to read

For the first time, I actually have a "To Read" list. If I've ever told you 'it's on my to-read list' in the past, I was misleading you slightly - in reality any lists of the kind have always been vague and stored in my brain somewhere.

Now, it's stored on my computer and made up of recommendations and chance encounters. It lacks a few books, like War & Peace, which have sat on my Feel-I-Should-Probably-Read list for some time but about which I am still sceptical. Here are its contents, in no particular order:

Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

The Larnachs, by Owen Marshall
A new novel by a New Zealand author, about the family who built NZ's only 'castle', in Dunedin. It looks very promising.

something or more than one something by P. G. Wodehouse

Keep the Aspidistra Flying, by George Orwell

A Handful of Dust, by Evelyn Waugh

The Pink Carnation series, by Lauren Willig

Evelina, by Fanny Burney

Belinda, by Maria Edgeworth
all three recommendations above courtesy of Stacy

Live Bodies, by Maurice Gee

Tender is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Conductor, by Sarah Quigley
Another more recent novel, about Shostakovich and the siege of Leningrad

Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens
I've never much enjoyed Dickens, but have recently been assured that I just started with the wrong novels. This is my concession to attempts at strong persuasion.

The History of Henry Esmond, by William Makepeace Thackeray
I loved Vanity Fair, so I'm really keen to read another Thackeray novel.

The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler

Till We Have Faces, by C. S. Lewis

The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald

Westwood, by Stella Gibbons

Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck

The Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe
Who couldn't want to read this after Northanger Abbey?

The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver
I actually own this so it really shouldn't be too hard, but it's been sitting in my shelf for a couple of years now.

Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John le Carré

The Crack-Up, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Villette, by Charlotte Brontë

Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie

The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene

Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov

Underworld, by Don DeLillo

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain

The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Time's Arrow, by Martin Amis

Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

******************

So - any comment? If any of these novels are a dead loss, please let me know! Do you have any recommendations of must-reads to add to the list? Should War & Peace have made it?

reading paint III

reading and childhood

Conger A. Metcalf, Untitled
[source]

Henri Martin, 'Young girl reading'
[Source]

Felice Casorati, 'Girl on a red carpet'
[source]

Marianne Stokes, 'Candlemas Day'
[source]

Mikhael Nesterov, 'Nastasja Nesterov on a garden-bench'
[source]

Jan Toorop, 'His daughter'
[source]

Gustav Adolph Hennig, 'Reading Girl'
[source]

customers in bookshops

I recently came across this lovely blog: This Is Not the Six Word Novel. Jen Campbell is a writer who works in a bookshop in the UK, and whose blog series "Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops" has recently scored a book deal.

I won't reproduce any of the quotes here, for fear of copyright et cetera, but trust me - they are GOLD. Check them out. In order to whet your appetite, here are some hints of what you might find:

reading paint II

reading and companionship

Jean Raoux, 'Les petites musiciennes'
[Source]

Robert Reid, 'Two Girls Reading'
[source]

Helen Allingham, 'Reading Lesson'
[source]

Vittorio Reggianini, 'The Letter'
[source]

Rudolf Ernst, 'The Reader'
[source]

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Two Sisters
[source]

Pablo Picasso, 'Two Girls Reading'
[source]

Suzuki Harunobo, no title
[source]

Egun Danielsson, 'Sisters'
[source]

reading paint

people who are so completely engrossed in their books that they have no idea they are being painted

Winslow Homer, 'The New Novel'
[Source]

Yves Trevedy, 'Elderly man at a window'
[Source]

Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoy, 'Sophia Kramskaya Reading'
[Source]

John Sargent, 'Man Reading'
[Source]

Jean-Jacques Henner, 'La Liseuse'
[Source]

Alexander Deineka, 'Woman Reading'
[Source]

This blog series is inspired by this post on Sally Skinner's blog, which introduced me to the world of art inspired by reading.

some thoughts on V. S. Naipaul, female writers and Jane Austen

So, the latest mudslinging match in the literary world: V. S. Naipaul's comments about himself, about women who write, about his former editor Diana Athill, and about Jane Austen.

(Naipaul won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001. He has written books like A House for Mr Biswas. I have not read any of his books so I will not be commenting on his literary talent. I understand he is a skillful writer with an off-putting personal life.)

The Guardian's summary is pretty good, but for your information, here are some of the things he said:

- No woman writer is his equal, in literary value or skill.

- People like his former editor, a successful writer in her own right, and Jane Austen are good examples of a "feminine" style which he labelled "feminine tosh". He can always pick up a piece of writing and assess within a few minutes whether it was written by a man or a woman.

- Jane Austen in particular wrote books out of "sentimental ambitions" and had a "sentimental sense of the world".

- This is because women inevitably are not "complete master[s] of a house", and so they have a "narrow view of the world".

I think my first response to these comments was confusion - I felt like laughing uproariously but I also felt rather horrified.

Here are some of my bullet-pointed thoughts in response.

1. Jane Austen? Sentimental?!
Have we been reading the same novels?
If you're going to pick an example of a sentimental female writer, surely Austen is one of the most bizarre choices to pull out of one's hat.

2. My theory is that he secretly identifies with Jane Austen's most ridiculous characters. The vain Sir Walter Elliot, the pompous Mr Collins. It's clear to me from this brief encounter with V. S. Naipaul that Jane Austen would have had a field day with him. She would have skewered him. And so he feels threatened.

3. Naipaul's blatant sexism is disturbing, to say the least. I suppose it's not surprising from an unsavoury misogynist who beat his wife, but, as Diana Abu-Jaber writes, his comment about women failing to be "master" of their own homes is chilling.
It is also horridly ironic, coming from someone who criticises women who fail to write about the evils of Western colonialism, but who does not notice his own ruthless male colonialism of the home.

4. Naipaul is so absorbed in himself that he clearly values no literature except his own genre and only a few within his genre. As Roxana Robinson said:

I suspect that, actually, Naipaul doesn’t think any male writers are his equal, either, nor any Jewish writers, nor Chinese or Arabic ones. I think Naipaul thinks no-one is his equal, and, in terms of hubris, he may be right.

It is, in fact, tempting to ignore him entirely. Except that I feel so furious.

Here is some more comment:
Diana Athill on Naipaul's attack on her
The Guardian's test: can you tell if the author is male or female?
"Sense and Sentimentality"
Jennifer Egan's response
The response of the Tribune (India)

I leave you with a quote from Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. The author is dead, but she still manages to speak for herself:

She agreed to it all for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition.

another lovely novel from Natasha Solomons

If just looking at that cover doesn't make you want to devour this book...

VIENNESE JEWESS, 19, seeks position as domestic servant. Speaks fluid English. I will cook your goose. Elise Landau, Vienna 4, Dorotheegasse, 30/5.

Elise Landau is a daughter, a beloved younger daughter, of an opera singer and a novelist. She loves her home, Vienna. She is also a Jew. And it is 1937. Believing that all her family will eventually be able to leave Austria, she advertises for a position in an English household as a domestic servant.

She arrives at Tyneford House in Dorset with a secret hidden in a viola, and gold chains sewn into the hems of her clothes. She will be housemaid for the enigmatic Mr Rivers and his charismatic son Kit. This novel is the story of her journey into womanhood at the same time as the world moves forward into war and as her parents try to join her in England. "The start of an affair. The end of an era." It's got romance, it's got history, it's got thoughtfulness, it's got setting, it's got joy and sorrow, and it seems to me like it's got everything.

I really, really loved Natasha Solomons' first novel, Mr Rosenblum's List. And so I was very excited to receive this in the post yesterday. Yes, I read it that quickly. It was very unhelpful when I am supposed to be poring over my thesis. Did it have to be so captivating?

Natasha Solomons writes really well. I think it's all in the detail. The book is full of enchanting descriptive passages which I do not skim over, as I normally would (to my shame). If I didn't really consider myself wanting to go to Dorset before, I do now.

The plot is beautifully woven together. I really did not want to put the book down. It's a really lovely, bittersweet combination. Moments of profound sorrow mixed with moments of joy, moments to delight in life. It's another historical novel, like my recent favourite Russian Winter, which works as a story with roots in history, rather than history clumsily turned fictional.

There were a few moments that felt a little laboured, but I almost don't want to mention them, because they really don't matter. The book as a whole is wonderful. It's like something delicious that melts in your mouth.