I’ve written about Marina Warner’s new biography of her parents, Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir, for Shiny New Books, and you can read it here.
If you can’t be bothered to click through: it’s a fascinating and charming study not just of Esmond and Ilia Warner, but of vanished post-war cultures in Europe and the Middle East. Highly recommended!
Today the sun is shining, an afternoon’s training on evaluating students’ speaking and writing skills has been cancelled and we are not exiting the EU with no deal. Reasons to be cheerful!
Another reason to be cheerful: my review of Forms of Enchantment, Marina Warner’s collection of essays on art and artists, is up at Shiny New Books.
Another reason to be cheerful: the world is full of wonderful books! Worried by the prospect of never again being able to buy a British book after Brexit, I have been stockpiling. A little reckless, considering how many unread books I already have, but no half-measures in a crisis...
First: a collection of fairy tales and fairy-tale poems by Theodora Goss. Confession: I’ve already read this. Although I like her novels, I believe she’s a better short-story writer (at the moment, anyway). I did not think that everything in this collection was great but I enjoyed everything, especially ‘Blanchefleur’, a new version of ‘The White Cat’, and ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’, which adds a lovely twist to Oscar Wilde’s story (as a child I disliked Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales and found them mawkish, perhaps I should revisit them).
Next: Helen Oyeyemi’s latest novel, Gingerbread. A novel about a gingerbread-maker, a mysterious long-lost friend, a country that may not exist, by one of the best British writers working today, I can’t wait to start on this. (But I still have about eleventy billion pages of Samantha Shannon’s The Priory of the Orange Tree to read, not that this is a chore, plus something for SNB...)
Then, well, this is all Hayley’s fault. She wrote a review of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s short stories so beguiling that I had to order a copy immediately. And then I accidentally bid on a lot of STW books plus Valentine Ackland’s autobiography, For Sylvia (Ackland was a poet and the lover of STW), and won! Tthe books are the novel The Corner that Held Them, and a collection of short stories called The Innocent and the Guilty.) On a roll, I then bought STW’s diaries, edited by Claire Harman. I suspect the only justification for this will be a STW week. Is there a STW week?
Finally, although not strictly stockpiling as I bought these locally in the kringwinkel or recycling shop:
(Bandits, by Elmore Leonard; Maigret and the Madwoman, by Georges Simenon; The Best Man to Die, by Ruth Rendell; Waiting for Willa, by Dorothy Eden.) I had never heard of Dorothy Eden but who could resist that cover? And it was only 25 cents. According to Wikipedia she was born in New Zealand and emigrated to Britain. I am assuming she’s going to fill the Mary-Stewart-shaped hole in my life.
I like to have at least a small pile of detective novels to hand for times when I am ill or unhappy. Nothing like murder to cheer you up I suppose.
But even while I’m writing this, I am still obsessing over Brexit. Crossing my fingers that the WA is voted down (again) today and that MPs can find a way forward on Monday. Now I am going to take advantage of the nice weather and do some gardening, and then I’m going to work on a rather limp short story I am writing. Have a happy weekend, everyone! What are you reading at the moment?
(Nala, demonstrating how to cope with British politics)