Goodbye March, Hello April

Well, March has been a bit of a crazy month (understatement, much?). I lost my job in the theatre at the end of February, started a waitressing job at the beginning of March which I then quit this week. So now I guess I'm unemployed again. Lovely. But I do have a writing job to be getting on with and I'm thinking with complete glee about all of the reading I can be doing. Basically, in the words of Monty Python, I am always looking on the bright side of life.

To the important things...books.

Considering how mental this month has been, I'm really pleased with the amount of reading I've managed. I've read three books for Modern March, a second Classics Spin book, a book club choice and a couple of other randoms. My favourite read has been A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf, followed closely by Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson. At the other end of the spectrum I completely disliked (read: hated) As I Lay Dying and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I am pleased to have read both, though.

I have already failed at the Translation Challenge (slaps wrist). I had intended to read The Bookseller of Kabul this month but just haven't got round to it. As I Lay Dying took quite a while to read (it was punctuated with many many stream of consciousness headaches). I'm not feeling too guilty because I did read two translated books in February. I'm still excited to read this one though and will get to it pretty sharpish in April.

Can I just take a moment to freak out about the fact that it's April already?! I mean, really, where the heck is this year going? Before I know it I'll be flat hunting and job hunting in London, then I'll be 23 and then it'll be Christmas again. Phew.

Anyway, April. I'm not planning too much what I read this month because I think some spontaneity would do me wonders right now. I'm definitely hoping to read The Bookseller of Kabul and maybe tick another off my Classics Club list (I'm leaning ever so slightly towards some Hemingway but Zelda Fitzgerald is pretty tempting too). Brighton Rock is my next book club read for the beginning of May so I'll get round to that at some point. I might also join in on the Their Eyes Were Watching God sync read with the Classics Club and I want to read something war related because that's the theme for April and we all know I get my nerd on when it comes to war writing. Oh my. So many books. I'm starting to think it's a good job I'm unemployed.

Fingers crossed April will be a slightly better month. I do have some really exciting things planned so I think it will be. I'm having a week staying with my sister in London at the end of the month and we've booked to go and see The Tempest at The Globe, World Book Night at the Southbank Centre and The Starting Line anniversary tour (squeal). The highlight of the week will no doubt be the Pompeii exhibition though. I am a MASSIVE Pompeii geek. Basically the entire week will be one nerdgasm after another.

Well, I'm boring myself so I'm going to crack on and spend some quality time with Fifty Shades of Feminism (the only Fifty Shades I'll ever read) which arrived in the post yesterday and is completely awesome and mindblowing and makes me want to burn my bra.

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Jane Austen: What is all the fuss about?

I know I'm a little late to the party and March has pretty much been and gone but I'm going to finally do the Classics Club March Meme. Let's crack on shall we.

Do you love Jane Austen or want to “dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone”? (Phrase borrowed from Mark Twain).

1. Why? (for either answer)?
2. Favourite and/or least favourite Austen novel? 

I hate to be the bringer of a general air of ambivalence but, well, I'm going to bring it because I tend to feel very 'meh' about good old Jane. I can't deny that I love Pride and Prejudice and I really enjoyed Northanger Abbey. I just don't love her unless I'm reading her. I've not read an Austen since my third year of uni and not felt the need to either. I don't re-read P&P every year or swoon over Mr Darcy in my head. I appreciate her novels when they are there in front of me but when they're not, well, I just don't particularly care.

When I'm feeling a bit more pro-Jane, as well as being all serious, go women, social mores and injustices, I think the best thing about her is her sense of humour. There is one bit in Love and Friendship that just gets me every time:

'One fatal swoon has cost me my Life...Beware of swoons, Dear Laura...A frenzy fit is not one quarter so pernicious; it is an exercise to the body and if not too violent, is, I dare say, conducive to health in its consequences - run mad as often as you chuse; but do not faint...'

Wise words...

My favourite Austen novel is Persuasion. I mean, come on, Captain Wentworth?! What a babe. Especially in the BBC adaptation. Ciaran Hinds would only have to look at me in that sailor get up with his brooding good looks and I'd be putty in his hands. And I mean fully moldable do-with-me-what-you-like kind of putty. Ahem, anyway, that's slightly off topic. What I'm trying to say is Persuasion is my favourite. There is something so real about the story and about Anne and about the whole circumstance of their relationship. I really think it is generally more believable. Plus it's set partially in Lyme - holla to all those south westerners who used to/still do go fossil hunting there and stand on the cobb like the French Lieutenant's Woman. At least Persuasion teaches you something practical: don't jump off the cobb in Lyme.

oh my...sigh

'Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.'

Oh, Anne. You are a woman after my own heart.

So there we have it, I don't want to beat her with her own anatomy but at the same time I'm not going to rush to make her my bestie should I ever go back in time to the 19thC and meet her. We'd be more casual acquaintances. Friends who do lunch. That sort of thing.

All the same, Sense and Sensibility is on my Classics Club list and I think I might read that one this summer. I look forward to seeing if my opinions will change.

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Review: Lighthousekeeping

Lighthousekeeping
Jeanette Winterson
2004

'My mother called me Silver. I was born part precious metal part pirate.'

It's kind of difficult to sum up this novel in a few sentences so I'm going to be lazy and just stick the blurb in here. It does a much better job than I could.

'Motherless and anchorless, Silver is taken in by the timeless Mr Pew, keeper of the Cape Wrath lighthouse. Pew tells Silver ancient tales of longing and rootlessness, of ties that bind and of the slippages that occur throughout every life. One life, Babel Dark's, a nineteenth-century clergyman, opens like a map that Silver must follow. Caught in her own particular darknesses, she embarks on a Ulyssean sift through the stories we tell ourselves, stories of love and loss, of passion and longing, stories of unending journeys that move through places and times, and the bleak finality on the shores of betrayal.'

Basically this is a story about telling stories. With a girl called Silver and a guy called Pew at the centre of it all. I actually just gave myself brain ache when I realised that Silver is telling the story of being told these stories, so she is actually telling the stories when we think Pew is telling them and wow I'm going to stop thinking before my brain EXPLODES. Phew. That was a close one.

As usual this is a beautifully written novel, I wouldn't expect anything less from Winterson. She does however, tend to wander off into what I call 'pretentious territory' when she tries to make herself sound uber intelligent and philosophical. Stick with it, JW, no need to go all mind-blowy on me. There is a long section (probably about 3/4's of the way through) which I think is entirely unnecessary. I'm not even sure there is much of a plot either but what little there is seems to work very well in conjunction with the general exploration of storytelling going on.

I love the literary links Winterson makes. Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Darwin casually stroll through the narrative. There is a quick wave to Captain Scott and Forster's 'only connect' is very slyly thrown in. Jekyll and Hyde also plays quite a significant part as it is one of those points of reference which makes a comment about the characters. Babel Dark and Silver (I think) are Jekyll/Hyde characters. But without that reference I don't think I would even have picked up on the whole double thing going on.

Overall, I think the novel is a wonderfully written foray into the whys and wherefores of storytelling. I would tell you just to read it but instead I'm going to leave you with some of my favourite quotes which I'm guessing/hoping may demonstrate why I'm recommending it.

'Because there's no story that's the start of itself, anymore than a child comes into the world without parents.'

'There's no such thing in all the world.
As a happy ending?
As an ending.'

'The lighthouse is a known point in the darkness.'

'And I did, and the stories I want to tell you will light up part of my life, and leave the rest in darkness. You don't need to know everything. There is no everything. The stories themselves make the meaning.
           The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments and the rest is dark.'

'I went outside, tripping over slabs of sunshine the size of towns. The sun was like a crowd of people, it was a party, it was music. The sun was blaring through the walls of the houses and beating down the steps. The sun was drumming time into the stone. The sun was rhythming the day.
          'Why are you afraid?' I asked myself, because fear is at the bottom of everything, even love usually rests on fear. 'Why are you afraid, when whatever you do you will die anyway?'

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I joined a book club (and a mini review)

Last Friday night I ventured out into the pouring rain armed with my notebook and pen and clutching my library copy of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I drove into town, headed for the local indie bookshop, where I found a sign saying the book club is delayed and to come to the pub. So that was my first assumption destroyed. Book clubs apparently, at least ones in Taunton, involve alcohol. And lots of it (damn you car). Once we'd settled into the bookshop, and everyone had pulled out their bottles of wine, we promptly ordered pizza. Another assumption destroyed. Food, wine, books...that is pretty much my idea of pure contentment.

Aside from the obvious excitement of being in a bookshop after hours (I sat in the farthest corner, flanked by two serious-ish women, to stop me from wandering among the shelves), I thoroughly enjoyed my book club experience. That is not to say that I enjoyed the book, however. In fact, I really quite disliked the book.

So, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is about Oskar, a 9-10 year old boy who lost his father in the twin towers. He finds a key among his dad's possessions and starts out on a quest to find the lock the key fits. There is a bit of a dual narrative thing going on which concerns the relationship of Oskar's grandparents. Out of the two, I found the narrative of the grandparents far more interesting mostly because it was the most believable (though still not hugely).

I think the issue I had with this book was the complete impossibility of the storyline and the sentimentalism of it. I feel bad saying this because I know a lot of people rave about it but it really didn't come anywhere close to being good for me. I really struggled to believe that a mother would let her young son wander around New York by himself, particularly so soon after the loss of his father.

Saying all that, it did have a couple of good points. I love the layout. The inclusion of pictures and pages with just one sentence on I thought was quite effective (although most of the group thought it was gimmicky). And there is one section when a deaf man turns on his hearing aid for the first time in years and that bit I thought was beautifully written. Ok, maybe literally only a couple of points...

It was funny and it was sad (particularly the Dresden bit) but in the end it really did nothing for me. In general, I'm going to leave Jonathon Safran Foer to go his way and I'll go mine. Sorry, dude.

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Musing Mondays

Hosted by Should be Reading

Musing Mondays asks you to muse about one of the following each week…

• Describe one of your reading habits.
• Tell us what book(s) you recently bought for yourself or someone else, and why you chose that/those book(s).
• Tell us what you’re reading right now — what you think of it, so far; why you chose it; what you are (or, aren’t) enjoying it.

I have just bought myself... The Innocents by Francesca Segal and Honour by Elif Shafak

This morning I quit my job so this afternoon I went out and bought books. Stuff comfort eating, I'm all about comfort book-buying. To be fair, I did only spend £2 on these books, technically, because they were on buy-one-get-one-half-price and I had a gift voucher. So really I didn't actually go that crazy. I thought I was wonderfully restrained. Both of these books are on the longlist for the Women's Prize for Fiction and as I'm intending to read the list I thought I'd best get started. I'm very excited to read Honour particularly as I've heard really good things about it.

Also guys, I mentioned last week that I was doing a guest post for the Women's Lit Event over on Lost in Books. Well, it went live today here so if you fancy hearing me spread the lady love check it out.

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Some recent aquisitions and exciting news.

I know, I know, I've done it again. I give up on the whole book buying ban, it is clearly an impossible task for one such as myself, that is, a total lit nerd.

Save Me the Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald
Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham
The Perils of Certain English Prisoners by Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens

How amazing does the Wilkie/Charles one sound? I love it when those two collaborate, it's like a marriage made in literary heaven and the result is a very literary love child. Their Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices was brilliant so I really didn't hesitate to pick this one up. The chapters are alternately written by Wilkie then Dickens and it is a particularly ripe subject matter so I'm thinking this one will be brill. Just got to try and get round to reading it now...

The other three are pretty self-explanatory really. They are all on my classics club list and since reading A Moveable Feast I am dying to pretty much devour anything by the Fitzgeralds/Hemingway/Pound/Ford. I don't even like Ezra Pound and I feel like reading him again. Damn you, Hemingway.

I will stop buying books eventually, I promise.

On to the exciting news. I'm sure a fair number of you are aware that Becca over at Lost in Books is holding a Women's Lit Event this month to celebrate Women's History Month. I'm also pretty sure that anyone who has read a couple of my posts would find it hard to deny that I general feel the lady love when it comes to literature. Women's History Month and this event are really my cup of tea so I jumped at the chance to sign up to do a guest post. On the 25th March my post will be going live over on Lost in Books. It's all about fiction from the Edwardian period, specifically fiction written by the su...-who-now? I'm not telling you. Such a tease.

There have already been some brilliant posts for the event on Becca's blog which are definitely worth checking out if you are a fan of the laydees.

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Modern March: A Room of One's Own

A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf
1928

'Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.'

Well, what can I say, VW has gone and done it again. What a corker. I'm feeling some serious love for Woolfy right now. My brain has been in overdrive since finishing this. All the thoughts have just been buzzing away in my head like intelligent little flies (umm, weird image).

A Room of One's Own is a short piece of non-fiction that grew out of a lecture Woolf was asked to give in Cambridge in 1928 on the subject 'Women and Fiction'. She argues that a woman needs 'money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction'*.

I think, ignoring the content for a moment, Woolf's writing/lecture style is wonderful. It is by no means dry or heavy going but descriptive and anecdotal. Particularly the discussion of the life of Shakespeare's fictitious sister (she didn't stand a chance). And I loved the discussions about the Bronte's (particularly the discussion of the section in Jane Eyre where Jane considers the stagnation of the female mind when it is not given freedom - a section that has made want to reread the novel), Jane Austen and George Eliot, as well as lesser known (if known at all) female writers.

I'm going to break my own tradition and love of paragraphing here and break into some bullet points. I think it is necessary. These are the points that I found most interesting:

• The whole issue of gendered writing - is it possible to tell from my sentence structure that I am female? Woolf seems to argue for androgyny of mind because a purely feminine or a purely masculine cannot necessarily create. Apparently we must be woman-manly or man-womanly. Amazing.
• As a WW1 geek, I obviously love how she tries to explain the change in the post-war world through poetry. Before the war people were surrounded by an unconscious humming of poetry that spoke of rapture and abandonment. Luncheon parties were the same before, during and after the war aside from the loss of that 'humming'. I think that's a wonderful way to explain the changes in people after the First World War.
• 'Have you any notion of how many books are written about women in the course of one year?'...why, then, does there seem to be no solution to the woman "question" if it's all people (mostly men) have talked about for years. Why is woman such an enigma? I also thought I was pretty cut and dry: short, smiles alot, likes books.
• 'Most women have no character at all'...oh, is that right, Mr Pope?
• 'Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size'...doesn't surprise me.
• 'Of the two - the vote and money - the money, I own, seemed infinitely more important.' Seriously?! And I spent months researching and writing about the importance of the vote for women for you to tell me money is more important *shakes head in disbelief*. 

I would highly recommend anyone giving this a read whether you are of the feminist inclination or not. It is entertaining, informative and an all-round delightful read.

*I am, incidentally, currently writing this in my room of my own. It may not have a lock and I may not be an aspiring novelist but without this room, the desk, the window, the seats, the heater (most important) I would never have gotten through my MA with my sanity intact. It is a room where I am not interrupted, where I can think and write in silence. I think, whether you write fiction or not, it is important to have a room, if only to sit and contemplate all the Deep Thoughts or daily happenings in.

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