Hopefully when I post this, I’ll be asleep. Oh the wonders of scheduled posting. As you may have gathered from previous posts and from my Twitter account, I’m on nightshifts at work at the moment. And so I thought that this would be a good moment to write about what I read when I’m on nights.
The Boy says there are three rules about dealing with me when I’m on nights or have just finished nights:
1. She will be irrational
2. She will burst into tears
3. She is incapable of making decisions
And to be honest, that’s pretty fair. I’m quite good at sleeping in the day (although I never feel that I get the benefit from it that I get from the same amount of hours at night) but I never feel quite on top form. This means that I tend to avoid anything too weighty or requiring too much brain power for my commute during nights. I also don’t read as fast – I’ve been reading Judith Krantz’ Scruples – and after 4 train journeys (5ish hours – although I have been checking twitter at various points during the journey) I hadn’t got to page 300 and normally I’d have finished it in that time.
In my previous job, there used to be some points in the shift were there wasn’t much to do – and it was during those lean hours in the early hours of the morning that I discovered some great series like Elizabeth Peters’ Vicky Bliss and Amelia Peabody novels, Carola Dunn’s Daisy Dalrymple books and Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher mysteries – which I’m currently re-reading to try and get the TV series out of my head. I also managed to finally get around to reading Wolf Hall on a nightshift – after taking it with me because it was one book that I definitely wasn’t going to finish before I got to the journey home!
The current job doesn’t really have any down time – so the only reading I get done on these days now is in my dinner break and that’s usually something from the Kindle because it’s easier to read and eat (very bad habit) with a kindle than a book. On the commute I usually read a paperback as I continue to try and get the to-read pile down. I tend to avoid non-fiction (too much brain power needed) and anything scary, depressing or that I think might make me cry. So it tends to be a diet of chick lit, historical romance and cozy crime – I’ve got through a lot of books from M C Beaton’s various pseudonyms during nightshift commutes!
The other consequence of nightshifts is impulse book buying. In the early hours, when I’m feeling tired and miserable, I’ll end up buying myself a few books to cheer myself up – as a treat/reward for surviving nights. In my first three nights this week I bought five books – three of which turned up during the day when I was trying to sleep which is distinctly suboptimal. Mind you book buying is somewhat cheaper than the beauty product spending spree I went on last time I was on nights. Or the ASOS one the time before…
On Good Reads to-reads shelf (I don’t have copies of all of these!): 417
New books* read in May: 20
Books from the Library Book pile: 0 (Oops)
Books from the to-read pile: 10
E-books: 7
Books read as soon as they arrived: 3 (including 2 free books)
Most read author in May: Carola Dunn
Books* read this year: 92
Books bought: 16 actual books and 3 ebooks
Net progress: 6 more books on the pile
Dang it. That book buying spree in the charity shop, and the nightshift impulse buys ruined what could have been a really good month for to read pile reduction. And the last week of the month was derailed by the nightshifts when all I seem to do is sleep and work.
Drat.
* Total includes some short stories (1 in fact this month)
So, I was crying in the supermarket car park today. Admittedly I’m quite an emotional person and it’s not that hard to make me cry in the first 36 hours after a nightshift, but Maya Angelou’s death really hit me. I sat scrolling through Twitter looking at the tributes that were pouring in to her from all sorts of people – from Joe Bloggs on the street to statesmen and everything in between – with tears in my eyes and no tissues to mop them up with.
Maya Angelou books on my shelf
I read I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings when I was in my final year of A Levels. In English Literature we were comparing Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and it was on the suggested further reading list – which, being a book geek, I worked my way through. And her book was the one on that list that touched me more than any other.
I was a white, middle-class teenager from rural England. I’d heard about racism. I’d even studied the Civil Rights movement in GCSE History. Back in Judy Blume reading days I’d first come across segregation in Starring Sally J Freedman as Herself. I’d studied To Kill A Mockingbird in GCSE English. But it was Maya Angelou’s writing that really brought home to me the reality of what people had suffered, how they were persecuted just for the colour of their skin and how they had fought for rights that I took for granted – rights that it hadn’t even occurred to me that it was possible not to have. And it had happened in living memory. It’s still within living memory.
The covers of Maya Angelou’s autobiographies
After I read I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, I went out and bought the next book of her autobiography – and the next and the next and so on. The final volume – A Song Flung Up To Heaven – came out during this period and I bought it, in hardback, because I was so desperate to find out what happened next. And I never bought hardbacks – I didn’t have a lot of spare cash and it wouldn’t match my paperbacks – but I didn’t care. Her writing meant that much to me.
There have been a lot of her quotes posted on Twitter and elsewhere since she died, but her own last tweet was only a few days ago and it is great and it is wise:
Listen to yourself and in that quietude you might hear the voice of God.
For all the hardships and heartbreaks of her life, her writing was joyous. She wasn’t bitter – although at times she was angry – she rose above and wanted to make a difference and she did, she has. She crammed so much into her life that it really did need all those volumes of autobiography to tell it. If it had been a novel, you would have said it was too far-fetched. Whenever I saw her on the TV or in a video, she was a force of nature, one of those people who you thought would live forever – and through her writing, she will.
Other people will be able to say all this and more much more eloquently than I have, but I couldn’t not say something about the death of someone whose writing and outlook on life had had such an impact on me. I’m off to read her whole story again and to give thanks for a life so well lived.
Between the 1920s and 1970s, Georgette Heyer wrote nearly three dozen novels set Regency or Georgian times, along with a string of thrillers. I love me some Golden Age detective action, but this article is about her historical romances which, in my opinion, are sublime and nearly perfect examples of their type.
Hardback, paperback, different styles – my shelf has editions from the 1940s through til the 2000s
My mum had a shelf of Heyers on the landing the whole way through my childhood, but it was only when I was about 16 that I first picked one up (either False Colours or Cotillion, I can’t remember which) and that one led to another, which led to all of the ones she had and then to buying the ones that she didn’t. When my parents moved house a couple of years ago, mum passed them on to me as she “didn’t have space for them” any more, on the understanding that she could borrow them back if she wanted and that I wouldn’t get rid of them. Since then though, rather than borrowing them from me, she’s started re-buying them!
I have a lot of favourites, but if I was forced and could only have one, it would be The Grand Sophy. Sophy is feisty, independent, well-travelled and used to running her own life – and everyone else’s. She arrives back in England to live with her aunt and her cousins after her diplomat father is posted to South America. She finds them in the midst of a family crisis – with one daughter in love with an unsuitable poet and the eldest son engaged to a disagreeable bluestocking. Sophy proceeds to try to organise the household along more harmonious lines and arrange matches for her cousins and, in the end, herself.
My copy of The Grand Sophy – in what I think is a late 1980s edition
What I love about Heyer’s female characters are that they’re not weak and wishy-washy pushovers, but they also don’t feel like modern women who have been supplanted to the eighteenth or nineteenth century. Her women aren’t simpering misses sitting around waiting for life to happen to them or for a man to make their life complete, but they’re not doing anything that feels jarringly out of period either. I have a weakness for American-written British-set historical romances (you know, the ones with the buxom heroines bursting out of their corsets on the covers) which lead a shamefaced existence* on the uppermost shelf of my tallest spare bedroom bookcase – and that’s a problem I find with some (but by no means all) of their heroines.
One of the feistiest and most independent of Heyer’s heroines is Léonie in These Old Shades – who we first meet as Léon the page when he is bought “body and soul” by Justin, Duke of Avon – known as Satanas because of his lack of morals. Heyer books always have a lot plot and not a lot of yearning looks or heaving bosoms and Shades is a great example of this. At the start of the book Justin is a thoroughly disreputable character who buys Léon not to free him from a life of abuse and mistreatment, but because he sees a method of being revenged on one of his enemies. Léonie is in love with Avon almost from the start, but you’re not sure until the very end, after the plot has taken you from France to England and back to France again, whether Avon’s motives have changed at all. Most of Heyer’s books are standalones, but Shades is unusual in that some of the characters have appeared before, albeit with different names and in a less developed form, in The Black Moth – and Justin, Léonie and Rupert all appear again in Devil’s Cub (which I also love) where Justin and Léonie’s son Dominic – who has all of his father’s faults and his mother’s temper but does at least have a conscience – runs off with a virtuous young lady who is trying to protect her sister’s honour.
My copies of Moth, Shades and Devil’s Cub show some of the range of different editions in my collection!
In Regency Buck (another with a sort-of sequel – An Infamous Army of which more later) another strong minded heroine comes up against a domineering alpha-male and, dear reader, you may start to see a pattern in the sort of heroes that I like. Preferably tall, dark and handsome, he needs to be bossy, clever and with a bit of a dark side or at the least a temper – like Buck‘s Julian St John Audley, the titular Sylvester or best of all Damerel in Venetia. But they also need to be up against a smart woman who is prepared to stand up for herself and what she wants. I don’t want to see any woman being forced into a marriage by a man who holds all the power. The Heyers that come off my shelf the least are ones like Cotillion (Freddy’s too thick), Friday’s Child (Hero the heroine is too wet), Cousin Kate (Kate’s too stupid to see the trouble coming) and A Civil Contract (Adam needs a good slap).
My copy of Devil’s Cub has a note from in the front written by my mum
Those are the exceptions though and just looking along the shelf is like seeing group of old friends – they live in the sitting room so I have them to hand if I need them! If you’ve never read any Georgette Heyer, may I heartily recommend you have a look now – particularly if you are a fan of authors like Eloisa James or Julia Quinn. They don’t have the sex that modern historicals do – in fact there’s barely any kissing, but they’re still breathtakingly romantic in places and have tight well-structured plots – and a wealth of meticulously researched historical detail (An Infamous Army was required reading for trainee army officers because its descriptions of the Battle of Waterloo are so accurate – it also features Julian and Judith from Regency Buck and a cameo from a much older Dominic and Mary from Devil’s Cub) that I can only imagine the current crop of authors have drawn on. It also says a lot that more than ninety years since her first book was published and forty years (this year in fact) since Georgette Heyer died, her Regency/Georgian romances are still in print.
A selection of my favourites in a charming garden setting!
I like them so much I even have a couple of them on my kindle and as audiobooks in case I need a fix when I’m away from home. And, while I was taking the photos for this article I discovered I’ve got a couple of duplicates of my own – I think I bought the pretty Pan paperbacks of The Talisman Ring and The Masqueraders when I was living in Essex – in the days when mum had most of the Heyers…
It took 20 years – but I finally have a matching set
I know exactly when I got my first Drina book – because when my mum gives people books, she always writes a message in them. She gave me Ballet for Drina in June 1991 – when I was seven – to read while she was in hospital for an operation. In the front she wrote that it was one of her favourite books when she was little – and I loved it as well from the moment I first read it and wanted the rest of the books in the series. Several of the others in the series have inscriptions in them marking them as being holiday books from various trips around the south coast. I’ve had the whole set since I was about 14 – but a couple of them didn’t match (smaller size! Different cover style!) and thanks to the wonders of eBay I got the “missing” matching books last year and was finally able to put them in order without the fretting over the fact that they didn’t look right! As you can see they’re all very well-loved – except Drina, Ballerina, one of the new additions, but I can assure you that my old copy is practically falling apart further down the shelf.
The Drina books are responsible for my childhood dream of being a ballerina – a dream which lead eight-year-old me to try to sew my own pointe shoes from an old cotton shirt from the ragbag, some loo roll and some hair ribbons! Drina is also responsible for some notable mispronunciations in my vocabulary – from the say-it-how-you-see-it school of reading – to this day I still struggle to pronounce Igor as Eegor rather than Eye-gor. Particularly because my stepgran had a beautiful Persian Blue called eegor that I used to feed when I went to visit and I always associate names with the first person/animal I knew with that name…
For those of you who haven’t read the series, it’s the story of Andrina Adamo – known as Drina – an orphan who is being brought up by her grandparents and who finds out when she starts ballet lessons in the first book that her mother was actually famous ballerina, who was killed in a plane crash along with her husband on a flight to New York where she was due to dance. Drina is desperate to be a ballet dancer – but wants to succeed on her own without any help (or hindrance) from her famous mother’s name. At the start of the second book the family move to London for her grandfather’s job and Drina starts at ballet school. The rest of the series follows Drina’s trials and tribulations in her quest to succeed – including overcoming her grandmother’s reluctance to let her follow in her mother’s footsteps, twisted ankles, school rivalries, her grandfather’s health problems which lead to her having to spend time away from her training and falling in love (at 14) with a glamourous New Yorker a couple of years older than her called Grant.
It’s hard to pick favourites – but I think mine are Drina Dances Again – where she plays Little Clara in The Nutcracker and Mr Dominick and Madame Volonaise find out Drina’s closely guarded secret about her mother’s identity; Drina Dances in Paris – where Drina goes to dance in The Nutcracker in Paris and Grant (the New Yorker) comes to visit her, Drina Dances on Tour – where her big secret finally comes out, she joins the company, experiences what it’s like to be in the corps de ballet and where Grant arrives in London and comes to find her and Drina, Ballerina which sees the series end with her dancing her mother’s most famous role and marrying Grant.
Looking back at what I’ve written, it sounds like a very far-fetched tale, but then how many children’s stories aren’t! I read them over and over when I was younger, and even as a teenager when I was poorly I’d get out my Drina books and start reading them all over again. Even today, just flicking through them so that I could write this post I’ve come over with the urge to sit down with them and have another read.
Looking at Amazon, I don’t think they’re in print anymore – which is a real shame – because there are still as many ballet mad little girls out there as there always were.
But that does lead me to another thought that has crossed my mind more than once – I am part of the last generation who will read these sort of stories and be able to see my own life in them? For all that Ballet for Drina was written in 1957, it was very similar to my own life – a world with no mobile phones or home computers and where most houses only had one TV – although flying wasn’t the big deal that it was in Drina and liners had stopped being a method of getting to New York by the early 90s. The same applies to a lot of the school stories I used to read (many of which I’m sure I’ll post about in due course) – the only difference between my life and theirs was that their trains ran on coal and that they called maths arithmetic. Will today’s children – who’ve grown up with smart phones, iPads, laptops, the internet and Playstations be able to buy into these stories the same way? I hope so, because I know how much enjoyment and knowledge I got from them when I was little.
I’ve girded my loins. I’ve taken a deep breath. I’ve done some dusting. Here is a photo of the to-read pile and the library book bag.
It looks bad doesn’t it? I know. It’s out of control. And the eagle eyed amongst you may notice that there’s two Jasper Fforde books from the same series on there too (breaking a rule of the to-read pile) and that’s because I spotted The Fourth Bear in a charity shop this morning for a pound and it seemed like too good an opportunity to miss. I haven’t worked out an excuse for the Mrs Bradley mystery and the Frances Osborne which I bought in a different charity shop five minutes later. I’ll get back to you on that.
Not the busiest week reading wise – six things finished, a couple more started and still on the go.
Read:
Dead Reckoning by Charlaine Harris
I Am Shakespeare (a play) by Mark Rylance
Vivian’s Heavenly Ice Cream Shop by Abby Clements
Significant Others by Armistead Maupin
The Three of Us (short story) by Cathy Woodman
Manna from Hades by Carola Dunn
Started:
The Viceroy’s Daughters by Anne de Courcey
Sure of You by Armistead Maupin
Lavender Lady by Carola Dunn
Still reading:
Tales of the Jazz Age by F Scott Fitzgerald
Love, Nina by Nina Stibbe
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
What have I learnt making this list? I have too many books on the go at the moment. And I’m feeling guilty about the fact that I’m still no further on with Titus Groan, which I started in January… The fact that it’s still lingering is another illustration of the problem with the massive to-read pile actually – if I don’t get into something quickly, there’s always something else I want to read, but because the book has been sitting on my shelf for so long, I think that I can’t give up and say it’s not for me. Although with Titus I’m only 75 pages in and I usually read at least 100 pages or a quarter of the book before I’m prepared to admit defeat. On the bright side, Vivian’s… and I Am Shakespeare were long standing residents of The Shelf, and Dead Reckoning was from the pile too.
As you’ll see I’m working my way through Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series (expect a post on that at some point) and am nearing the end of the True Blood series – in fact Dead Reckoning was the last I could get for a penny plus postage from Amazon, so I was expecting to have to wait to finish the series and then I found the last two in the library on Thursday!
As for the others, Cathy Woodman is one of the authors on the list of people I automatically buy new stuff from so I picked up her short story soon after it came out, Manna from Hades has been on the Kindle a while but I’d forgotten about it (oops) until I picked up the next two in the series in The Works this week so I bumped it to the top of the pile.
My aim for this week? To reduce the number of things on the go…
I think everyone has at least one of these – the book you bought because it looked interesting, but you’ve never got around to reading, because there’s always something else more interesting. I’m not going to name the books on my shelf, but as you’d probably expect on a to-read pile the size of mine there’s probably a dozen really long term residents lingering around – and they were the reason for my re-organisation of the pile the other day.
For me, they tend to fall into a couple of categories – books about history, classics that I ought to have read, and really thick books. Several of the long-standing books fall into two of those classes. There are also a couple of books on there that I’ve borrowed from my mum and haven’t got around to reading, and now it’s been so long that I can’t give them back to her without having read them…
The re-organisation of the pile has seen me group the books into genres and put them together – I’ve half developed an idea that I ought to have one book from each section of the pile (two shelves, two piles – so four) on the go at a time to try and make the (hoped for) reduction in the pile more even, and help me resist the urge to stock up on one genre if I go through a phase of reading one type of book avidly. I know it’ll never happen though!
So what can I do about them?
Well that Lent book-buying ban was my first attempt to try and reduce the stockpile, although as it was running at the same time as an attempt to read the library book backlog, it wasn’t as successful as I’d hoped – although the April numbers still show a (slight) net decrease. I read 22 books in March – but at the start of the month the library book campaign was already going – and 10 of the March books were from the library bag (that’s quite impressive) and another five were from the kindle backlog (so kind of reducing the to-read pile) but on the bright side, only one was a book that I had just bought. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t buy others and add to the pile – although my Goodreads to-read list only shows 1 new addition that I know I actually own in March, I may have bought books that were already on the list, or that I’ve not added yet.
So this next attempt is going to be a concerted effort to restrict my buying, but also to go down the shelf rather than the library book bag. But as I refilled the library book bag on Thursday, this may not work…
Wish me luck – and if you have any suggestions let me know in the comments or on twitter @WildeV
I know, I know. Considering that the pile is so outlandishly large, the idea that it has rules seems ludicrous. But it does – although they are few and somewhat flexible.
The principle rule is No more than one book per author on the pile:I’ll admit this does get broken frequently (although I’m getting better at keeping to it) and for two main reasons – firstly when The Works have lots of books by the same author in one of their offers and secondly when an author writes more than one series – for example Charlaine Harris currently has three books on the pile – two Aurora Teagardens (from The Works) and one Harper Connelly (the last two Sookie Stackhouses are in the library book bag – different rules apply to library books).
The second is Don’t buy hardbacks. I’ll admit that this rule does mean I end up behind the curve on some authors. But its born from experience – I just don’t get around to reading hardbacks – they’re big, they’re heavy and they won’t fit in my handbag. They end up sitting on the shelf for months and months even when they’re something I’m really keen to read. I am sometimes given hardbacks, but I don’t usually put books that are only out in hardback on my gift lists. Most books come out in paperback in the end – and the few that don’t are usually books that I can buy for borrow from my mum.
The third is Don’t buy series out of sequence. This is because they end up sitting on the pile for ages waiting for me to buy/borrow the books leading up to it because I hate reading series in the wrong order in case I spoil a major plot point (it’s happened before I don’t want it to happen again).
Most of the sins of my to-read pile can be put under one of those headings. As I’ve said before, I’m terrible for discovering a series and then reading it through from start to finish (as I’m doing at the moment with the Tales of the City series) but the rules mean I usually only buy one book in the series at a time – although there are exceptions – like when I’m trying to get over a free delivery threshold – or those Works multi-buys again.
On Good Reads to-reads shelf (I don’t have copies of all of these!): 387
New books* read in April: 20
Books from the Library Book pile: 3
Books from the to-read pile: 9
E-books: 3
Books read as soon as they arrived: 6
Most read author in April: Armistead Maupin (Three books in the Tales of the City series)
Books* read this year: 72
Books bought: 14
Net progress: 1 less book on the to-read pile…
April saw the end of the Lent Book Buying ban, so I can’t take too much credit for the progress down the pending pile, but I’ll try not to buy more than I read in May as well!
* Total includes some short stories (1 in fact in April – Trisha Ashley’s Finding Mr Rochester)
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 