Relatively Speaking

It seems a bit of a habit with me to see plays somewhere towards the end of their run.  I saw the brilliant All My Sons on its final night, and by the time I blogged about Peter and Alice, it was off the stage.  Well, you've got until 31 August to see Alan Ayckbourn's Relatively Speaking (1965), and I deeply encourage you to do so if you possibly can!We had a lovely surprise when we arrived ('we' is me and Andrea, my frequent theatre-buddy) at Wyndham's - our balcony seats were upgraded to brilliant circle seats, right in the middle of the...

Read more →

Stuck-in-a-Book's Weekend Miscellany: Shirley Jackson Special!

Hope everyone is enjoying their weekend so far - I'm going to be seeing Felicity Kendal in Alan Ayckbourn's Relatively Speaking tonight, which is pretty exciting (although I did start reading a book by him yesterday that gave away the plot, ooops...)  Entirely unrelated to that, this week's book, blog post, and link come with a Shirley Jackson theme!1.) The book - it was via Claire/Paperback Reader's Facebook page that I discovered the obscure Shirley Jackson novels I'd hankered after were - gasp - soon to be reprinted by Penguin!  So, Hangsaman,...

Read more →

Remarqueable

Sometimes classic books are a bit of a disappointment, sometimes they're good but you can't see why they're considered better than others, and sometimes they play a real blinder, to use, er, sports terminology.  All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) by Erich Maria Remarque (see my hilarious post title pun?) is in the final category.  Of course I had heard of it, but it took Folio sending me a beautiful review copy, and my book group choosing to read it, for me to actually get down to it. And I'm so glad I did.I suspect it'll come as a surprise...

Read more →

Life in a Day

I'm greatly enjoying your comments on yesterday's post, so do keep them coming!Have I mentioned yet that I've set up a two-person film club with my friend Andrea?  I think I have, but I'll recap - we take it in turns to host and choose the film, and then put our comments and scores out of ten in a little notebook.  So far we've watched some truly wonderful films, and a few not-so-wonderful ones.  The list is: I Live in Grosvenor Square, And A Nightingale Sang, The Enchanted April, Secrets & Lies, Like Crazy, Separate Tables, On Approval, Manhattan Murder Mystery, Mildred...

Read more →

The Greats

This is an idle question, but perhaps an entertaining one too.  I was thinking to myself, while reading a biography of Ivy Compton-Burnett, which authors I would place among the Truly Greats.  There are thousands of authors who are good, hundreds who are very good, but I could only come up with a list of five whom I consider to be Great.  That is, their writing is not only better than other authors', but different somehow - and so different that even imitators seem to belong to another world, or perhaps another plane.On that list, after careful...

Read more →

A House in Flanders - Michael Jenkins

I wouldn't usually write a book review for the weekend (although this self-imposed rule might well be something nobody notices?) but today I am seeing a couple of lovely ladies from the internet, in beautiful Malvern, and one of them gave me A House in Flanders - thank you Carol!  (The other is Barbara, of Milady's Boudoir, so I expect to see a post about a Malvern trip there, in due course.)  Since I'll be seeing Carol, I thought I should write about the book she gave me about this time last year - which would mean it was during our trip...

Read more →

A trip to buy books...

I was having lunch with Naomi (of the erstwhile blog Bloomsbury Bell) the other day, and in amongst bookish chatter and catching-up, she happened to mention that she had found a magical bookshop in Wantage.  She described it as a sort of Aladdin's cave of literary wonder, and it was all I could do not to push my salads aside uneaten, and hope on a bus to Wantage immediately.  My self-control didn't last very long as, only a couple of days later, I found myself on that selfsame bus...  Since I haven't had a day away from my thesis for...

Read more →

The Flying Draper - Ronald Fraser

Out of all the books I'm reading for Reading Presently, this is the one I should have read before now... Tanya very kindly sent me The Flying Draper (1924) by Ronald Fraser, as she correctly thought it would be useful for my research (I'd actually requested a copy to the Bodleian library, and hadn't had time to read it there) - but somehow I have only just read it.  So it's going in the footnotes of my thesis...Before I get any further - compiling my list of sketches from year six made me keen to include more in future.  Often I just can't...

Read more →

Stuck-in-a-Book's Weekend Miscellany

Hope y'all are having a great weekend, folks!  (I've been thinking about my autumnal trip to America, if that's any excuse for that sentence - although 'autumnal' has rather scuppered that line of thought.)It's getting rather too hot again, so I shall collapse in a heap - before I do so, here's a book, a blog post, and a link, as per.1.) The book - Janet Todd wrote a fantastic book called Death and the Maidens a few years ago, and the Shelleys and Wollstonecrafts (read my review here) - I've heard that she's now got a novel out reimagining Jane Austen's...

Read more →

Beautiful Barbara Comyns

I can't remember if I've already blogged about the beautiful new editions of some Barbara Comyns novels that Virago have brought out, but it bears repeating.  They tend not to send me review copies, and I can't justify buying myself duplicate Comyns books when I have zero income - and I'm not getting rid of my Stanley Spencer covers - so it's pictures off the internet for now... but I'm going to have to find someone to give one of these two, as I hanker to see one in the flesh.  (Hmm... do you think Waterstones would stock them?)They've reprinted...

Read more →