{review} miss buncle's book

D. E. Stevenson Miss Buncle's Book (1934 [2008]) 

   

Mr Abbott... had given up trying to predict the success or unsuccess of the novels he published, but he went on publishing them and hoping that each one published would prove itself a bestseller. Last Friday morning his nephew, Sam Abbott, who had just been taken into the firm of Abbott & Spicer, suddenly appeared in Mr Abbott's sanctum with a deplorable lack of ceremony, and announced 'Uncle Arthur, the feller who wrote this book is either a genius or an imbecile.' Something stirred in Mr Abbott's heart at these words, (a sort of sixth sense perhaps) and he had held out his hand for the untidy-looking manuscript with a feeling of excitement – was this the bestseller at last?

I'm going to confess up front that I read Miss Buncle's Book... on my Kindle. I know, I know: what about the tactile pleasures of a beautiful Persephone book in the hand? What of the terribleness of e-reading something with the actual word 'Book' on the cover, etc. etc.? I'm a bad person. But Persephone Books is now selling e-books, and one can only hope that this leads to an even wider audience for their lovely publications.

I am always a bit worried that I won't like a book that others love. For instance, I find myself in the tiny camp (I may even be camping by myself) of people who didn't like Miss Hargreaves and found I Capture the Castle twee and annoying. Fortunately, I loved Miss Buncle's Book: I loved the idea of the book within the book within the book, I loved the writing, and I just thought it was screwball comedy funny - like a wonderful B&W film of the 30s.

Without giving too much away, Miss Buncle writes a book based on what she knows. What she knows is, unfortunately for her future peace of mind, the inner workings of the small village in which she lives. Chronicles of an English Village (a.k.a. Disturbers of the Peace) becomes a bestseller and half the village is up in arms about who the anonymous author could be; and then strange things begin to happen amid the chaos... Miss Buncle - with her "unsophisticated palate and a good digestion"- we find, is a very fine student of human nature indeed:

She was obviously a simple sort of person – shabbily dressed in a coat and skirt of blue flannel. Her hat was dreadful, her face was pale and rather thin, with a pointed chin and a nondescript nose, but on the other hand her eyes were good – dark blue with long lashes – and they twinkled a little when she laughed. Her mouth was good too, and her teeth – if they were real – magnificent.

Miss Buncle is also my favourite type of heroine: as well as making her own way entirely on the merits of her own intelligence, she ticks another box - the heroine who whips off her spectacles (figuratively in this case), lets down her hair (OK, perms her hair), finds a good dressmaker and is instantly transformed into, if not a Siren, then certainly into her rather different alter-ego of the book.

I find this trope eerily irresistible. The Cinderella scene always gives me a primitive sort of pleasure even as I snort in derision at yet another manipulative canonical trope courtesy of the patriarchy: think of Miss Pettigrew transformed; or, the companion in Agatha Christie's The Mystery of the Blue Train or the young tomboy in another favourite Christie, The Moving Finger, or, indeed, Eliza Doolittle.

I've heard (My Porch) that the sequel (Miss Buncle Married) isn't as good, so I'm just going to leave this one in my mind for a bit.

'How nice for you – and for her of course,' exclaimed Barbara. She had lived for so long amongst these people and had suffered so many afternoon teas that she was able to say the expected thing without thinking about it at all. You simply put a penny in the machine and the expected thing came out at once, all done up in a neat little packet, and suitably labelled. The machine worked without any effort on Barbara's part, it even worked when the real Barbara was absent and only the shell, dressed in its shabby garments, remained sitting upright upon its chair. The real Barbara often flew away like that and took refuge from the dullness and boredom of Silverstream in the scintillating atmosphere of Copperfield.

Did Stevenson write anything else I should read?

Rating: 10/10.

If you liked this: my favourite examples of the Cinderella transformation are above.

{review} maids of misfortune

M. Louisa Locke Maids of Misfortune: A Victorian San Francisco Mystery (2009)

M. Louisa Locke Uneasy Spirits: A Victorian San Francisco Mystery (2011)

 

Annie shuddered. Every time Nate said those words, she felt a blow to the framework of her existence. How do you become a person whom someone wants to kill? How do you go about your day, knowing some unknown person is out there plotting your death?

I'm a bit mixed up about things which are 'free'. Why would someone sell their book for free? Books are hard work. Books in Australia are also heinously expensive which I think adds to my uneasy feelings: are free books rubbish books? 

The Amazon 'Top Free' list comes through my feed reader every day (RSS link), but generally the content doesn't hold much interest for me. Occasionally there's a familiar name, but generally there is a lot of bodice-ripping and cooking recipes to wade through (maybe if the genres were combined I might stop a little longer?!). Only very, very occasionally is there something that makes me click onwards. 

The blurb for M. Louisa Locke's first historical detective novel was appealing: in late 1870s' San Francisco an independent woman, a young widow, who runs a boarding house and has a financially successful sideline pretending to be a fortune-teller, is drawn into the suspicious death of a client. The author was a professor of history before retiring to write fiction. This pushed some buttons for me.

And I was very, very pleasantly surprised: Maids of Misfortune was a very enjoyable read - plenty of nice historical detail, a really likeable heroine, a typically gorgeous male helper figure to add some will-she?-won't-she? to the action. 

I would recommend this if you like a light historical read with a dash of romance and a nice puzzle to get the grey cells going. I would have bought the second in the series (Uneasy Spirits) but the next day it too popped up in the free list.

Mrs. Henderson was a widow, here to communicate with her departed husband, a pharmacist. Miss Reynolds was her sister. She had evidently developed a lovely relationship with a minor Greek philosopher who spoke to her through Arabella.

In this second book I thought the puzzle was a good one (about dodgy séances) though the dialogue sometimes seemed to flow less easily than the first book. I thought there were moments of cliché in both books (the hero's warm skin and beating heart through his fine linen; the heroine smelling of sunshine; some 'delicate' nose-blowing), but, hey, it's a clichéd genre and that's probably what I felt like when I devoured these two neat bits of historical crime fiction. There's a third on the way too. 

Oh, and my 'thing' about free stuff? The author has an interesting piece on her blog about why she added the books to the 'free' program and what a success if has been. And, yes, this has made me have a good think about my snobby perspective on the value of free stuff.

Rating: 3/5 for both.

If you liked this: it's Julia Grey territory.

{miscellaneous} summing up

Ah, the time of the year for summing up.

In no particular order, my top five ten twelve favourite books of 2011 are:

No Orchids for Miss Blandish - James Hadley Chase {REVIEW}

The Blue Castle - L. M. Montgomery {REVIEW}

The Turn of the Screw - Henry James {REVIEW}

The Boys from Brazil - Ira Levin {REVIEW}

How to Be a Woman - Caitlin Moran {REVIEW}

The Return of the Soldier - Rebecca West {REVIEW}

The Ghost Map - Steven Johnson {REVIEW}

The Debt to Pleasure - John Lanchester {REVIEW}

In a Lonely Place - Dorothy B. Hughes {REVIEW}

The Shuttle - Frances Hodgson Burnett 

Nella Last's War: The Second World War Diaries of Housewife, 49 - R. Broad & S. Fleming (eds.)

The Eye of Love - Margery Sharp {REVIEW}

I read just over 170 books this year. I keep getting a different figure owing to not having enough fingers, toes and concentration (the cricket was on in the background), but, roughly, it breaks down into fiction of the respectable literary type (37), crime/mystery/stuff I should be slightly ashamed of but am not in the least (113), non-fiction (23). Two more stats: e-books (128 - !!!!), re-reads (25). 

At this time last year I was packing away my library as I thought I might be moving. As it turned out, I didn't move. I also didn't unpack. As a result, I have done rather less re-reading this year of old favourites (um, unless I bought them again - bad person, bad person).

The single biggest change to my reading habits this year was caused by buying a Kindle. This has resulted in a dramatic reduction in the number of physical books entering the home and requiring homes of their own. This is both excellent - since space is always an issue - but, I do confess, a little sad, as I LOVE BEING SURROUNDED BY BOOKS. Books are beautiful, tactile, comforting, dusty, furnish a room; my library is part of me. But, I also love being able to highlight bits of text (I don't write on real books); I love being able to search electronically for something I only half remember; I love that e-books are cheaper than tree-books (a big consideration for an Australian as books are ludicrously expensive here); I love getting them instantly; I love travelling without a case so full of books I can't fit in a giant box of macarons. I miss: sharing books; the smell of books; not being able to get everything I want electronically (but that's (a) just greedy and (b) kinder on my bank balance).

A couple of new discoveries this year have brought me much reading pleasure - Mary Stewart, Tess Gerritsen, Ira Levin, Alan Hollinghurst, Anne Zouroudi, Jo Nesbø. There were a couple of good sequels in favourite series - Alan Bradley's Flavia de Luce, Carol K Carr's India Black. I don't go in much for 'challenges' but I really enjoyed International Anita Brookner Day (I reviewed Lewis Percy) and Paris in July (Zazie in the Metro and Chéri were highlights). I also had a HUGE binge on Patricia Wentworth, some of which were re-reads (favourite: The Case of William Smith).

2012? I want to: read more non-fiction (I feel as though I've read less than usual) and more noir and try to resist starting a new series as I cannot stop myself from reading ALL OF THE SERIES AND STUFFING UP MY READING PLANS. Yes, well, good luck.

{wishlist} manybooks.net

Some of the titles on manybooks.net (a great free source of older books in multiple e-formats including for Kindle) make me laugh so much. How about... 

• How She Felt in Her First Corset and other poems by Matt W. Alderson (1887)

• Miss Maitland Private Secretary by Geraldine Bonner (1919) [gutenberg offers some images]

 

 Sources: (1) (2)

One could so easily write one's own adventure using these titles.

And how did she feel? Apparently ""I feel just like bucking," the maiden replied."

Incidentally, manybooks.net has a useful RSS feed for tracking their latest additions.

{not so much review as quick thought-gathering}

What have I been reading lately? 

Well... I've completely fallen behind with all my (on the whole, pretty tenuous and crazily laid-back) reading 'plans' and have about 30 things on my 'active' list that I am either reading or about to read or started to read so long ago that I really should just start them again as Heaven knows what they were about. There is no question that I am prey to complete book sluttiness and a lack of impulse control. I also seem to have been neglecting non-fiction of late and I think this is because I am meant (er... overdue) to be reviewing some classical studies books for a journal and the non-fiction bit of my mind is occupied there. 

That said... Danielle (whose enticing blog A Work in Progress offers me far too many distractions!) asked what non-fiction books we've been enjoying and I have to say that Caitlin Moran's How to Be a Woman is my Personal Non-Fiction Book of The Year. Brilliantly funny. I don't often laugh aloud when reading (except when reading E. F. Benson), but she is hysterical. And there are important and very sensible messages for women who are feeling overwhelmed by the pressure to embrace, e.g., Brazilian waxes and dodgy undies. Loved this book.

Because I find it difficult to begin a series and just read one book, I derailed my reading plans on Charlaine Harris' 'Sookie Stackhouse' series. The first couple were good fun {REVIEW}, then there was a slumpy decline in the middle (one book in particular not only omitted a big chunk of background which was essential for the book - it had appeared somewhere in a short story, apparently - but suffered from dodgy editing which had failed to correct continuity problems) but the last couple sort of picked up the pace again, though I had lost my enthusiasm by then. I don't think I really like the supernatural that much, but Southern food sounds great. I've got one more to go; not sure I'll bother. 

I was reading Kerrie's post at Mysteries in Paradise (a local, Adelaide blog which I really enjoy) on whether one can view series vs. stand-alone-book in terms of a dichotomy between character development (series) and plot (stand-alone). Certainly in the Sookie Stackhouse series it is clear that the reader can have both but as the series progresses there is the problem of bringing the reader up to speed on the characters. This is tricky: how much background is sufficient?

And then there's the interesting case of an author who has gone backwards in a much-loved series and provided her readers with another take on an earlier book. This would count as a fleshing-out of the characters, as the plot has already appeared. Laurie R. King's Beekeeping for Beginners is a short story (available only, I think, as an e-book) which  takes the reader back to the meeting between Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes in The Beekeeper's Apprentice. This time around, the meeting and subsequent events are presented from Holmes' perspective. I thought this was an interesting idea and one which had a lot to offer fans of the series. It made me - as I presume was intended - want to go back and read all of the Mary Russell series again (I am only up to The Language of Bees, so I should still be going forward, not backwards).   

   

 

Another Mary: one wonderful discovery for me - courtesy of mentions on so many other blogs - is Mary Stewart. I cannot imagine why I haven't read these before as they magically combine a fistful of ingredients that I find terribly appealing in a book (crime, mystery, romance, plucky heroines, nice frocks, wonderful scenery, travel, etc.). I have now read three set in Greece (I thought I'd start with familiar territory) - This Rough Magic [Corfu], My Brother Michael [Delphi], and The Moonspinners [Crete]. Wonderful. I can see that reading the rest of her enormous oeuvre is going to stuff up all my plans for the next few months, esp. given their reissue (ghastly covers, as above). This is a thought which fills me with complete contentment.

One last thought: every book above was read on my Kindle. It has taken over my life. It has solved my book storage problems. I can eat with two hands now when I read at dinner. I am an addict.