Summer Time

There are certain sure signs that Summer is here.  For each of us they are probably very different.  It used to be the sound of the first ice cream van jingle, but round here they were still trying to ply their trade when I couldn't get the car out of the garage because of mounds and mounds of snow, so I've had to ditch that as one my sure fire indications.  Sadly, these days I complete the statement

I know that has Summer has come when.....

with the words

I can drive onto campus at 11.00am and find a parking space.  

Usually you have to be there well before nine.  The pleasure of not having to fight for a place is immense.

One universal signal, however, is the appearance in the Sunday papers of the lists of Summer Reading and this morning, the first really warm day we've had this year, The Sunday Times has provided fifty fiction and fifty non-fiction choices along with a handful of audio and children's suggestions.

I always pour over these lists with real interest.  The New Year equivalent, when people are asked for their 'books of the year', are terribly 'worthy' and I don't believe for a moment that half of them have ever really been read.  They have just been chosen to make the people recommending them sound good.  These Summer recommendations are different.  Oh, very few people actually come out with the real 'beach reads', but what you do get are suggestions of good, solid readable fiction; the sort that will see you through the next six months or so whatever the weather.

Amongst this morning's list there are several books that I have earmarked for any free days that I might discover hidden in my diary, including Ann Patchett's new novel, State of Wonder and Jane Harris's story of an English spinster who attaches herself to the family of a painter in the Glasgow of 1888, Gillespie and I.  There are also a couple that I seem to have missed when they came out, but which look very interesting.  I've enjoyed Justin Cartwright's earlier books, so I shall definitely see if I can find a copy of Other People's Money and Cynthia Ozick's Foreign Bodies set in post-war Paris sounds fascinating as well.

Reading through the list made me think, however, about all the plans I have made for Summer Reading over the years and about how rarely I have been able to stick to them.  When I was studying or teaching there was always a reading list for the following term that needed attention and each year I promised myself that I would get started early and make sure that I didn't end up having to rush.  After all, how many people had the privilege of a working life where reading fiction was a central activity?  How many would have killed for such a life?  But it never worked out like that.  There was always something on the library shelf, or something I'd been storing up all year that found its way into my hands instead.  And I don't suppose this year will be any different.  I might state my intention of reading certain books, but I strongly suspect that the same thing will happen as in the past.  I have eight books that have to be read for one reason or another before the second weekend in September, all excellent novels in their own right, but I don't mind betting that I shall be desperately trying to finish them at the last moment just as in previous years.

Am I alone in this?  Or are you all far better at meeting your objectives than me.  If so, what is your secret?  Please, do share it.

Back Again!

Look, if I ever commit myself up to that level again, will you all please take me out and shoot me!  How stupid can you get?  All I feel like doing now is precisely what is going on in the picture on the left.  In fact, I'm not even certain I've got the strength to read.  It might have to be a decent audiobook and someone else reading to me.

However, I do have one thing to be grateful for in as much as I had a request earlier in the week from a local university to see if I would do a year's cover work for them from September and I said no.  At any other time I might have been tempted to help them out only to have regretted it later when all the preparation and marking started to mount up.  But, coming as it did, just as I was really experiencing the consequences of saying yes too often, I turned them down without a second thought.  Come cold winter mornings, when I would have been dragging myself out to catch an early train, I shall be so glad about that.

Anyway, now I'm taking a breather before turning my mind towards the two Summer Schools I'm organising this year.  The first is the second week in August and is based round three piano concertos, one each by Beethoven, Schumann and Shostakovich.  We're going to place each one in the context of other music being written at the same time, by both those composers and others and I'm really looking forward to it because, although I've done all the organisation, I'm not leading any of the sessions so I can just sit back and enjoy the music.

The other, two weeks later, is our annual literature Summer School and this year the people coming have chosen to read three books each of which is set in two different time periods: Daphne du Maurier's The House on the Strand, Emma Darwin's A Secret Alchemy and Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott.  I have to do rather more where that week is concerned, because as well as leading the final discussion I also have to pull the whole week together and I want to get people thinking about why historical fiction seems to be making a comeback at the moment.  I happened to catch a radio discussion some weeks back suggesting that more recent historical research, which has concentrated on the everyday life of ordinary people, as opposed to the political events, was responsible and I shall be interested to see what the others think about that idea.  If any of you have any thoughts that would add to the discussion then please do let me know.

Now I'm off to put my feet up and listen to Wimbledon.  I might even pick up a book and read.  But then again, I might not.  Have a good weekend.

I am not a Passive Reader.

As Erica Wagner said in yesterday's Times, I don't like disagreeing with Kate Atkinson, who is one of my favourite authors and a writer whose intelligence I respect, but when she says as she did in that selfsame publication that reading is a passive activity I simply have to take issue.  The actual quote, taken from a piece marking the move of Jackson Brodie to the television screen this evening was this,


People like to think that there’s some synergy between reading and writing but there isn’t. Writing is a very active act and reading is passive and that’s seen as a negative thing: people don’t want to be seen to be passive. They want to feel engaged and involved in the process but they’re not. They’re reading something that would exist even if the reader didn’t.


Don't worry, I'm not going to get into the whole reader-response question here.  I know that the book sitting by my side at the moment would still exist even if I didn't.  But, even without wandering into the realms of literary theory, I'm afraid I think she is just plain wrong.  Whatever else reading is it isn't passive.  Or if it is then it has stopped being a worthwhile occupation because all you are doing is letting the words pass through your mind without engaging with them in any way and you might just as well fill the space up with so much cotton wool.


Any child in the process of learning how to read will tell you that reading is damned hard work.  The fact that so many of us manage to master the art to the point where we no longer notice that fact is a tribute to a lot more hard work put in by teachers of one sort or another all over the world.  But once you've reached that point and you don't notice the work you're putting in any more what you're doing is still not passive; what is more it is perfectly possible for it to be active in a different way every single time you pick a book up.


This past week I've read four books each of which has asked me to engage actively with it in an entirely different way.  One has an extremely complex plot located in a slightly off kilter world which demands that I follow every twist and turn in an unfamiliar setting without letting a single ball drop if I want to have a hope of understanding how the final denouement fits logically with what has gone before.


A second has engaged me in an emotional manner that has demanded that I empathise with characters I might not normally respond to and come to some understanding of why they have behaved as they have and why I might possibly be able to follow their reasoning if not ever applaud their choices.


The third and fourth are both books where I have been struck immediately by the fact that the writers are women of tremendous intelligence and I have struggled, as I read their novels, to keep up with the ideas that their minds have woven into extremely readable books.  But even here what I have been working at has been different.  In one of these it has been the ideas themselves that have kept me on my toes, the writers that this author has assumed I would know and the way in which their concepts have fed into the story she is telling.  In the other is has been the style that has had me thinking, deceptively simply and yet expressed in language so distilled that unpacking all the layers of meaning has been a tremendous challenge.  Working out how she has managed it would be another task in itself.


So, I'm afraid I have to disagree with Kate Atkinson.  For me the very essence of the pleasure that is reading is the fact that it isn't passive, that I have to work at it if I want to get anything out of it.  And the day it becomes a passive, time filling activity is the day I will burn my library cards and go out and shot myself.

To Prepare or Not To Prepare.......

Well, I don't know what it was that hit me last weekend, but I'm very glad it seems to be on its way out, helped, I'm sure, by all your good wishes.  I haven't even felt up to any decent convalescent reading, so I can't make myself feel better by making the rest of you jealous with the tales of all the good reading time I've had.  Still, showing off would not be good for my soul, I'm sure, so maybe it's better that way.  To be perfectly honest, I still feel as if I am a Bear of very little brain, so excuse me if what I write over the next few days makes very little sense indeed.  And the first person who says, "So what's different?" gets knocked straight off my Christmas card list.

Something which caught my attention in last weekend"s papers, and which I had intended to raise then, was an article about the need to prepare, to do your homework, as it were, before you take yourself off to any sort of cultural event.  I should have made a note of it at the time, but I was rushing out to go to Stratford and thought I would come back to it on the Sunday.  Of course, I didn't, so I may not be quoting the opinions with any accuracy but it was quite simply because I was going over to Stratford that it caught my attention and I thought I would ask what you thought about it.

As far as I remember, the gist of the argument was that if you were going to a play or an art exhibition or a concert it was pretty much your duty to have done some preparation before you went so that you could fully appreciate the work being laid before you.  So, if you were on your way to a concert you should have listened to the music beforehand so that you could judge the quality and interpretation of the specific performance you heard.  If going to an exhibition you should have researched the artist's portfolio and the context in which s/he was painting.  And, if you were going to the theatre you should have attempted to read the play before you went.

As I say, this struck a chord with me at the time, because I was just on my way to see the RSC's production of Philip Massinger's play of 1632, The City Madam and earlier in the week I had picked up a copy of the programme precisely so that I could read the scholarly articles which the Company always commissions over a pre-preformance lunch.  These articles don't give away the story, but they do cast light on the particular aspects of the play and its original context that the director has seen as important.  I find that they help to focus my mind on the world in which I am going to spend the next three hours before I ever take my seat and I do feel as if I enjoy the whole experience the more for having put some effort into it.  However, a couple of weeks prior to that I had been at a discussion with the director of another of this season's offerings, the 're-imagined' Cardenio, where the director, Greg Doran, had specifically asked that we shouldn't read the play itself before we saw it.  I probably respect Greg Doran more than any other theatre director around, so I hastily stuffed my newly purchased copy in my bag and haven't taken it out since.  I don't see the production for another month or so.

I can't really comment on the concert aspect because I've been going to classical performances now on a regular basis for over fifty years and it is very rare indeed that I go to hear a piece of music I don't already know.  If I do, it's likely to be something new that isn't available to listen to beforehand anyway.  I have, however, recently been to see the Jan Gossaert exhibition at the National Gallery (post to follow) and for various reasons wasn't able to read up about the artist's work or life beforehand.  I did pop into the Gallery prior to going to the exhibition itself with the intention of picking up the catalogue to read through over an early lunch but it was so vast that I couldn't even face the thought of lugging it round the exhibition with me and so ended up not buying it until I was ready to come home.  And I'm sorry about that because I'm certain that if I had had more context into which I could have placed Gossaert's work I would have got a lot more out of the paintings themselves.  Preparation would have helped.

So, where do you stand?  Do you prefer to go to these things 'blind'?  Do you feel the need, or the duty, to have done some preparatory homework?  Or do you laugh at the very idea of having the time to research before you experience a great cultural event?  I'm interested to know.

To Believe or not To Believe...........

First an apology.  There was some sort of blip in the Blogger world at the back end of last week and as a consequence a number of comments were wiped out.  That really annoys me, as I would hate to think that anyone believed I had deleted their comment as unacceptable.  I do do that from time to time, but not with any of these.  I have no way of knowing just how many people were involved, but if one of them was YOU, then please accept my apologies.

Secondly, a blowing of my own trumpet.  I did what I said I would do last Sunday and cancelled one of my library tickets.  As a result my bookshelves are slightly less bowed in the middle and I am feeling a little less guilty about the number of library books that appeared to have taken up permanent residence here.  I have also reduced the number of reservations I have on my other two tickets to the number of books I could actually take out at any one time.  It is so embarrassing when ten books turn up at once and you only have space for eight of them on your ticket.  Which do you leave behind?  Quite how long I will be able to maintain this part of the resolution I don't know, but at the moment I am being really good.  (And also, really smug, but we won't go there for the moment.)

There were a number of things that I wanted to write about this morning but if I try to rattle them all off I will end up saying very little about nothing. So, a relatively short post about one of them and then I'll pick up on the others later in the week.  Over breakfast this morning I was reading a review of a new book by Harold Bloom, called The Anatomy of Influence.  In it the reviewer, John Carey, a distinguish British scholar, writes:


He regards Shakespearian characters as real people, who exist outside the plays. Hamlet, for example, has a will of his own and “rebels against apprenticeship to Shakespeare”. Those who object that Hamlet is just a figment of Shakespeare’s imagination are quickly dismissed: “I brush aside all academic critics — dryasdusts and moldyfigs.” As real people, the characters are free to become quite different from anything Shakespeare wrote. Bloom’s Falstaff is “an incessant and powerful thinker” and his Hamlet “knows everything”.
Apparently Bloom once wrote a fantasy novel, and in these creative misreadings he becomes a fantasist rather than a critic. His imagination also gives him access to secrets of the characters’ sex lives omitted from the plays. He knows that the marriage of Othello and Desdemona was never consummated, and that Macbeth was prone to premature ejaculation (at least, that is what he seems to mean when he discloses that Macbeth is “sexually baffled in his enormous desire for his wife”).


I have read very little of Bloom's work; he is not as feted on this side of the Atlantic as I believe he is in the US, and if this is representative of his views, then I can't see me reading very much more.  It is, of course, possible that there has been an editorial slip and that what he really intended to say was that Falstaff is “an incessant and powerful drinker” but given the other examples I suspect not.  I'm not denying that Falstaff did a fair bit of thinking, but let's face it, it did him no good at all given the way that he completely misread the situation between himself and Prince Hal.  And, if it is true that Hamlet knows everything, how come we have the perpetual question of to be or not to be hanging around in our heads?  However, should it be the case that Macbeth was indeed prone to premature ejaculation, then I suppose that does at least give us an answer to the worrying dilemma of how many children had Lady Macbeth.  We should be grateful for small mercies.

But, oh yes, there is a 'but' hidden away in here.  There is an issue here.  If we are going to believe in a character and the way in which they behave within the novel concerned, then they do have to have a reality to them that allows that belief.  They have to be three dimensional enough for the reader to accept that they could do what they do within the confines of a human life.  If a writer plies their craft well enough for us to laud a book with praise then surely one of the things they must have achieved is the creation of a set of characters that behave in a consistent and recognisably human way?  So, if a writer does his or her job supremely well is there not a chance that caught up within the power of the reading experience we might not, just for a moment, forget that there is no such person as Elizabeth Bennett, or that annoying as he is in his worst excesses, I am not going to be able to take Dickens' Pip and bash his head against a wall to knock some sense into it?

It's a fine line.  And it is the reader's line to draw.  If John Carey's reading of Harold Bloom's work is correct then Mr Bloom seems to draw it a lot further over than I do.  But you may feel differently and it would be interesting to hear your opinions.  Is it acceptable to project a life beyond the page for a character or should we confine our discussions to those facts that the author gives us?  And, I suppose, a second question could be should that be just the 'original' author, given how many characters find a second existence in the pages of writers' works.

As a postscript I should tell you the story of a discussion my Mom and I had before she died.  We had both been reading the Harry Potter series and she was as big a fan as I am.  However, I must have been waxing too lyrical on this particular occasion, because I distinctly remember her saying to me in a very concerned voice, "Annie, they're not actually real, you know."  Perhaps she thought I was going to leave my car parked outside her house and try and fly home on her kitchen broom.

Eyes Bigger Than......

I have just come in from a long walk during which I have taken a momentous decision;  I am going to give up one of my library tickets.  I am going to go into my local library tomorrow morning, surrender my card and ask them to delete it from the system.

No, I haven't had a brainstorm, nor have I taken leave of my senses.  What I am trying to do is curb the habit I have of ordering far more books through the library system than I could ever hope to read in the time I'm allowed to keep them.  Actually, I shouldn't call it a habit, it's far worse than that; it's an addiction.  Not only do said books weigh down my book shelves until they are at breaking point, but while those books are sitting on my shelves they're not on the library's shelves available for other people who do have the time and the desire to read them.  It has to stop.

Because of the way our library system works I have three different tickets which in total allow me to borrow forty books, most of them for up to three months at a time.  Forty books, and that's not counting the ones that I can have on reserve.  You can see the problem, can't you?  The Booker long list comes out - I order the lot.  One of the papers does a 'books of the year' or 'summer reading' article - another dozen or so join the list.  And blogging!  Oh don't get me onto the effects blogging has on this.  Oh yes, you're the ones who are really to blame.  None of this is my fault.  It's you lot out there, leading me into bad habits, that are at the root of the problem.  You're a bad influence, that's what you are.  I should have known better than to keep company with any of you.

There is another side to this as well.  I'm not really being discriminating enough in what I reserve.  Instead of taking the time to browse through a book or really read the reviews thoroughly I'm ordering things on a whim and then finding that I've spent time trying to get into a book that was never going to appeal to me in the first place, time that could have been better spent with books I had taken the trouble to find out more about.  Of course, some times there is a wonderful, serendipitous find, but not often enough to justify the continuation of my present approach.

So, I'm clearing the decks.  The ticket and the books associated with it go back to the library tomorrow.  I won't need more than one journey provided I pack the car boot carefully. And the new policy of keeping a wish list and only reserving book from it as I finish one in the pile begins.  One book finished, one book ordered and no more than a dozen in the house at anyone time.  I have the will power, I can do this.  If I repeat that often enough I might even begin to believe it.

Making Connections ~ The Other

A librarian friend of mine is convinced that books talk to each other because she so often finds that a subject she has been reading about in one will then find echoes in whatever volume she picks up next.  Well, I certainly wouldn't want to disagree with her.  In fact, one of the reasons that I first took up blogging was precisely because I wanted somewhere that I could explore those connections as and when they arose, although then, as now, I was interested in connections across all disciplines rather than just in books.  My weekend decision to do a bit of weeding and try and get back to reading for more than just escapism prompted me to think about that early resolve again and so this is going to be the first of what I hope will be a series of posts about making connections and the 'added value' such thematic 'echoes' can bring to the enjoyment of a book, a play, a piece of music or a work of art.

Over the past few weeks I've gone back to some of my earliest dramatic roots and have been re-reading the Greek Tragedies.  One of the issues that has come up time and again has been the problems that the 5th Century BCE Athenians so obviously had with anyone who was in some way 'other'.  You might have thought that this would be predictably with someone who was foreign, but far more often it was  with someone who was female.  Pity then poor Medea, who being both foreign and female was on a hiding to nothing before she ever set foot in Greece.  OK, so what she did, killing not only her rival for Jason's love but also the children she, herself, had borne him, was perhaps not the ideal way to endear herself to the populous, but nevertheless she just didn't stand a chance. 

What happens to Medea, especially the way she is set aside by Jason when he wants to take another wife, and the attitude expressed towards her, epitomises the often expressed regret of the Greek male that women had to exist at all.  In a strictly patriarchal society and one which saw women as inferior beings, it was a source of great concern to the men of Athens that it was unavoidable that they had to consort with women in order to perpetuate their family through the production of a male heir.  You get the feeling that if it hadn't been blasphemy to say so they would have told Zeus he'd got it wrong somewhere.  All babies should spring fully formed out of their father's heads as Zeus's own child, Athena did - except, of course, such children should always be male.  They might be able to get rid of a foreigner, but the dreaded woman they had to keep about them.  

Coincidently (or not, as the case of the whispering books may be) I've also been doing a lot of work on The Taming of the Shrew this past few weeks.  It's proving quite a frustrating play to study, mainly because wherever you look for academic discussion you find only two subjects being given any great attention, the relationship between The Taming of the Shrew and The Taming of a Shrew and the question of how you interpret what happens to Kate in that final scene, where it seems she capitulates completely to Petruchio's mastery.  I might come back to the first of those issues at some point because I think the answer to why there are two very different but clearly related plays probably accounts, to some extent at least, for the disappointment brought about by the second, however, the interesting aspect of my study in relation to this particular set of connections was the extract I came across from Jack Holland's A Brief History of Misogyny printed in the programme for an RSC production of the play.

For men, women are the original 'Other' - the 'not you'...woman presents a...complex problem for those who designated her as 'the Other'.  She is 'the Other' that cannot be excluded.  Racists can avoid interaction with the despised group.  But intercourse with women is in the end unavoidable, even for misogynists...intimacy with her is as unavoidable as it is essential.  The very maintenance of human life and society depend upon it.

And there we have it again, this idea that there are some instances of 'otherhood' that you can avoid, but the 'otherhood' of gender is inescapable.  I'm not certain, by the way, that this is a particularly helpful approach towards understanding what is going on in either A Shrew or The Shrew as texts, but clearly there was one RSC director who thought that it might provide a way of approaching the play when it came to trying to make sense of it on the stage.

Then along came instance the third, Julia Spencer-Fleming's second book in her Clare Ferguson series, A Fountain Filled With Blood.  Spencer-Fleming is one of those crime writers whose works I shall not be throwing into the compost bin.  Not only is this second book definitely better than the first, but she is also a writer who offers you subjects that require some serious thinking on the part of the reader, demanding that they consider their own position in relation to whatever issue she has chosen to raise.  I suspect the fact that Clare is an Episcopalian Priest is not purely coincidental.

In this book the people who have been assaulted, and in one instance killed, are all homosexual.  Clare is convinced that this is not a coincidence and that the fact that they are hate crimes should be made public.  Russ Van Alstyne, the local Police Chief, disagrees, arguing that to do so could cause unnecessary panic.  However, eventually he admits to Clare that this may not have been his only reason for refusing to publicise the sexuality of the victims.

"I guess I'm afraid that, deep down, all my reasons for not issuing a general warning or going to the press with the gay-bashing idea are because of ... who the victims were.  Because I don't, you know, feel comfortable around gay guys."

"Bur Dr. Dvorak was - is - a friend of yours.  That doesn't make any sense."

"We were friends at work.  I knew who he was and what he was, but it never impinged on our relationship.  He never talked about Paul, just like I never talked about my wife.  The fact that he was gay was like having a friend at work who's Jewish, or vegetarian.  You know about it, but you don't have to think about it, because what you do together never intersects with that other part of the person's life."

Here then is the other side of 'otherness', the 'other' you can pretend doesn't worry you because you can avoid ever having to face what marks that person out as different.  (Or for that matter, what marks you out as different.  Difference works both ways, although we rarely manage to recognise the fact.)

It makes you think, doesn't it?  How many prejudices do we deny simply because we've never been put into a position where we've had to intersect or interact with the people who embody them?  If we found ourselves in Russ's position could we be that honest?  Unless I hie me to a nunnery, I have to acknowledge the gender 'other', but other 'others'?  I'm not so sure.

Freedom, Not Escapism

Long ago and far away, in another blogging life, I used to contribute a discussion piece to the Sunday Salon on a fairly regular basis and very often what I wrote about would be sparked by the topic the author, Jeanette Winterson had raised in her column in the previous day's Times.  

I'm sure I'm not the only one who regrets the passing of the Times Saturday Book Supplement.  It was full of interesting reviews and debates and, coupled with The Guardian's Review Section, it ensured that you could catch up, over each weekend, with whatever had been going on in the book world during the previous seven days.  But it was Winterson's pieces I always looked forward to the most.  As an author she is someone whose works I have never particularly enjoyed, but as a thinker about the literary world and about what it means to be a reader I thought she was second to none.  So, it was with real pleasure that I picked up the collection of articles from Books and Company that I bought in Oxford a couple of weeks ago and found that the first of the pieces is one by Winterson, A roof of one's own.

In this essay Winterson talks about the way in which she 'made' books for herself as a child to replace those she could not buy.  Her technique was not exactly orthodox, but then neither was her childhood.  Whereas you or I would probably have bought ourselves a notebook and scribbled away in the privacy of our bedroom, the strictures laid down by Winterson's mother meant that was not an option open to her.  Instead she would memorise passages from the books she was allowed to borrow from the library and then copy the lines down on roofing slates from the old Accrington Stanley football ground.  Lacking any chalk with which to scribe, she used instead the stones that lay about the derelict buildings.

Of course the eighteenth and nineteenth century classics she was allowed to borrow were long and the slates not really adequate for the purpose and so inevitably major parts of the works would get paraphrased in Winterson's own words.  But, what she was aiming for was not a boiled down Reader's Digest style abridgement.

It was not the story I wanted, I wanted those moments of intensity that change a narrative into a poem.  I wanted to feel its heartbeat against my own.

Those couple of sentences brought me up short.  Especially that clause it was not the story I wanted, because when I think about my own reading, of late it has only been the story I've wanted.  My disquiet was only enhanced when I moved on to the next paragraph where Winterson talks about freeing herself from within the books as she copied them out.

Freedom, not escapism.  Time with a book is not time away from the real world.  A book is its own world, unique, entire.  A place we choose to visit, and although we cannot stay there, something of the book stays with us, perhaps vividly, perhaps out of conscious memory altogether, until years later we find it again, forgotten in a pocket, like a shell from a beach.

Freedom, the chance to enlarge mind and spirit beyond the confines of everyday.

Yes, exactly!  That is exactly what books used to do for me and yet of late, if I am honest, I know that  I have been reading in a very different way; I have, for the most part, been reading simply to escape.  

Now, I don't think there is anything wrong with a bit of escapism.  Goodness knows, during the winter we've just been through there were days when a book that took you away from the feet deep drifts of snow covering the surrounding district was the only way you could get 'out' of the house.  But, when I think back and try and remember the last time I read a book that gave me a feeling of having freed something of myself, of having expanded my mind and spirit, of having asked me to really engage with it, I'm hard pressed to recall anything.

Part of me would like to argue that there must have been a reason for this, that my mind must have needed a time of lying fallow and I think there is possibly some truth in that.  But I also think that it is very possible to simply become lazy in our reading habits and ask for nothing that demands more than a cursory, glancing attention.  A time of essential fallow can morph only too easily into a period where we simply allow the weeds to grow.  

So, with Winterson at my side, I am going to go weeding.  That doesn't mean that I am going to give up completely on my plot driven crime fiction but I am going to make sure that it isn't any more than fifty percent of what I read and I am only going to read the best, rather than whatever happens to come my way.  If it becomes clear that I have something in my hands that has little more than plot to recommend it then back to the library it goes.

And, if anyone at the Times should be reading this (well, you can always hope!) I want my Saturday Book Supplement back please.  More especially I want Jeanette Winterson's column back.  I've clearly suffered without a regular kick in the behind to keep me up to the mark.

Anyone For Tennis

I don't know if you remember, but earlier this year I blogged about an idea that had been mooted by the Institute of Fine Arts situated on Campus that they would run a book discussion group in conjunction with this summer's exhibition on tennis in art.  They were running into difficulties because there aren't that many books that feature tennis to any great extent.  Indeed, even when I put out a call for suggestions the blogging world found itself pushed for ideas.

Well, earlier this week I was contacted about the final selections and this is the list that the people organising the event have come up with.

Double Fault, Lionel Shriver

A Room with a View, E M Forster, (romance between Lucy and Cecil)

Period Piece, Gwen Raverat

Love Among the Chickens, P G Wodehouse, (Chapter XIII. Tea and Tennis)

As you can see, the connections between the game and the narrative in most of the books are as tentative as the texts I came up with, so there obviously really is a gap in the market out there just waiting to be filled by someone other than Lionel Shriver.  Nevertheless, I've signed up to participate because I want to encourage the Institute's attempt to reach out to a wider audience.  I think the basic idea of linking exhibitions with other art forms is a really good one and who knows what possibilities there may be in relation to future exhibitions.  

So, I will try and whip some enthusiasm for Double Fault, difficult as I know I'll find it.  I have real problems with Shriver's written style.  It doesn't matter how good or otherwise her work may be, the surface structure just gets in between me and it.  Forster, of course, is never any hardship and this particular book a wonderful summer read.  And, I suspect that the same will be true of the Wodehouse.  I don't know the chosen book, but doubtless it will be good for a wry smile at the very least and if it has to do with tea then it's bound to be a winner where I'm concerned.  I think the Raverat is a memoir.  I must check.  If that's the case then I will be very interested in it because I know she and her husband were good friends of the Woolfs and I enjoy anything to do with Bloomsbury.

What with this and the Summer School June to September is going to be a busy reading period, but then how does that make it different from any other period in my life?  What I will find interesting about this project is to see what the dynamics of the group will be like.  I've never been involved in an ad-hoc coming together like this before.  All the book groups I've belonged to have been made up of people who, for the most part, already knew each other.  There is the potential here for a certain amount of fireworks as people jostle for position.  It could work very well or it could be a recipe for disaster.  I shall just have to wait and see.

Summer School ~ 2011

Every year I look longingly at the adverts for Summer Schools, especially those which involve a study of some aspect of the literary world.  And, every year I force my gaze away from those same adverts for one simple reason - the cost.  A week at a Summer School at one of the UK's universities can set you back anything between £400 and £800 and that's before you factor in accommodation, board and transport.  Even if I didn't live on a very fixed income there is no way that I could even begin to think about splashing out that amount of money.

Well, last year, I decided to do something about it.  It seemed to me that if I felt this way there must be others with the same desires and the same problems meeting them.  I began by canvasing members of my U3A group to see what interest I could gather there and before I knew it I had a group of a dozen other avid readers who were all keen to see if we couldn't put something together for a little less in the way of financial layout.

What I eventually devised was a week in which we met on three afternoons, the Monday, Wednesday and Friday, to discuss three separate, but linked, books.  We met in a different person's house on each occasion and someone different led each discussion.  That way no one was asked to take on too much of the burden of hosting or of preparation.  We all dropped 50p into a saucer on the way out every time we meet to cover the cost of tea and biscuits and as a consequence the week set us back by the grand sum of £1.50 a head.  It was a roaring success.  We started on the Monday with Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, moved on to Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone and finished up the week with Andrew Taylor's The American Boy.  By the Friday meeting we were so involved with the books and with our comparison of the treatment of crime in the nineteenth century that I had to force people to leave so that Jen could have her home back.

Needless to say, we are repeating the experience this year and running a music equivalent as well and the time has come for me to put together lists of possible literary trios so that this year's group can decide what they would like to read.  I'm going to follow the same pattern as last summer when I offered five sets of three books and asked people to rank them one to five in order of preference.  I then totalled the marks for each set and the one with the lowest score was chosen.  In fact, it was a very close run thing last year and four of the trios pushed each other hard.  That makes it easier this time round because I can retain the three losers on the list.  There was one set that no one was interested in, so that will have to be replaced and I need a final group to fill in for those we actually read last year.

Choosing the books is more than half the fun.  There are some criteria I have to abide by.  Everything has to be easily and cheaply available and we don't want anything too heavyweight.  This is supposed to be fun, after all. Other than that, the literary world is my oyster.  This is where I've got to.

Groves of Academe

The Secret History ~ Donna Tart
Gaudy Night ~ Dorothy L Sayers
Nice Work ~ David Lodge

Then and Now

Ghostwalk ~ Rebecca Stott
A Secret Alchemy ~ Emma Darwin
The House on the Strand ~ Daphne du Maurier

The Regeneration Trilogy

Regeneration ~ Pat Barker
The Eye in the Door ~ Pat Barker
The Ghost Road ~ Pat Barker


221B Baker Street and Beyond


The Hound of the Baskervilles ~ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Final Solution ~ Michael Chabon
Arthur and George ~ Julian Barnes


Authoboigraphical Fiction


The Master ~ Colm Toibin
The Hours ~ Michael Cunningham
Girl in a Blue Dress ~ Gaynor Arnold


The first three are the runners up from last year.  The first and third speak for themselves.  The second comprises three books that all work in two different time periods.  The first new group is one I've put together from books that have something to do with either Sherlock Holmes or his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the second (for which I desperately need to find a better title!) is made up of books that fictionalise aspects of a writer's life.


Now, here's where you come in.  Are there any obvious contenders for those last two groups that I've missed?  I don't want to put one of the Mary Russell books into the Sherlock Holmes set.  I know the people who will be participating and I don't think it would work.  But, are there other re-imaginings of Holmes' adventures?  And what about other books that fictionalise authors?  I would have loved to include the new David Lodge, A Man of Parts,  which is about H G Wells, but it's still only in hardback.  Any suggestions will be gratefully received before I have to finalise the list at the end of the week.

The Great Book Buying Expedition

So, yesterday morning I woke up feeling well enough to set out on a Great Book Buying Expedition because, as some of you know, I was recently the lucky recipient of an unexpected present of some book tokens. As real book buying for me always means travelling to one of two fairly distant places it can never be planned in advance, I have to take myself by surprise and just set out. If I know what I want and it's something that I think they are likely to have in, then I go to a small Shropshire town called Much Wenlock to my favourite independent shop, Wenlock Books. If you're ever in the area I can't recommend the shop too highly. Anna sells both new books and second hand volumes and is always only too glad to talk to you about her stock. If you're lucky she will also make you a cup of excellent tea as well. What more could anyone ask?

Yesterday, however, I needed to browse and I also felt well enough to get as far as Oxford and that is a combination which means just one thing - a day in Blackwells.

Some people, I know, find a bookshop that size intimidating and I can understand that. How can you hope to find something that is just right amongst all those books? How do you ever narrow down your choice? Panic ye not! I have the perfect answer - tea and buns. The tea and bun break is an essential part of any Great Book Buying Expedition. Actually, if you're going to be pedantic about things, several tea and bun breaks. Blackwells acknowledges this fact by having a cafe inside the shop, although normally there are so many people having tea and bun breaks that it is hard to find a seat. But don't let that worry you, there are plenty of other appropriate places where you can indulge within very easy walking distance.

So, your plan of campaign should go something like this. Arrive at your destination. First tea and bun break while you decide which sections of the bookshop you are going to prowl round and in what order. For me, yesterday, this was the literary criticism section, the fiction in translation and the history department.

Having made your initial selection you then go back to the shop and carry out a preliminary sweep, logging possible choices as you go. Note book and pencil is essential at this stage, although you will need to be prepared to defend yourself if challenged by concerned booksellers who think you are just noting down titles that you then intend to buy at half the price from the Internet. (You wouldn't do that, would you?) This reconnaissance can take anything from half an hour to half the day depended on the size of the bookshop and how many categories of book you are interested in. However long it takes, by the time you get to the end of it you will definitely need another tea and bun break. You might even need two buns if your exertions have left you really exhausted.

Over your second bun you then peruse and narrow down your lists and decide which books are going to be deemed to be serious contenders. Over your first bun you may have got the list down to a couple of dozen but it's over that second one that you do the really hard work and cull for all you are worth. They will want to close the bookshop at some point that evening.

Back to the book face then, this time for some serious browsing. I hope you haven't come in your best clothes, because this part of the proceedings inevitably means that you will end up sitting on the floor pouring over tables of contents, reading first chapters or chasing through indexes to see if your favourite writer is mentioned or if that essential piece of information is covered. This is hard work. When you have browsed your way through your short list you will justifiably be tired. You will need more tea and buns.

I recommend a real good strong Assam tea for this deliberation because this is where you have to make the final selection and your resolve will need fortifying. However much you want that book on Crime Fiction that's only available in hardback at £125 (I kid you not!) you can't have it, at least not if you have my bank manager, you can't. You have to be realistic and make decisions. You may even find you need a full cream tea to get you through this difficult and heartbreaking part of the operation.

Finally, at a point where the staff of both tea and book shops are ready to have you removed for loitering with intent, you pull out your purse (or in my case, book tokens) and you buy your books. These may or may not be the ones you decided on over your full cream tea. It's not unknown for all this hard work to be in vain and for me, at least, to completely change my mind the moment I get back inside the shop and buy something that just happens to cross my line of vision as I go through the door for that last momentous visit. But what does that matter? I've had the fun, I've had the tea and buns and I've finally got the books. What better way of spending a day?

What's that? I haven't said which books I actually bought? Sometimes I think that is the least important part of the whole expedition, but if you really want to know.

I rejected the fiction in translation because I've had so many bad experiences recently with poor transitions and I didn't have anyone with me who could vouch for the quality of what I was looking at. The history section was always little more than a preliminary scan for when I move on to study medieval literature next year and want some social and political context. The serious buying in that area won't happen until Autumn at the earliest. So, that left literary criticism and within that I found myself drawn back again and again to the essay section. I looked long and hard at the latest volume of Virginia Woolf's collected essays, but it was very expensive, and I also hankered after the new Zadie Smith collection, but that is coming out in paperback later this month and I am prepared to wait a little longer. So, what I finally came home with was a volume of Michael Chabon's essays in praise of reading and writing, Maps and Legends, and a collection edited by Susan Hill, The Best of Books and Company, which comprises a selection of the essays that originally appeared in the magazine of that name. I love nothing better than reading about other people's bookish loves. Both of them will give me hours of pleasure, accompanied, of course, by more tea and buns.


Annie

U3A Monday Reading Group

You may have noticed that I've added a new tab at the top of the page for my Monday afternoon reading group and I thought you might like to know a bit about us and the type of book that we read.

As the tab says we meet under the auspices of the University of the Third Age, which you may know is a world wide organisation through which people who for the most part are either retired or semi-retired come together to self-educate. Branches vary in size. My local group is around the 200 mark, but there are others which are smaller and others that are as big as 1400 or 1500. The study groups available will depend on the interests of the individual branch members and the expertise within the group in terms of people who can lead the learning. In my case I belong to the history and music groups in addition to the reading group and I teach two Shakespeare classes as well as running a literature Summer School each year.

I belong to three different reading groups, but this is the one that most makes me think. Almost all of the members have been English teachers up to at least 'A' level standard and all of them are really really intelligent readers. I learn so much just from talking with them about the books we choose to read. I love our Monday afternoons and always come home with my mind buzzing with new ideas.

Our group was set up to read award winners and for the past three or four years that is what we have done, choosing from amongst the Booker, Pulitzer, Orange, Costa, Commonwealth and Dagger Lists. Given the amount of 'bashing' that goes on after any prize is awarded, it's interesting that in all that time there has only been one book that we have unanimously agreed should never have had a sniff at any award. I probably ought not to say what that was in case the author is reading. I've been caught out that way before.

Despite our having so few failures, at our last meeting we decided that we would like to spread our nets a little wider and acknowledge the fact that in many instances there have been other books on short lists that have been every bit as deserving of the award as the title that actually won. So, with that in mind, we have been studying the runners-up for the Booker and I suspect that this is a project that will keep us busy for the next couple of years, if not longer. May is a special meeting because we have specifically been asked to read Iris Murdoch's The Bell. As we take a break in August, for the moment we have just selected titles for June and July, Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop and Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans. But before we break up for the summer we will decide what were going to read through the winter and I will post our choices here.

If you have any favourites that you know have run the Booker winners close and which you would like to recommend then we are always open to suggestions. What do you think we should read over the coming months? Or, if you are brave enough, are there any you think we should definitely avoid?


Annie

Book Tokens

Totally unexpectedly, I was given some book tokens yesterday. They were a completely unnecessary thank you for a very minor service I'd done someone, but nevertheless very very welcome, because I love book tokens.

Not, every one does, you know?  I have three sets of god children, all in varying stages of growing up, and while the youngest are still at the stage where I wouldn't think of giving them a token, because anything that doesn't have wrapping paper that can be torn to shreds is a major disappointment, the other two groups have diametrically opposed views on the subject.  The eldest, a grouping of three, now all in their thirties, demand the real thing.  So what if I choose a book they already have?  It doesn't matter.  They want something I have gone out and chosen especially for them.  The youngest of these has a birthday just days away from my own and we think so alike about literature that on three occasions we have chosen exactly the same book for each other.  It can get complicated.

The middle group are both teenagers and for the last twelve years or so, they have been equally adamant about wanting tokens.  I don't think it's to do with them not trusting my judgement, they will often ask for advice about what to buy, they just like going round the bookshop for themselves and weighing up the options.

And I'm with them.  The thrill of being able to browse the shelves, knowing that you don't have to leave all those books behind, that you're in a position to take one or maybe even two, home with you without having to calculate whether or not you can really afford them, is wonderful.  Some of you will have heard this story before, so I apologise in advance, but I think it's worth the retelling.  Some years ago an ex-partner (and believe me, that ex is important) asked me what I wanted for Christmas and I said that I would love some book tokens so that I could go and browse round my favourite bookshop looking for books that I didn't even know existed but which I would want as soon as I saw them.  Well, Christmas morning came and we exchanged presents.  I gave him the individualised, custom-made barometer I'd commissioned after he had admired the maker's work at an exhibition we'd been to and he gave me.......

An Electric Toothbrush.

You see why the ex was important.

Well, no electric toothbrush this time.  This time I get the joy of deciding which bookshop I'm going to go to, browsing for a couple of hours, going off and having tea and cake while I think over what I've seen and then finally coming home clutching my wonderful and unexpected purchases.  Could life hold any greater pleasure?  Not from where I'm standing.

This Year 'Don Quixote'?

I'm still working my way slowly though Susan Hill's book of reading delights, Howards End is on the Landing, and this morning, curled up in one of my favourite coffee shops, I came across her piece about the books with which we form a special relationship despite the fact that they have been standing unread on our shelves for decades at the very least.

They become known in a strange way, perhaps because we have read a lot about them, or they are books that are part of our overall heritage. I think I know a lot about 'Don Quixote'. I do know a lot about 'Don Quixote'. I have just never read it. I doubt if I ever will. But I know what people mean when they talk about tilting at windmills; I recognise a drawing of Quixote and Sancha Panza. I believe Cervantes to be a great European writer. Why do I believe that? What possible grounds do I have for believing it? Other people's opinions, the fact that it has an honourable and permanent place in the canon? So, 'Don Quixote' has an honourable, permanent place on my shelves. It would be wrong to get rid of it.

I feel exactly the same about Don Quixote. I too have a copy and, like Susan Hill, I have never read it. Nevertheless, this doesn't stop me from being convinced that I know what the novel is about. After all, I did once, long ago, see a stage version at the National starring Paul Scofield. That has to count for something, surely?

Well, two people who we know did read the book were William Shakespeare and the up and coming star of the King's Men, John Fletcher. I don't know about you, but I always find it astounding that Shakespeare and Cervantes lived at the same time, however, that is, in fact, the case. Indeed, they died on the very same day, April 23rd 1616.

Cervantes published the first part of Don Quixote in 1605 and the first English translation, by Thomas Shelton, hit the book stalls outside St Pauls in the early Summer of 1612, just in time for Shakespeare to pick up a copy and decide that one of the stories it contained would be ideal fodder for his Christmas production for the company he had been part of since its foundation in 1594. By this time most of his work was being done in collaboration with the young Fletcher and this was no exception. The play, Cardenio, was written, the music composed by Robert Johnson, who also worked with them on The Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII, and the whole entertainment presented at court over the Christmas period 1612.

What, you've never heard of a Shakespeare play called Cardenio? Ah, well there's the rub. We've lost it. Careless, I know, but nevertheless, a fact. What we do have is a bowdlerised version from the eighteenth century by one Lewis Theobald called Double Falsehood which he claimed was based on the Shakespeare and Fletcher original, but if he had the three copies he said he did they almost certainly went up in flames in the Drury Lane fire of 1809. Please, don't ask me to say any more, it's just too painful. If it's any sort of consolation, what does still exist is the music for that first production and you can see it, I believe, in the Bodleian Library.

Recently, however, there has been considerable interest in both the Theobald play and in attempts to use it as a basis from which to reconstruct the original Cardenio. There was an Arden edition of Double Falsehood published last year and there have been two university attempts, one here in the UK and one in New Zealand, to stage a version of what scholars have thought might be something like the original of 1612. Now, we have the first professional production opening at the Swan Theatre in Stratford next month. As you can imagine, this has caused considerable interest, not to say controversy, and I can't wait to see how Greg Doran (a director, for whom I have the greatest respect) has set about rebuilding a script from very little original material. Fortunately, there are going to be several opportunities during the coming months to talk with him about the process, including an afternoon workshop in June that I've managed to wangle myself a place on.

There is no way that what we are going to see on stage this summer can possibly be thought of as a reliable reconstruction of the performance King James and his court saw during those seventeenth century Christmas festivities. Theobald must have completely gutted the original. For instance, there is no subplot in Double Falsehood and I am reliably informed, by someone who definitely knows, that there is only one play from that period which doesn't have at least one subplot and often more. Shakespeare certainly always liked an extra line of plot development knocking around. Nevertheless, if even just a few lines are reliably by Shakespeare that has to be worth something.

And now, I have to decide whether I am going to celebrate this event by making this the year in which I change my relationship to the Don. Is this going to be the year when I finally take my copy down from the shelf and actually read it? Maybe, we'll see.


Annie

Shared Fetish

How do I manage to do it time, after time, after time? Here I am again running rings round myself in order to try and catch up with everything that needs to be prepared for this week. Actually, I know why it's happened this time. I was involved last week in the appointment of a very senior academic position (which I would love to gossip about, but to do so would definitely be unprofessional) and I underestimated just how much time and energy it was going to take. So, here I am battling away to finish a lecture on the relationship between The Taming of the Shrew and The Taming of a Shrew and read David Nicholls' novel, One Day, both of which I need for meetings on Wednesday.

Fortunately, the Nicholls is hardly the most demanding of works, in fact I'm not certain how we are going to sustain an hour and a half's discussion on it. It's taking time, but not much brain power. And, every now and again it makes me smile in recognition of something that strikes a chord in me, like this.

[Emma] drinks pints of coffee and writes little observations and ideas for stories with her best fountain pen on the linen-white pages of expensive notebooks. Sometimes, when it is going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery. The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus ticket, the wall of a cell. Emma is lost on anything less than 120gsm.

If there is such a thing as a fetish for stationery then I definitely share it. I love the feel of a clean sheet of paper that has still to be marked in anyway. I can get tingles up and down the back of my spine just remembering the thrill of having a new exercise book at school, a book that has, as yet, not even been sullied by so much as a ruled margin. Friends buy me notebooks as presents because they know I will go all gooey-eyed and drool my incoherent thanks as I imagine all the world shattering observations I will record in them.  I don't, any longer, hanker after the 'best fountain pen' because I learned a long time ago that the surest way to defile a beautiful sheet of paper was to turn me loose anywhere near it with real ink. But it does have to be a very particular make of biro and always, always a fine nib and black ink.

And, do you know what? I reckon I'm not alone in the blogging world in sharing Emma's fetish. I suspect that there are a lot of closet stationery obsessives out there right now. Have the courage to come out and admit your addiction and we can form a blogging branch of stationery fetishers anonymous. Just as long as no one ever really tries to wean me away from my notebooks, pens and rulers that is. This is a fetish I'm actually happy to claim as my own.

Annie

An Uncommon Writer

Well, here we are, at the end of the week, and I've made it in one piece. I'm going to celebrate by spending this weekend with the latest book by one of my favourite authors, Sophie Hannah, whose sixth crime novel, Lasting Damage, has just arrived from the library. The phone is coming off the hook, I'm detaching the door bell from the batteries and I shall repel all borders. I will also find time to catch up with my posts here and my on-line visiting ready to get back to a more organised schedule on Monday.

Meanwhile, I want to share what I think is a lovely story. When it first came out my library reading group all read Alan Bennett's wonderful book An Uncommon Reader. I'm sure all of those readers who are in the UK know about this gem but if you are from overseas and it hasn't come to your notice it imagines the arrival of a mobile library in the precincts of Buckingham Palace and the gradual conversion of HM the Queen to books and to reading for pleasure. The writing is absolutely typical of Bennett's perceptive observation and wry humour. It's the sort of book you read at one sitting, not only because it's fairly short, but also because you can't put it down until you've finished it.

Well, as I say, everyone in the group loved it and Mary, the librarian who runs the sessions, decided that because it had given us such pleasure she would contact Bennett's agent and just say thank you on our behalf.  So, she sent him an e-mail and asked him to pass on our best wishes to the author. That would have been the back end of 2007 and none of us had given it another thought until last week - when a postcard arrived.

The postcard, of the Yorkshire Dales, had been sent in September 2009 but had been rather vaguely addressed and it had taken the Post Office sometime to work out where to deliver it. To be honest, the sender's handwriting didn't help either. However, when we deciphered it, we discovered that it had come from Alan Bennett himself.  He thanked us not only for our kind thoughts but also for taking the trouble to contact him and spoke about the process of writing the book and how it had been easier than most because he didn't know HMQ and could therefore let his imagination do the work.   He wrote as if we were the ones doing him the favour instead of our being the people who had benefited immeasurably by the pleasure given by his wonderful writing. We would have been thrilled by a response from his agent, but this was so personal, and so typical of a man who is known here (much to his chagrin) as a National Treasure.  He is, indeed, a most uncommon writer.

Annie

Everyman ~ The Original

This month our Monday book group is reading Philip Roth's 2006 novel, Everyman, and as it must be all of thirty-five years since I read the original morality play, I thought I ought to go back and revisit it if I was going to be able to make sensible comparisons between what I assume are texts that are meant to be considered together.

The earliest print fragment of Everyman dates to somewhere between 1510 and 1525 and although it has been suggested that it is actually several decades older than that if, as is often posited, the English play is based on the Antwerp text of Elckerlijc (c 1518-1525) then this fragment is probably very close to the time of composition. This isn't the place to go into theatre history and its developments, but if Everyman is as late as 1525 then the changes that were to take place in the intervening seventy-four years between this and the opening of The Globe on Bankside in 1599 with that ringing cry of Oh for a muse of fire are just unbelievable. Even the thought makes my head spin. (Look, we can argue another day about whether the choruses were in that first performance - stop trying to distract me and take me off subject!)

What strikes me most immediately about Everyman is how modern it is and yet how much it is of its own time. There can't be a single person who reads this who doesn't identify with the main character, facing his own death and realising that the life he has lived has not been as he might have wished. It doesn't matter whether you define a well-lived life in terms of religious belief or not, surely everyone of us has to have some regrets. And everyone of us has to share Everyman's fear as well. I know that there are some people who live in such pain, physical or mental, that death is a relief, but even in such instances there must be, I would have thought, a certain amount of trepidation. And, the 'associates' who desert Everyman, his friends, his kin and most especially his goods - well I bet there are a few people around now who are reckoning the cost of the financial turn around in more than just monetary terms.

But, at the same time, this is so much part of the medieval society, especially in its insistence that however much Everyman repents he has to get it all sanctioned by a priest. No question of finding your own way to salvation, you go the way the church lays down or you don't go at all. If this is as late as 1525, then Martin Luther has been making waves on the Continent and the Catholic Church in England, not aware of the home grown challenge just around the corner, would be keen to emphasise and reinforce its power over the people who would have made up the audience for this drama.

Something that I do find interesting is that unlike a lot of other plays of this type there is no depiction of the 'fun' that Everyman has had up to the point that death comes along and says "Oy". We just jump straight in there on the fateful day itself. Maybe the church wasn't taking any chances. Don't give the plebs any ideas, they can be creative enough in the ways of evil as it is without putting notions in their heads for them. It does make for a pretty dark play from the first line onwards.

But, the original version of Everyman has one speech in it that surely lifts the heart of every reader who meets it. Having been forsaken by those he thought would always stand by his side, Everyman thinks he is alone until he discovers his ailing Good Deeds and that virtue's sister, Knowledge and it is Knowledge who says to him

Everyman, I will go with thee, and be thy guide,
In thy most need, to go by thy side.

This, of course, is the preface to the books published in the Everyman series. Words that still thrill me every time I hear them.

So, how is this going to relate to Philip Roth's book? That remains to be seen. Not only, of course, a modern retelling, but also one by a notably non-Christian writer. Our discussion this week is going to be very interesting.


Annie

The Essay

First, an apology to those of you I haven't got round to visiting this week. As some of you know, I don't always have the best of health and there are times when I just have to sit back and let life go on around me. In the past I have let this put a stop to my blogging, but this time round I don't want that to happen. I may occasionally have to go silent for a time, but I will eventually come back.

Down time does give me the opportunity to do some thinking about how I want to spend my up time, especially my reading hours and one of the forms I know I want to revisit is the essay. Perhaps thirty years ago I read a great many collections of essays, especially those put together from the work of arts journalists. I read everything published by Bernard Levin, for example, a journalist who had such a following that when he wrote in praise of a show or an exhibition it would turn its fortunes over night, as the RSC discovered when he waxed lyrical about their superb adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby. Somehow, however, I've let the habit slip and until the last couple of weeks there have been almost no essays on my shelves at all.

The essay is a difficult genre both to compose and to appreciate, I think. By its very nature it has to be thought in a concentrated form, a distillation of many hours of deliberation. Whatever argument the writer is putting forth, it has to be set out clearly and in a concise manner, it has to make its point at the first attempt. There is no option of setting out your thesis in an opening introduction and then returning to expand on your meaning a couple of chapters down the line; you have to get it right the first time.

Likewise, as a reader you have to hit the ground running. You don't have the luxury of easing your way into a writer's style, of gradually coming to understand their point of view. Although you do, at least, have the option of returning to a difficult passage, an essay generally demands a level of concentration greater than the average novel, a commitment to follow absolutely every turn of the author's mind.

And this, I think, is the reason I have let my essay reading fall by the wayside. Concentrated thinking hasn't been my strong point over the past few years and it is a habit, which once you let it fall into disuse, takes some retrieving. Now, however, I would like to do something about this, even if it only a promise to myself to read at least one essay a week, and so, as a way of breaking myself in slowly, I've been gathering a number of books which are primarily essays about reading. If I can't read about books, what can I do?

Anne Fadiman has been on my shelves all along. I love her work and return to it often. However, someone mentioned Michael Dirda on a blog and his work looks ideal. Classics for Pleasure and Book by Book, I found easily enough and yesterday Bound to Please finally arrived. Carolyn Heilbrun was also recommended and I've managed to pick up good cheap copies of The Last Gift of Time and Hamlet's Mother and other Women on line. I was lucky enough to be given a copy of Sarah Bakewell's essays about Montaigne, How to Live. And finally, and quite by chance, last weekend I picked up second hand collections by Doris Lessing and Nadine Gordimer, although the latter seem to be political rather than literary.

So, I can't say that I don't have enough to go at, can I, and the next thing I need to decide is how I'm going to structure my reading. And so, two questions: have any of you tackled an essay reading project and, if so, how did you go about it and are there any other collections of literary essays I might look out for? All suggestions most gratefully received.

Annie

My Life in Books

Well, not exactly mine, but the lives of the twenty guests who will be interviewed by Anne Robinson over the next fortnight as part of the BBC's run up to World Book Night on March 5th.  This is not a television household.  The radio wakes me up in the morning and goes off when I finally put the light out at night.  I do, however, make an exception for programmes that discuss books and the prospect of this every weekday evening for a fortnight, is tempting indeed.

If there's one thing I love as much as I do reading it is discussing what I've been reading with other likeminded people.  Hence the three book groups to which I belong, not to mention being part of the blogging world.  So, a programme where two guests each brings along five of their favourite books to talk about has to be my idea of heaven.  In fact you can tell how much I'm willing to put up with to listen to a book discussion if I say that two of the three people involved in the first of these programmes are among the broadcasters I would normally go furthest to avoid and yet I still watched it and still enjoyed it.

The format is very simple.  Anne Robinson invites two readers to choose books that mark particular points in their lives and explain why they have been important to them.  It could become extremely formulaic and lifeless and indeed after the first five minutes, especially when Robinson kept jumping in to try and move the proceedings along, I was worried that it wasn't going to work.  However, the two guests, writer P D James and radio presenter, Richard Bacon, suddenly started to interact with each other, ignoring whatever time constraints there may have been, and the programme immediately took off. I hope by the time the second in the series airs this evening Robinson will have relaxed a little and learned to let the discussion flow more easily.  I'm not certain, though, that she does relaxed and it might be necessary for the guests to take over every evening.

Whatever the faults it is just so nice to have a programme that takes reading as a lifelong obsession seriously and I hope that it will be such a success that the BBC will have to think about giving it a regular spot in the schedules rather than just a short term project.  Maybe we should all write and demand a second series.