{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.

{review} the blue castle

L. M. Montgomery The Blue Castle (1926)

Valancy wakened early, in the lifeless, hopeless hour just preceding dawn. She had not slept very well. One does not sleep well, sometimes, when one is twenty-nine on the morrow, and unmarried, in a community and connection where the unmarried are simply those who have failed to get a man. 

What can I say about this lovely, lovely book that hasn't already been said? I devoured it in almost one sitting, as though it was some light but luscious, slightly sickly choux pastry creation inhaled on the footpath outside a pâtisserie. Like a Ladurée violet religeuse.

This is one of those books that you pick up in the sure knowledge that everything is going to turn out alright for the likeable heroine and her hero, despite the very long odds:

"Oh, if I could only have a house of my own—ever so poor, so tiny—but my own! But then," she added bitterly, "there is no use in yowling for the moon when you can't even get a tallow candle." 

It's like a check-list of everything one wants in an L.M.Montgomery book: fab scenery, gruesome but dainty deaths from tuberculosis as punishment for moral infringement, a secret fortune, mistaken medical diagnoses, and, oh yes, Lurv with a capital L.

Valancy is that dreadful creature, a spinster with romantic longings, living under the thumb of a bullying mother and stern gossipy community.

People like prudish "Second Cousin Sarah Taylor, with her great, pale, expressionless eyes, who was noted for the variety of her pickle recipes and for nothing else. So afraid of saying something indiscreet that she never said anything worth listening to. So proper that she blushed when she saw the advertisement picture of a corset and had put a dress on her Venus de Milo statuette which made it look 'real tasty'."

The writing is so wickedly good, which carries what is really a roll-call of (delightfully grim) clichés. For example, the line, "After all their bright hopes at the funeral!", or "'Fun!' Mrs. Frederick uttered the word as if Valancy had said she was going to have a little tuberculosis."

"I don't know what it would be like not to be afraid of something". Valancy daydreams away her sorrows by living a secret life filled with romance in the 'Blue Castle' of her imagination. She is thoroughly annoyingly spineless: "Valancy never said what she thought". Her mother is thoroughly stereotypically an evil [step]mother.

And then something happens that I'm not going to tell you and Valancy is presented with an opportunity to live large. Will she take it?

Words to drop in conversation: lambrequin.

Rating: 10/10 for sheer, gorgeous escapist romance coupled with ingenious plot and lovely writing.

If you liked this... it's got to be Anne of the Island. I don't think I ever got over Gilbert's narrow escape from death. Montgomery writes a great near-fatal illness.

BTW: I read this on the Kindle via a not wholly typo-free $4 copy on epubebookeditions.com.au. Proof-reading, folks...

{weekend words}

Valancy wakened early, in the lifeless, hopeless hour just preceding dawn. She had not slept very well. One does not sleep well, sometimes, when one is twenty-nine on the morrow, and unmarried, in a community and connection where the unmarried are simply those who have failed to get a man.

L. M. Montgomery (1926)

The Blue Castle

 

{review} daddy-long-legs

Jean Webster Daddy-Long-Legs (1912).

This is the cover of my 1954 copy of Daddy-Long-Legs, which I found in a second-hand bookshop in Perth for a measly $7:

I can't believe that I didn't read this wonderful book in my youth. It is quite magical and I think I might sit down and re-read it immediately. Just as soon as I download all the other books by Jean Webster (they're mostly available for free on-line). Puffin are going to reprint Daddy-Long-Legs soon too:

I loved the film (how could one not like a Fred Astaire film, although the age-gap between Astaire and Caron was considerably more than in the book):

Jerusha Abbott is an orphan miraculously taken under the wing of an anonymous benefactor who sends her to a nice ladies' college of the Vassar type and provides an income so that she can fulfil her promise of becoming a writer. Summer holidays are to be spent on a farm working at her craft. In exchange? Once a month, Judy - as she now becomes - must write her guardian a letter about her life. She will never hear from or meet Daddy-Long-Legs, as she calls him - having spied his elongated shadow on the orphanage wall - and she is not to ask any questions about him. Judy's letters are a delight as we learn how she adapts to college life and to having money to spend on clothes and entertainment for the first time in her life. Her letters reveal snippets of the ills of life as the oldest orphan and we watch as she flowers intellectually and physically. Romance enters her life in the form of a room-mate's "big, good-looking brother" and, most spectacularly, another room-mate's wealthy older uncle Jervis - all of which she documents to Daddy-Long-Legs. Can't give away the rest (though it's pretty obvious).

I hope he'll [Jervis] come soon; I am longing for someone to talk to. Mrs. Semple, to tell you the truth, gets rather monotonous. She never lets ideas interrupt the easy flow of her conversation. It's a funny thing about people here. Their world is just this single hilltop. They are not a bit universal, if you know what I mean. It's exactly the same as at the John Grier Home. Our ideas there were bounded by the four sides of the iron fence, only I didn't mind it so much because I was younger, and was so awfully busy. By the time I'd got all my beds made and my babies' faces washed and had gone to school and come home and had washed their faces again and darned their stockings and mended Freddie Perkin's trousers (he tore them every day of his life) and learned my lessons in between - I was ready to go to bed, and I didn't notice any lack of social intercourse. But after two years in a conversational college, I do miss it; and I shall be glad to see somebody who speaks my language.

It is remarkably undated, apart from references to women not having the vote. Loved it: laughed, cried, rushed out and bought the 'sequel' Dear Enemy on ebay before I discovered it for free everywhere.

Rating: 10/10.

If you liked this... I want to read Anne of Green Gables again. Not that other red-headed Orphan Annie though. Failing that: Patrick Dennis' Auntie Mame.