This is what started it all

When this beauty landed in my kitchen before the Summer, it relegated my cookery books to the overcrowded bookshelves in the dining room, which necessitated a weeding out of all my paperback novels. Whilst the cookery books look great on the shelves, most of the novels are still languishing in a cardboard box near the back door. Reckon I've made more cakes than I've read books though!

My beautiful new mixer

Note to self

A brief post this. After the passing of Doris Lessing aged ninety-four yesterday, I realise that I have not read a single one of her books, and am probably the worse for it. I must take steps to rectify this, but since I  do not have any of her novels in the house, and need to read the books I do have in the house first, this could take a while! That is all!

Room: a different kind of true.......

The novel is called "Room", and a few pages in it becomes obvious that the action is going to take place in this room, inhabited by five year old Jack and his mother, known as Ma. Already at the outset this is no ordinary book, and no ordinary room. First of all, I notice the strange truncated language that mother and child converse in. Then the harrowing truth dawns on me that this eleven foot square room is the only world Jack has ever known, and that he and his mother are each other's entire world.

I wonder how Emma Donoghue is going to sustain her readers' interest under such confines for just over four hundred pages. Will all the "action" stay in the room, or will we ever get to see outside of it? It is a feat of inventiveness and imagination in which she does not disappoint!

The inventiveness runs right through the book, starting with Jack's vocabulary and speech. His young mother constructs a false reality for him, scaffolded by a rigid routine and punctuated by ingenious games. Ironically, she spends the kind of quality time with her son that most mothers would aspire to but never achieve. Throughout she is driven by a fiercely protective, sacrificial love, but she knows that in order to escape the room, she will have to deconstruct this false reality that has cocooned Jack for the first five years of his life.

How does one survive such an ordeal: the young mother deprived of her freedom at nineteen and subjected to unspeakable degradation; and the young son, secure in his mother's love and in the familiar surroundings of their captivity, forced to accept that there is a scarier world outside?

Stories are a different kind of true,"writes Donoghue, when Ma is explaining to her young son what is real and what is make-believe. "We're like people in a book, and he won't let anybody else read it."

The characters in this book have a reality and originality to them that stays with the reader long after the last chapter is closed. The love between mother and child is potent and charming, and Emma Donoghue has pulled off a tour de force in combining the truly horrific with the utterly wonderful. Read this book, and I guarantee you will have a greater appreciation of what is good and true and real in this damaged world of ours.

West Coast

I love Kate Muir's writing from the days when I used to enjoy her column in the Saturday Times Magazine, the predecessor to Caitlin Moran, who currently inhabits that column with such panache. I loved to read all about her postings in Washington DC and Paris, which she covered with a great degree of humour as an outsider looking in at the quirky ways of foreigners. So I expected this novel to be a complete wheeze from start to finish.

Indeed, now that I have done shuttling between the metropolis inhabited by Fergus MacFarlane, the novel's protagonist, and the place of his birth on the West Coast of Scotland, I can reveal that whilst there is some dour Scots humour, there are also some sad, reflective bits. In fact, it is much darker than I expected, populated by loss, alienation, rent boys, squats, drugs, and alcoholic binges. 

Fergus, born in a small-minded West Coast fishing port, Burnoch, is desperate to escape its restrictions and low expectations. Along the way he finds a vocation: edgy, art photography, and becomes famous, moving in the same circles as the Saatchis and the Joplins, and going from living in a dingy squat to working in a trendy Hoxton studio cum loft, and living in a millionaire's pile in Belsize Park. It's a world away from his mum Isla's bungalow "Marbella" back in Burnoch, with it's ruched sateen blinds, known locally as "hoor's knickers", which I have to confess to lusting after myself in the late eighties! She sadly squandered her opportunities to leave the town when she fell pregnant with Fergus at seventeen, and never subsequently managed to escape its confines. Fergus is absolutely determined to get out of town, and when an opportunity presents itself, he goes at it with a kind of death wish. 

There are some great pictures of the excesses of the self-indulgent art world and its parties, where agents woo rich Russian oligarchs at exclusive sushi bars, the slivers of fish laid like scales on a human mermaid. There are photography trips to war-torn Baghdad to capture the grisly aftermath of suicide bombs, and to death row in Houston to photograph the condemned and their last meals, with Fergus cruising around in a rental car playing "Dropkick me Jesus through the goalposts of life" on the radio.  It is an expansive novel covering the years from 1978 - 2007,  and clocking up considerable mileage on photographic expeditions.

Despite his fame and artistic achievements, Fergus remains deeply unsatisfied and cynical of the art world, nursing an alienation from his former life, as deep as the differences between North and South. After making a bit of a mess of lots of things, the resolution comes from closer to home than he could imagine. As Kate Muir herself once said in an interview about this book: "The thing about roots is that they keep you upright. They're the ballast in your life, the thing you're never going to throw away."

However, there is still one unresolved issue in my mind: is it really true that if one feeds Alka Seltzer to seagulls, (a recreational sport for bored teenagers in Burnoch, and a story once told to me as a student in Aberdeen), they will explode, or is it just an urban myth?

Just a thought from a mere mortal...

Now that they are planning to open up the Man Booker prize to American authors, I'm just wondering how long the short list is going to be. I heard one critic on the radio saying that judges would have to read four hundred novels! She was lamenting the fact that she only ever manages to read two books a day. Well, it's taken me all Summer to get into double figures. I don't think I even managed to read two a week!

How do people do that and not have their brains burst? I couldn't possibly read so fast, or retain any details of the plot at such speed. So it is with a sense of abject failure that I resume my noble quest to shift as much reading matter as possible off my bookshelves, and out of my small terraced house. I am the plodding Shire horse to their literary thoroughbred. 

                                                                             Versus

Which type of reader are you?

The Palace of Strange Girls

I am a Lancashire lass, born and bred in Blackpool, reading a debut novel by another Lancashire lass, Sallie Day, set in Blackpool, and enjoying the simple pleasure of recognising many of the references to local sights and venues with which I grew up.

I cannot remember how I came into possession of this book. Did I buy it in my local Waterstones, did I spot it in a charity shop, or did a colleague pass it on to me? I suspect that whichever one of these is true, what really attracted me to the book was the back cover with a black and white print of Blackpool Tower reproduced on it. I am always drawn to items with that iconic image on them, whether it be a Cath Kidston design on a beach bag, or a Marks and Spencer's insulated sandwich bag. They speak to me of home, and nostalgia for the past.

The novel is set in 1959 and follows the Singleton family who are on their annual holiday to Blackpool along with most of the population of Blackburn and other mill towns. It is amazing to think that at the height of its popularity in the inter-war years, Blackpool attracted seventeen million visitors a year. By the late fifties, with the demise of the cotton mills and the availability of cheap package holidays abroad, this was on the wane. Sallie Day sets her novel at this point, and has done an excellent job of researching the industrial and social history of the times. There is a real sense of change, and a mixture of fear and anticipation about the future. Not only are the industries and factories changing, with all the implications for employment and trades relations, but the young people are also changing with their dangerous fashions and music. The reader feels this tension between the old and the new worlds throughout the book, as it is at the heart of the Singleton family. 

The father Jack is torn between promotion to Mill manager, or a job offer to be the area union rep. The mother Ruth, is a control freak, unwilling to allow her sixteen year old daughter Helen any freedom to meet with other young people, or to wear any of the new fashions. Her own personal agenda is to move out of her modest terraced home in Blackburn to one of the new semis that are being built on the outskirts of town, an ambition not shared by her husband.

The youngest daughter, seven-year-old Beth, painfully stifled and mollycoddled by her mother after a recent heart operation, is the character I enjoyed most. She just wants to get on with finding all the objects in her I-Spy book, so that she can collect enough points to become a member of Big Chief I-Spy's club.

May I echo the Northern Echo when I say that Sallie Day's debut novel has a terrific sense of time and place. It is populated with Bendix twin tubs, stilettos, suspenders, net underskirts, block mascara, Teddy Boys, winkle-pickers, Babycham and winceyette nighties, with a backing track of Bobby Darin songs. A great End of Summer read.

Reader, I finished it!

As I near the end of my first working week back in the school routine, I have just finished reading Eva Ibbotson's A Song for Summer. Quite appropriate timing, as the hot, sunny weather we have been blessed with this year is about to break. Tomorrow will be ten degrees cooler, and we are officially into Autumn already.

Eva Ibbotson as she appeared in The Telegraph article

I am not quite sure what to make of this book. It's an enjoyable read, but it tries to straddle both camps of adult and teenage fiction, and ends up being neither. Originally written as an adult novel, I read in a Telegraph article that it had been adapted later on for the teen market. Therein lies the problem I think.

It has what one would expect from an Ibbotson novel. There are echoes of her own nomadic life, lots of snapshots of Vienna and references to the kind of intellectual circles that both her parents moved in. Her mother knew Berthold Brecht, who gets a mention in the play. As a child she was surrounded by intelligent, independent-minded, strong women, who were perhaps the blueprint for the heroine's mother and her two aunts, all heavily involved with the Suffragette movement, and running an alternative home in central London. Ellen Carr, the heroine in question, is expected to be a blue-stocking herself, but she has a passion for cooking, and latent gifts for home-making. She takes off on an adventure as a housemistress at an unconventional Austrian school, where there is much scope for the author to indulge her trademark love of the zany. The school is populated by a band of eccentrics of all temperaments and nationalities, where the children run wild as do the teachers! Were this present day England, Ofsted would be sure to shut it down immediately, but this is Austria just before the war, where there are other more pressing concerns on the horizon.

It is against this backdrop that Ibbotson sets her love story, for that is essentially what this book is. There's a predictability about some of it, and an unbelievability about other bits of it, especially the character of the hapless Kendrick.

Nevertheless, it's a good read with a feisty, beautiful heroine, but with her love interest prone to rolling about on a swan-shaped bed with an operatic diva from time to time, it's not exactly suitable for primary aged kids!

A Song for Summer

Before the Summer disappears, I will just squeeze in Eva Ibbotson's Song for Summer. Known mostly as a children's author, I first enjoyed her work when I read Journey to the River Sea. I spotted this novel in a charity shop, and thought it might be suitable for the school library, but stuck it on the bookshelf until I had time to vet it. Now is that time.

School has been out for the Summer, but now I must resume the day job, so reading will be snatched here and there, where time, energy and commitments allow. 

I have had a really enjoyable Summer of reading and have made a good start at clearing my shelves, but it has been an epic fail in terms of liberating those books out of the house to new homes. This is because although I now feel able to part with these novels, I have done such a good job of selling them to my own family, that some of them now want to read them! However, I suppose it is progress to move a pile of books from one side of the bed to the other, and to share a good read with my loved ones. 

I already know a couple of chapters in that this book won't be making it into the school library, as I feel it is more suitable for secondary aged pupils, having already mentioned female circumcision and skinny dipping teachers. So, I don't know at this stage what I am in for:an adult book, or a young teen read. I'll let you know in due course.....                                                                                                  

A Thousand Splendid Suns

Every book I've read so far has been written by white middle-class men, with the exception of Rachel Joyce, and Lionel Shriver (is she pretending to be a man, or is that her real name?) and Siobhan Horner's co-authorship of For Better, For Worse. So, time to redress the balance with Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns. 

I really enjoyed his first novel The Kite Runner, and
this, according to the blurb on the back is better. The Times writes "If he cut his teeth writing about his countrymen, it is the plight of Afghanistan's women that has brought him to realise his full powers as a novelist."
Accordingly, the book is dedicated to the women of Afghanistan.

If Richard and Judy and their viewers, plus Isabel Allende and Mariella Frostrup are anything to go by, it was one of the great reads of 2007. All I know so far, is that, unlike my last read, which had no chapter breaks at all, Khaled has been very kind to me, and written in nice, short chapters!     

Short chapters means fast reading for me, and I finished this wonderful novel in two sessions over a night and a day. Here is yet another man who writes women amazingly, and what strong women. Nothing really prepared me for the harsh reality of life for a woman under the rule of warlords and the Taliban, and the restrictive controls of extreme Islamist teachings, enforced by a male-dominated society. 

The dynamic of the plot revolves around the two main female characters, Mariam and Laila, almost a generation apart, who have suffered at the hands of such men. Through their shared suffering, they forge a gradual admiration and friendship for each other that develops into a mother/daughter relationship, and acts as a buffer against the outrageous violence and injustice that is meted out to them. 

In the Postscript he writes that "For me, writing has always been the selfish, self-serving act of telling myself a story." What makes this book magnificent, is that it tells just such a powerful, emotive story, populated by unforgettable characters. Mariam, the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy business man, stands like a giant, quietly dignified in the face of domestic tyranny and humiliation. Laila later describes her surrogate mother as being " like a rock in a riverbed, enduring without complaint, her grace not sullied but shaped by the turbulence that washes over her." 

It is an incredibly powerful book, which I really enjoyed, even though it left my emotions totally shredded!                                         

Seek my face

I wonder how everyone else chooses the next book they are going to read. Confronted with the remnant of reading material here, I decided that much as I had enjoyed Kevin, I didn't feel able to plunge straight into something dark and psychological, but still wanted something meaty. I looked at the covers and was attracted by a novel with shelves on the front full of arty materials. Since I am trying to clear my shelves I felt this may be an appropriate choice. Then I saw John Updike's name, and realised that I had never read anything by him, and that I really ought to have done! 

Starting into the book, I began to wonder if the reason I had never read any Updike before was because he is far too clever for me! As the elderly artist Hope is interviewed by a young twenty-something journalist, Kathryn, she reminisces about her life amongst a group of post-war, bohemian artists in New York: contemporaries of the likes of Picasso, Mondrian and Dali. This part of the novel is peppered with intellectual artistic theories about Expressionism and Abstract art, and multiple references to philosophers such as Nietzsche, Jung and Freud. I found it hard to follow, a mite pompous and rather dry and boring. Time Out may describe it as "Engrossing, intellectually thrilling", but throw me a line John, I'm drowning here, and don't possess the processing power of many of your more literate reviewers!

I purposed to bear with, and a turn of phrase here and there began to show me that this guy could write something that would engage me. The Times says that his novel "Burns it's images into the reader's mind", and here I offer you an example of Updike's beautiful prose, describing the joy of one's favourite tea mugs of all things:"Momentarily alone, Hope empties the mugs-her own, nearly empty; Kathryn's nearly full- in the sink. Then she swishes hot faucet water around in them and puts them mouth-down on the drainer to dry. The pets she and Jerry had have all died, but even these mugs, with their painted parrots and red-and-green stripes, have that quality pets do, of sharing your innermost domestic existence, so that you come gratefully home to them from a venture into human society. They give you back yourself after others have dirtied and addled it." I was beginning to get sucked into Hope's evocation of the past, to feel what her life must have been like living in a virtual artists' colony on Long Island. 

Further passages of purple prose ensued - descriptions of the Long Island landscapes, of physical human beauty, of glass panes in an old window, accomplished with light, deft touches in painterly fashion. The interview, taking place over the course of a day became like a private view into Hope's life and soul. Three relationships, three children and a life full of stories. We often look at old people and don't realise the life they have lived and what they have lost - that once they were idealistic risk-takers, grabbing life by the neck and shaking it. After reading this book, I don't think I will look at an older person so dismissively again. 

In parts Updike's novel sounds like a twentieth century art treatise, but what remains for me is the celebration of the human spirit and the appreciation of art in its many forms. That a man could write two women, one pushing eighty and one pushing thirty so convincingly is testament to the mastery of his own art.

The shelves incidentally are the ones in Jackson Pollock's studio.

And now for something completely different!

So, having got my holiday fling with canals and the life afloat out of the way, I am now back on track with my next offering, Lionel Shriver's We need to talk about Kevin.

I got through the first hundred pages with my mind not really tuned in to the narrative voice, and then, almost imperceptibly, I began to understand where Eva, the wife of the story is coming from. From this point on I found myself reading for pleasure, and not just for notching up another title on the bedpost and the blog.

I picked this novel up in the local charity shop simply because I had been intrigued by the film of the same name, starring Tilda Swinton, but which I had never managed to see when it was in the cinema. I was also intrigued to read something by a woman called Lionel.

I think that if possible, it's always best to read the book before you see the film. Then you can avoid having someone else's vision projected into your mind. I can understand why some actors don't like to watch previous film versions of screenplays that they are working on, because it makes it very difficult for them to come up with new angles on the characters they are playing. However, watching a film after you have enjoyed the book, may be a let down, as The Time Traveller'sWife was for me, but more usually it is a pleasure. Therefore, I fully intend to borrow a copy of the Kevin DVD once I have finished, and see if my understanding of the novel tallies with that of the director. Tilda Swinton is a great actress, so I hope not to be disappointed.

As for my observations on the book, I have to admit that Lionel Shriver kept me on my toes. It is a very cleverly written book, and demanded my whole attention. I found it impossible to read and follow if there were any distractions in the room, whereas I can usually read with conversations going on around me, or television in the background. Consequently, it has taken me longer, as I have had to find quiet time and space to read. It has been well worth the effort though.

The Kevin in question is Eva and Franklins' teenage son, who has massacred seven of his fellow pupils, a teacher and a canteen worker in the gym at his school a few days before his sixteenth birthday. As she undertakes to visit Kevin in prison, Eva writes a series of revealing letters to her estranged husband looking for clues as to why he may have committed such a heinous crime. Were they to blame as parents? Was it nature, or was it nurture? It is a brutal dissection of a marriage, where like Isaac and Rebekah, they have taken sides and are championing their favourites.

Lionel Shriver is masterful in her psychological analysis of the main players, and fills her novel with darkly comic humour. I don't know how she sustains this brilliance, in the same way that I cannot comprehend how Kevin manages to manipulate his parents from earliest childhood whilst maintaining his own disaffected, amoral personality. Left me wanting to be able to write like Lionel!

For better, for worse.......

One of my most enjoyable reads of the Summer has been a husband and wife joint effort:For Better, For Worse by Damian and Siobhan Horner. It chronicles their journey through France to the Med on their restored boat "Friendship", and switches constantly between his thoughts in bold typeface, and hers in normal typeface.

Most folks pushing forty and having a bit of a mid-life crisis, would probably buy a Harley, or go yak-packing in Patagonia for a month; but these two, he a burnt-out advertising exec, and she, a former travel writer and busy mum of two under threes, up sticks from the Big Smoke, decamp to a wooden boat and live in cramped conditions as they travel the French canal system.

Life in London has become pretty meaningless, and Damian in particular wants to know if there's still a good guy underneath his cutthroat advertising executive exterior.  His wife has settled into the humdrum routine of caring for very young children and misses not having a career or time for herself.  

On the journey they both get more than they bargained for as they rediscover the joys of family life, meet some amazing new friends, and learn how to savour the small things in life. It's a lovely read, and the stream of thought device alternating between husband and wife is amusing and insightful. I read it really quickly, and now want to go and live in Arles and be a writer!

This is the last of my three holiday read library books, and tomorrow I shall endeavour to return them without borrowing any more that might distract me from the task of reading only those tomes from the bag and the box that have come off my own shelves!

Too narrow to swing a cat

Another one of my illicit library reads that didn't come out of the bag. I started Steve Haywood's Too narrow to swing a cat while on the narrowboat, and finished it when I got home.

Although not written with the same verve and wit as Terry Darlington's books, it is nevertheless an entertaining and humourous read. My enjoyment was heightened as I had been through some of the very places he was writing about, and in some of the same pubs!

He really conveyed the personality of his cat Kit, and although I am not a cat person, like Steve's wife Em, I ended up toying with the idea of owning a Maine Coon cat. I even googled the breed website!

Read this book if you want to understand the history and the nature of life on the canals, and especially if you are one of those hire-boaters like me that plague the life out of the regulars on the cut!

The Unlikely pilgrimage of Harold Fry.

Why did it take me so long to read The Unlikely pilgrimage of Harold Fry? I got through it in stops and starts, interrupted by the barge holiday, but on my return I found I couldn't put it down. Harold got so far along his incredible journey that it seemed to gather a momentum of its own.

 

This is a fantastic novel dissecting the marriage of Harold and Maureen, and how we move around each other in our domestic arrangements, being very British, yet never saying what needs to be said. It is about those grand themes of love and loss, but is never heavy-handed, and unveils where the relationship started to break down in a gradual, gentle fashion, even though we may hazard a guess at the reasons for this.

It takes the form of an unlikely road trip, and has echoes for me of The Hundred year old man who climbed out of the window and disappeared, and Forrest Gump  especially in the way that other hapless cases latch onto Harold's mission, searching for meaning in their own lives. Harold himself is an archetypal anti-hero, full of regret and pathos, and along the way, he meets other individuals who have sometimes been damaged by life themselves. He also experiences the kindness of strangers. 

He travels almost the length of England in an attempt to save an old friend's life, but in the process, he saves his own. Meanwhile, his wife Maureen, left behind in her pristine home behind the net curtains, undergoes her own voyage of discovery and redemption. 

Although it deals with heavy themes, this is nevertheless a book full of gentle humour and wry observations, told with a deftness of touch. It could be unrelentingly tragic, and yet it is an uplifting and enriching read, which I thoroughly recommend.

A Confession.....

I must fess up and tell you, that the Narrowdog book wasn't out of the box or the bag that I am supposed to be reading my way through this Summer. It was borrowed from my local library after I was persuaded in there by a friend two days before casting off on my canal adventure. I was actually looking for information books about the canal journey we were making, and kind of stumbled across it, (plus two other books in the same vein). Oops!

As an apology for straying from my remit, I offer a short toast extract from The Gum Thief.  Prepare to be buttered up.....


Toast 2:A High Seas Tale

11 Nov. 1893
Though the Vessel shakes with incessant nauseating rolls & pitches, my faith in a Promised Land free of grills and devices that scorch our tender farinaceous flesh shakes not. The ship's Captain, one Cornelius Jif-a hideous, unschooled poltroon of questionable agenda-has almost entirely reduced our daily ration of both cinnamon & sugar, this over and above last week's complete withdrawal of butter.  Some of the fainter slices on board have swapped logic with salt water and have gone delirious from the cursed sogginess that is the perpetual enemy of we who travel on the Good Ship Slice, registered in Liverpool but flying the Canadian Dominion's flag (though only, one might add, when nearing crafts touting flags of nations hostile to America's open-loaf policy.......)

I hope the above buttering has whetted your appetite for more of this loaf. Personally, I think that Douglas Coupland is the best thing since sliced bread:)

Bag of books.

A box and a hessian bag of novels

Narrowboat reads

I've just come back from a week's holiday on a narrowboat, pootling along at 4 mph on the Shropshire Union Canal. Between working the locks there has been ample opportunity to sit up front with a good book.

I really enjoyed Douglas Coupland's The Gum Thief, set in a Staples megastore. It's an entertaining, easy read, as Coupland writes in short chapters, and moves the action along fast. The novel takes the form of a dialogue between two colleagues: Roger, a jaded, middle-aged divorcee, and Bethany, a twenty-something Goth. What makes this different, is that the "dialogue" happens through mock diary entries which Roger writes in Bethany's diary, pretending to be her. Two colleagues who would probably never mix socially begin to share each other's secrets and tragedies, and Roger's novel in progress: "Glove Pond."  Through this secret correspondence a friendship is forged and other family members become embroiled until the reader feels totally involved in their personal histories.

It is an extremely funny, quirky and touching book, dealing with the big themes in life such as death, grief, ageing and relationships. I would read it for the crazy toast interludes alone!

Midweek I turned to a barging book, Terry Darlington's Narrowdog to Wigan Pier. What's not to like about Terry? You get a road trip (on a canal), Terry's offbeat humour, and poetic soul searching to boot. It's a travelogue with a cast of worthy characters and places, stuffed full of literary references. I love his writing. He has a unique voice, and I have enjoyed all three of his Narrowdog books. This is perhaps my favourite, as it is the most autobiographical, weaving details of his life into the travel narrative. Plus, I was reading it whilst travelling on a narrowboat through some of the places in the book, experiencing some of the things he mentions. Oh, and I forgot the Whippets, Jim and Jess, and having met lots of pairs of dogs on various barges over the past week, I can testify to the fondness of  the barging fraternity for their canine companions. (Btw we saw 2 of the following: Westies, Bassett Hounds, Collies, Cairns, Red Setters, Huskies - all of them lovely, lovely dogs).

Two lovely Westies on the Shroppie

One down!

I am pleased to report that I finished MacLaverty's The Anatomy School this evening, and don't know what form of boredom overtook the previous reviewer who gave up at page sixty.  I was fairly riveted, although this may be something to do with my Catholic past and Northern Irish Roman Catholic ancestry, and my recent reacquaintance with Macbeth, which is quoted extensively throughout. I enjoyed everything about this book apart from the swearing, blaspheming and adolescent male obsession with sex, which MacLaverty absolutely nails. The dialogue sounds authentic, both the filthy, irreverent banter between the three school friends who are the main characters, and the older authoritarian figures. The priests, especially Condor,are brilliant,and I love the way that the author ratchets up the tension as the all-important exams approach. At this stage in Part 1, I found I couldn't put the book down. 

I could see this making a great film, and don't know why it hasn't made it to the silver screen yet. There would be some fabulous characters for actors to get their teeth into.

Anyway, my advice is to find some MacLaverty and read it. I definitely want to check out his other stuff if he can write so well. Let me not get side-tracked though. It's back to the hessian bag for me, and my second choice: Douglas Coupland's  The Gum Thief. This was picked up from the sale table at a local branch library for 50p. Too good to resist!

First out of the bag....

First out of the bag was Bernard MacLaverty's The Anatomy School, picked up at a local charity shop recently for £1.50. 

A passing acquaintance with the author (who was Writer-in-Residence at Aberdeen University in the mid eighties, when I was a student there), was enough to persuade me to take it home. He used to hang out in the Roman Catholic Chaplaincy,where students could find the best tea and coffee facilities, super ploughman's lunches and a great little library fitted out with study tables. I remember him as a genial, funny, down-to-earth kind of guy, who had experienced a normal life before taking up writing.  If you don't know anything about him or his work, check out his website, where he has some amusing anecdotes, and a recommended reading list of personal favourites. www.bernardmaclaverty.com

 I am heartened by the fact that he confesses to not reading much at all until adulthood. It seems to be the opposite way round for me. I read loads as a child, often stuff that I was too young to appreciate, but seem to have lost the appetite for reading in mid-life! Anyway, if The Times is right, this is going to be a "zestfully funny" novel. I'm twelve pages in so far, and enjoying the irreverent Catholic humour, especially the priests. Lets see how I get on between here and page sixty, where one reviewer says she got bored and gave up!

A Mixer and a mixed bag!

Buying a rather gorgeous Kitchen Aid mixer recently has moved precision engineering into my kitchen and my recipe books out of it. There's no way I would hide such a thing of beauty in a cupboard, but a solution had to be found for the books. Immediately, I set about removing two shelves of paperback novels from the Billy bookcase in our dining room to make room for Delia, Jamie, Nigel, Nigella and friends. However, I could not discard the paperbacks without knowing that I had read them all; rather ashamed of the fact that I ought to have read some of them, like Catch 22, a long time ago! So they are sitting in a cardboard box and a hessian bag awaiting removal to the charity shop AFTER I have read them. It's a very mixed bag. Some I have had for years, and their covers are like old friends. Others have been passed on to me by real friends. What they have in common is that I feel I would be missing something were I simply to bundle them into the boot of my car and distribute them around the charity shops in town. That something might be noble, or uplifting, or simply the possibility of a good laugh. Maybe in a really good novel it could be all three? 

So, here I am at the start of a long Summer holiday from my job as a teaching assistant, hoping that by the end of August I will be well-read, better informed, finely attuned to the human condition, and living in a tidier house! Now, where to begin........cardboard box, or hessian bag? Watch this space!