No,
my "middlebrow vacation" from blogging is not over. In fact, Andy and I will be on our real
holiday vacation in Washington DC shortly. But I couldn't resist the temptation
for one more Furrowed Middlebrow Dozen list. It was a great year of reading,
and my blog vacation in the past few weeks has led me to some exciting new
reads, including four contemporary novels that I have to mention even if
they're technically "off topic".
Two
of these might well be of interest to readers of this blog, even if they (like
me) don't often read contemporary fiction. I couldn't put down RACHEL KADISH's The Weight of Ink, vividly set in London just before and during the
plague of 1665, as well as in the early 2000s, when two scholars are making an
astonishing discovery about a Jewish scribe working in the earlier time. Kadish
is brilliant with her descriptions of the London of the time, and I felt I'd
had a chance to travel back in time and experience a walk across the old
bustling, smelly London Bridge with its ramshackle tumble of shops. Definitely
recommended for fans of historical fiction, as well as for fans of A. S.
Byatt's Possession.
That
discovery led me (via Amazon's "Customers who bought this item also
bought" feature) to SARAH PERRY's
amazing second novel, The Essex Serpent,
which offers a similarly atmospheric and compelling version of 19th century
England (and also evoked, for me, an earlier novel—John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman). I loved
this one even more, and recommended it to a co-worker who was similarly sold. I
think many of you would enjoy it.
But
the two biggest standouts of my sparse contemporary reading this year were,
surprisingly, books by men, both of which harkened back to my days of reading slightly
edgier, more experimental fiction. GEORGE
SAUNDERS's Lincoln in the Bardo,
which happily won this year's Booker (though at the same time I am still
ambivalent about Yanks being allowed to win it at all), reminded me of both
Mark Twain and Samuel Beckett, and I don't think there could be many books
about which that's true. I've never been teary-eyed on one page and laughing
maniacally on the next so many times in the course of one book, so if you're
open to unconventional storytelling with a powerful historical bent, give it a
try.
And
finally, I geared myself up for all the trauma and beauty that is COLSON WHITEHEAD's The Underground Railroad and was fair blown away. Not for the
squeamish, to be sure, but ultimately exhilarating and uplifting.
I've
also started two other contemporary mystery series as a result of
recommendations. People have been telling me to read LOUISE PENNY for ages, and I now have and am hooked. I've finished
the first two in the series, Still Life
and Dead Cold, and the third, The Cruelest Month, will accompany me on
my flight to DC. And I read C. J. SANSOM's
Dissolution as a result of an
intriguing review in The Scribbler an
issue or two back, and I've never learned so much about a period of British
history and had so much fun at the same time.
But
I'm not including any of these I my dozen. Per tradition, it's limited to books
that fit the main focus of this blog, and for those that I've reviewed here,
I'm linking to my review. So without further ado:
12) Monica Redlich, Five
Farthings (1939)
In
many ways an ordinary enough family adventure story, but oh my! As a travelogue
of London just before WWII, particularly focused on churches and historic
buildings, it was one of the two best wish-fulfillment fantasies I came across
this year—see #3 below for the other.
11) Christianna Brand, Suddenly at His Residence (1946)
One
of several books here that I never got round to discussing, but I had a great
time with it, and surely there can't be many mysteries whose climax is
punctuated by a doodlebug bombing.
10) Isabel Cameron, The
But and Ben (1948)
My
biggest regret of the year is not getting round to discussing Isabel Cameron.
Something like an even cozier, Scottish version of Miss Read—cheerful,
sentimental, and placidly (and not too intrusively) informed by Cameron's own
Christian beliefs—she was one of the happiest discoveries of my bookshopping
raids in Edinburgh last year. She is better known as the author of a series of
tales about "The Doctor", which apparently sold more than a million
copies, but it was her four Glen Craigan novels that proved irresistible to me.
The But and Ben and its three
sequels—Tattered Tartan (1950), Heather Mixture (1952), and The Kirk of the Corrie (1956)—trace the
arrival and gradual settling-in of a young woman doctor in a close-knit
Highlands community. They seem ripe for rediscovery, and they're actually not
impossible to find at reasonable prices…
9) Verily Anderson, Our
Square (1957)
Sadly
the last of Verily Anderson's six wonderful memoirs that I hadn't read, but now
I can go back and start re-reading them. This one tells of the early days of
her hectic married life, in all of her usual incomparable and hilarious style.
8) Winifred Lear, The
Causeway (1948)
One
of the oddest and yet most satisfying of the novels I read this year. Sadly,
Lear wrote only two novels, and her second, Shady
Cloister (1950), set in a girls' school, didn't quite live up to its
promise for me. But this one, even months after reading it and with my
notoriously bad memory for plots, comes vividly back to mind, and the fact that
it makes interesting use of wartime realities just adds to the mix.
7) Stella Gibbons, The
Swiss Summer (1951)
6) Stella Gibbons, A
Pink Front Door (1959)
5) Stella Gibbons, The Snow-Woman (1969)
The
biggest chunk of my reading during my blog vacation has involved obsessively
tracking down and reading several of the Stella Gibbons novels that weren't reprinted in the past few years
by Vintage. It started innocently enough, when I finally picked up The Yellow Houses, the last of Gibbons's
novels to finally be published. I didn't absolutely love that one, as I did the
other "lost" novel, Pure Juliet,
but Houses was enough to send me on a
Gibbons bender, and these are the three standouts so far. Gibbons's nephew,
Reggie Oliver, in his rather anemic bio of her, dismisses Swiss Summer as dull and little more than a travelogue about
attractive characters spending a summer in the Alps, but that description might
well make fans (like me) of Enchanted
April and similarly quiet novels with wodnerful settings sit up and take
notice. A Pink Front Door is also
surprisingly cozy for a Gibbons novel, dealing with a young wife who attempts
to solve everyone's problems, to the
dismay of her father and husband. I enjoyed both a lot, but it was The Snow-Woman, the second to last of
Gibbons's novels to be published in her lifetime, that made me feel more than
ever that she's a kindred spirit. The story of a bitter—even, initially, rather
unlikeable—woman in her seventies, who visits old friends in France, then
returns to her quiet life to discover the "snow" of her years of
bitterness melting away, it's a lovely, perceptive novel that deserves to be
more readily available. Happily, Gibbons wrote quite a number of novels, so I
still have several more left to track down…
4) Rumer Godden, China
Court (1961)
I
also re-read The Greengage Summer
this year and was so tempted to add
it to this list, but decided to limit myself to new discoveries from this year.
I thought I'd already read all the very best of Rumer Godden's books and was
only filling in some of her lesser works, but this one gives all my other
favorites a run for their money. Which is best: China Court? Greengage Summer?
Episode of Sparrows? In This House of Brede? Or her marvelous
memoirs? I can't choose, so it's fortunate I read all those others in previous
years.
3) Mabel Esther Allan, Changes
for the Challoners (1955)
Possibly
my favorite of all the MEA books I've read so far (and I must be up to 25 or 30
now), and the perfect wish-fulfillment fantasy for me. Who wouldn't want to
move to Allan's fictional version of Chester, make new friends, and search for
lost Roman ruins?
2) Hilda Hewett, So
Early One Morning (1948)
An
author that Shirley at The Scribbler
and I both came across for the first time this year. This was my particular
favorite of Hewett's work—a funny, charming, and and ahead-of-its-time
portrayal of a 13-year-old aspiring actress's first love. Hewett turned out to
be a wildly uneven author, though I also tracked down Shirley's discovery, Kaleidoscope (1947), set near the end of
WWII, and enjoyed it tremendously as well. But So Early One Morning is the one I'll want to re-read and savor the
most.
1) Marjorie Mack (later
Marjorie Dixon), The
Red Centaur (1939)
There
was really no question what my favorite novel of the year would be, though
Mack, too, proved to be an uneven writer (see my disappointment in her one
other adult novel, Velveteen Jacket, here).
Red Centaur focuses on 8-year-old
Laurel Maude's observations (and misunderstandings) of the adult dramas around
her during one glorious summer in Brittany. It reminded me of the best of Rumer
Godden's The Greengage Summer and
Pamela Frankau's A Wreath for the Enemy,
two of my all-time favorites.
And that was my year of
reading. What were your favorites of the year?