Birthdays Are Book Days

It's that time again. Another year older (which I'm trying not to think about) and something that goes hand-in-hand with birthdays for me - a cornucopia of new books. As far back as I can remember, if people were stuck for a present for me, they just got me a book and I never complained. I recall car journeys to the coast on birthdays with my nose more in a new book than bothered about sniffing the sea air. Don't worry, I eventually put it down and did kid stuff but the point is that birthdays and books are entwined in my head.

I went to York for a few days and went a little crazy in the book department. It's easy to be free with someone else's money but this is my York haul:

Three shops contributed to that. I've been meaning to read Brody's Kate Shackleton series from the beginning since I read A Woman Unknown (reviewed here) over a year ago but I'd got it into my head that I wanted to buy it from a 'proper' bookshop in Yorkshire and, being too dippy to order it in, I was waiting until I found it. Looking forward to that one immensely. The Stella Gibbons book will be the fourth of hers that I've read (and still haven't touched Cold Comfort Farm) and, although the last one I read was a little odd, I do have high hopes for this one. As for Jude the Obscure... Well, I might give that a wide berth for a while. I want to read it but Hardy tends to emotionally break me. 

Now the non-fiction. Out of the five, Dickens and the Artists is probably the most intriguing and the prettiest. Dickens and the Social Order might be put off until I've read two of the novels it discusses but it was too good a deal to ignore and, while I've heard mixed things about the Collins biography, I couldn't really pass that up either. The Virginia Woolf book, although small, is notable for the illustrations so that should be good and as for Yorkshire's Murderous Women... Can I just point out that until I started studying sensation fiction my interest in gruesome historical murders was almost nil? I think we can blame Edmund Yates and Wilkie Collins for that one. 

There's one other book to mention, a present from a good friend who aims to aid my procrastination by giving me books like this: 

She knows me so well.

Here, have Audrey Hepburn singing (with her real, charming voice) in a bookshop in Funny Face:

200th Post - Getting There Alone

When I was in my early teens my mum gave me a copy of A Tale of Two Cities for either Christmas or a birthday. I read it but it didn't make much of an impact on me. Although I was an avid reader throughout my youth I don't think classics really touched my radar. I think I rebelled against them, probably due to the fact my paternal grandfather had bookshelves stacked high with Dickens, Milton, Fielding and Shakespeare. Who doesn't instinctively feel as a kid that they should be the exact opposite to their family?

Of course, I was exposed to Shakespeare throughout my schooling and appreciated the tragedies enough to see Hamlet and Macbeth on stage at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. I studied the first chapter of Great Expectations for my GCSE coursework and looked at Tess of the D'Urbervilles for an A-Level module. I think Tess proved to be the breakthrough text. Certainly, when I got to university I was more than happy to find myself on a Victorian fiction unit. I remember vividly sitting and reading Jane Eyre in the lounge of my student accommodation, curled up on one of the cheap Ikea chairs and gazing up once in a while to look at the view of Lincoln Cathedral. Jane Eyre was followed by Wuthering Heights then the full text of Great Expectations and other selections. Although these books were part of a syllabus, reading them wasn't a chore (perhaps reading Middlemarch was though). I was then (and still am) a rather shy girl, reluctant to speak in seminars, but I really did enjoy the literature. I hadn't come to the texts on my own as such, but I'd found enjoyment in them because I'd been able to look at them as something other than the books my grandfather enjoyed.

Reaching conclusions about your tastes on your own is satisfying. Most people, unless they're exceptionally eager to please, can't get enjoyment from acting to suit others. When you finally sit down and consider the things you like, there's a certain thrill in knowing that these tastes are yours alone. They may be influenced by the prejudices and encouragements of your past but, if you have even a smidgen of self-awareness, you can pinpoint why you like them and not why people you've known like them.

Look at me and Victorian fiction. From being ambivalent about A Tale of Two Cities I've progressed to studying a minor author at PhD level. Classics of all eras find their way onto my reading piles. I'm intrigued by the literature and culture of the nineteenth-century in particular but I count Tom Jones and Mrs Dalloway amongst my favourite books. But I read them because I want to, not because somebody stern wants me to.

We've got a serious problem in Britain at the moment. One in three children live in houses without books. This is a nightmare and I dread to think where it'll leave us in a few decades. But I don't think pushing so-called 'good' literature on them from a young age is quite the way to go. Some will be receptive to it but a lot won't. It might put them off for life. When I was younger I loved Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl and whatever mystery books I could get my hands on. I happily read tie-ins with my favourite television shows - Sabrina the Teenage Witch springs straight to mind. That's a great way to get children from screen to page without much of an effort. Then perhaps when they get older they'll go looking for fiction they might enjoy themselves. Perhaps they'll even discover Charles Dickens, Emily Bronte and Wilkie Collins on their travels... Ah, well, an academic can dream.

Books I Couldn't Read

As some people may know, today is Bloomsday. With that in mind, the Internet is awash with people either congratulating themselves on having blundered through Ulysses or demonstrating their wisdom by happily pointing out they've never tried to read the thing. Personally, I've read it twice. It was one of the set texts on my undergraduate Modernism unit. I remember hating it the first time I tried then giving it a second shot and actually... well, I don't think I loved it but I certaininly hated it less. In the exam we had a choice of focusing on the novel or Eliot's The Waste Land. I don't think many people focused on Ulysses but I did. I felt it owed me a pass! Anyway, Bloomsday prompted me to take a look at my own bookshelves and those books I haven't yet read. This isn't including my ever-increasing TBR pile, which includes everything I intend to read in the next six to eight months. Nope, these are the ones I'm not so sure about ever reading. All advice gratefully received.

A Passage to India, E.M Forster
Bought for my Colonialism and Post Colonialism unit but never read.

Scenes of Clerical Life, George Eliot
Immensely difficult to get into. Bought a cheap version on a whim.

London Fields, Martin Amis
Purchased for some unit or other. Have since developed a dislike for the man which puts me off reading it.

The Time Traveller's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
Was in a 3 for 2 and never got around to reading it.

Mary Barton, Elizabeth Gaskell
Recommended text for my Victorian unit but couldn't find time to read it.

True Tales of American Life, ed Paul Scott
Recommended text for one of my units. Never got round to it.

A Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe
Bought on a whim, never found time to read it.

The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot
Fancied reading more of her work after finishing Silas Marner but it failed to grab me.

Adam Bede, George Eliot
Has the distinction of being the first classic I bought of my own free will. Alas, I never read the thing.

The Waves, Virginia Woolf
Exceptionally difficult to get into, even for a Modernist text. I gave up after a few pages.

So...what do you think? Any books in the list I should bump to my TBR pile? Oh, and as a final note, for years my dad's copy of Ulysses (never read) came in useful as just the right thickness to keep the dresser without a foot from wobbling. All great books have their uses!

Fear Itself

One of the most clichéd emotions in fiction that I've come across is fear. We're all familiar with the sweating palms, the darting eyes and the stomach sensations which compromise a fearful moment in a story. Those are all tangible effects of fear but they've become so predictable that I feel jolted out of the book whenever I read one - or, more frequently several - of the above.

As a writer I'm well aware that I resort to these clichés in early drafts. All too easy to get something on the paper and worry about it later. Then, as I reread and scrutinise, I invariably want to bypass over these moments. After all, it's too difficult to describe personal fear in a fresh manner... isn't it?

Possibly. But that doesn't mean we writers should stop trying.

The physical effects of fear probably are run of the mill in all of us. I start to shiver insanely, no matter the weather, the moment that something frightens me. I get the same reaction whether it's a spider crossing the room or something much more terrible. However, it's the mental accompaniment that differs.

How long that first sleep lasted, she never knew. She could only remember, in the after-time, that she woke instantly.

Every faculty and perception in her passed the boundary line between insensibility and consciousness, so to speak, at a leap. Without knowing why, she sat up suddenly in the bed, listening for she knew not what. Her head was in a whirl; her heart beat furiously, without any assignable cause. But one trivial event had happened during the interval while she had been asleep. The night-light had gone out; and the room, as a matter of course was in total darkness.

The above is an extract from one of my favourite novellas, The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins. Now, although Collins goes on to describe the terror as being akin to 'the clasp of an icy hand' the prelude to the fear is the most interesting bit. Collins builds the tension by withholding the revelation of fear itself. There is the vague suspicion that something is about to happen but until our protagonist, Agnes, discovers she is not alone a few paragraphs later we don't know what the non-assignable cause is.

If a character is truly afraid of something there must be a reason for it. The best way to demonstrate this sometimes can be to link briefly to a past event. Virginia Woolf, that master of stream-of-consciousness, was so entwined with the minds of her characters that an actual physical reaction, such as Collins' icy hand idea, would feel out of place in one her novels. Instead, Clarissa Dalloway spins her past into a web and manages to create a sense of fear around it.

Somehow it was her disaster - her disgrace. It was her punishment to see sink and disappear here a man, there a woman, in this profound darkness, and she forced to stand here in her evening dress. She had schemed; she had pilfered. She was never wholly admirable. She had wanted success, Lady Bexborough and the rest of it. And once she had walked on the terrace at Bourton.

Clarissa's fears echo vividly here, even if there is no physical description of them. Fear is mainly a mental component. It has physical side-effects, yes, but it's no lie to suggest that fear is all in the mind.

To that end, then, something we as writers need to accomplish is a way of portraying fear without seeming to portray fear and still get our point across.

Easy...