time when I could be doing much more interesting things.

I didn't download a prom in the end yesterday as Radio 3 repeated Monday's chamber music Prom with the Henschel Quartet. The main piece was a beautiful, intense work by Sibelius: Voces Intimae, although it would have been a lot more intimate if there hadn't been some sort of music festival going on in the nearby park, as the music from that kept drifting through the window. At one point Sibelius was drowned out by what sounded like a bunch of drunken pirates singing something dreadful. I think I have definitely moved into the 'older generation' when it comes to music, and am quite happy to remain there.

Friday Evening

I love Friday evenings - peace and the knowledge of two days of freedom and reading. Except the husband is planning that we spend this weekend painting the cellar, woohoo. Hopefully I can sneak off and download a prom from the past week - we're in the test for the new BBC iPlayer, which is perfect timing: Proms season! I think I might try and get the Britten and Mahler from Tuesday. When I was a student in the early nineties I went to so many concerts of Mahler, he seemed to be in fashion, so it will take me back to my youth (just as 2Unlimited do!)

Right now I am relaxing with a glass of chablis feeling very smug as I have managed to upload a picture of my cat to my Librarything profile. I feel almost computer literate. I spend far too much time there, the enduring fascination with other people's books and lives. However, while I am messing around with that and this blog - I just realised I forgot to put Columbo as one of my interests when it's my greatest addiction! - I am not reading. I think it's displacement; I am reading Walden at the moment and really not getting into it. Usually I love the opportunity to spend a few hours in the mind of an intelligent person but this book is not grabbing me. Perhaps it's because I've just been snatching ten minutes on the train instead of giving it the attention it deserves, so I will switch off the computer now and settle down with it for a bit - as soon as I've added Columbo to that interests list!

'Those who spend the greater part of their time in reading or writing books are, of course, apt to take rather particular notice of accumulations of books when they come across them. They will not pass a stall, a shop, or even a bedroom-shelf without reading some title, and if they find themselves in an unfamiliar library, no host need trouble himself further about their entertainment.'

A Neighbour's Landmark, M R James

I love the beginning to this story, it sums me up. A terrible film can be watchable if it has an interesting bookshop or set of bookshelves in it. The scene in Educating Rita where her husband burns her books makes me cry.

This is my first entry but I hope will be followed by others. I want to try and capture some thoughts and memories of the books I read. I've been logging my reads on my Librarything.com profile but want to record something a little more permanently. In the Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides Boswell says that people should keep a journal of everything they read, as it will show the development of their mind. It's a nice idea. I doubt I'll write about everything I read, or it will be come a chore rather than a pleasure, but hopefully there will be something to say about most books.

I have just read Zofloya, or The Moor by Charlotte Dacre, on the recommendation of a fellow Librarything-er. It is true Gothic, with murder, remote castles, fallen women, the devil - the full Gothic works. I enjoyed it, as a fan of the style, but I was not racing through the pages as with The Mysteries of Udolpho. Despite being written by a woman it is very hard on the weaknesses of women: a mother who betrayed her husband at the root of all the evil in the book, and the main character is a woman whose selfishness and eagerness to turn to evil to get her own way are astounding. There is no sympathetic side to her whatsoever. Indeed, none of the characters are sympathetic - the bad are too bad and the good are too one-dimensionally perfect. But the story is fascinating: just how low is Victoria prepared to stoop to get her own way? Can she not see how much power Zofloya holds over her, and into whose hands she has fallen? The ending is over the top classic gothic come-uppance and it is great. Overall I enjoyed it, a good read.

I also read Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay on Saturday. I have fallen in love with the tv programme, although the husband says it's not that great - good enough for Sunday evenings but nothing more. I disagree, I think I identify with Dexter a bit, especially in the episode just shown where he talks about fantasising about being alone in a post-apcalyptic world where he no longer has to pretend. I do that too. But I'm not a murderer and do have normal human feelings, so there's probably more morbid fascination here than true identification. The book was easy reading - it took a couple of hours during Saturday. It was good but the additional characterisation in the tv series makes it better, I think. Meatier - even though I now know who the Ice Truck Killer is I still want to watch. But still, for a genre I don't ever usually read, I enjoyed the book - it's funny, not too gruesome, and his reaction to Rita's seduction is wonderful. I think I may buy the rest, despite my general dislike of modern books.