I’m in denial that August is nearly over, but the weather feels like it’s starting to change for the cooler, and the very early mornings are getting darker so it must be. Most of my reading time this week was spent on The Mitford Girls – which is 700 pages long and absolutely fascinating. It really does make me want to go off and read about more the various sisters and also the people around them, but I have so much non-fiction on the pile and they do tend to get slightly ignored in favour of fiction that I shall have to try and resist the urge to purchase more! And of the rest of the reading, aside from the Christie and Heyer which were on audio, the other three books were all from the pile, so if it wasn’t for that whole situation at the National Trust bookshops last week, I would be feeling quite good about myself. As it is, the pile is still larger than it was at the start of the month, and is looming at me from the corner of the sitting room and making me feel guilty.
I’ve got another lovely theatre visit to tell you about this Sunday – but if you want to see it in London, you’ll need to hurry, because it is only on in London until September 7th, then it’s back out on tour around the UK.
I can’t believe there’s many people out here who don’t know the story, but in case you don’t the four Pevensie children have been evacuated to escape World War II and find themselves living in a big house, owned by a professor. In the house there is a wardrobe that leads to the land of Narnia, which the children help free from the tyranny of The White Witch, with the help of Aslan the Lion and some talking animals. This is a really neat and compact adaptation – it’s a tight two hours ten including interval, which considering the 2005 movie was two and a half hours, and the 1988 tv series which I grew up on was 6 parts and nearly three hours in total. It’s still got all the stuff you remember – Mr Tunmus, the Turkish Delight, the Beavers, Father Christmas etc – so you won’t be disappointed on that front, but short enough that children (hopefully) don’t get too fidgety*.
I wouldn’t exactly describe this as a musical, but it has got some songs – wartime inspired in the “real” world and then folky ones in Narnia. The supporting cast are playing the instruments as well as dancing and playing multiple characters so they’re a really talented group. The children near me seemed to find Maugrim (the chief of the secret police) scary, but that was the only bit that seemed to be an issue- and I think the child in question was about five. There are some great bits of stage illusion and puppetry too so it would make a great alternative to a panto if you’re near Salford at Christmas.
Honestly it really flew by and I would totally recommend it, maybe not as a first show for children but certainly as an early theatre experience. It’s got some really clever puppetry and set design to turn a stage into a magical land. I don’t even think you really need to be familiar with the original book to enjoy 5)3 show.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is at Sadlers wells until early September and then it goes back out on tour around the UK. You can find tour dates here.
*the night I was there someone had been giving out bags of popcorn and the noise was insane for the first 20 minutes or so, but there wasn’t any restlessness before the interval.
Yes I know I only did a Books Incoming post last Saturday. However, it all got a bit out of hand in Norfolk and so I’m back already. What we have here is the result of a trip to Carlisle (which should probably have been on last week’s post, but I forgot to put them on the pile so they got left out of the photo) and then two second-hand bookshops at the National Trusts in Norfolk…
Lets start with the Carlisle purchases, which are top left, the Shaun Levy Ratpack confidential and the Molly Keane. I’ve read Levy’s A Castle on Sunset and have been keeping an eye for his others as he writes in the Old Hollywood/movie adjacent part of my reading interests. The Molly Keane is because she keeps coming up in articles I’ve read and I did like Good Behaviour. Then we have the National Trust haul. And I’m going to start by saying that mobile phone signal in Norfolk was generally not good and was non-existent in the bookshops so some of this was done a little by guesswork. There’s actually one book I left out of the pile because when I had signal I realised I had read it, and there were a couple I didn’t buy because I wasn’t sure if I already had them on the pile (I had a 50 percent success rate on that front). Excluding the Abbey girls and the Dodie Smith, I was buying based on vibes and half remembered thoughts that I have read the author before.
So there is a fighting chance that some of these will be terrible and you will never hear of them again. There’s at least one book here when when I searched for the author on my goodreads page I discovered that I had read them before and not enjoyed it. So there’s a fighting chance some of these could end up victims of my 50 pages and out rule. But they were cheap and I was supporting the National Trust so it’s fine really. Totally fine.
Now lets see if I can control myself for the rest of the month. I don’t think I’ve got any more pre-orders due to arrive in the next few weeks, and so it’s going to be a case of can I keep myself from impulse purchasing in any bookshop I visit, and if I go on a series binge, can I restrain myself from acquiring more. Wish me luck.
The movie comes out next week and we’ve got a little over a month to go until the release of book five, The Impossible Fortune, so it seemed like to point you at my posts about Richard Osman’s series about a group of crime solving group of pensioners from a retirement complex in the south of England. You can find my review of book one here, and my series post here. Of course this series has also spawned a gagillion lookalike covers and books – you can read Smart Bitches Trashy Books’ post about the covers here and listen to Sarah’s conversation with Kayleigh Donaldson about them here. And no I don’t know where my copies of the first and second ones are. Probably on loan somewhere. I think. I hope.
Breaking away from the mystery theme of the new books from the last few weeks to mention that Juliette Fay has a new book out this month. I read her novel The Tumbling Turner Sisters nearly a decade ago and it was a BotW here all of those years ago. The blurb for The Harvey Girls says it follows two women who want to become waitresses in a hospitality chain on the Santa Fe railroad. From very different backgrounds and with different motivations, both are hiding secrets and must try and overcome their dislike of each other in order to survive training and then working at a luxurious hotel at the Grand Canyon.
I thought I’d mention this because of my recent recommendsday about books set in hotels, but I don’t know how easy it will be to get hold of here. I have another of Fay’s novels on the tbr shelf waiting – but I picked it up second hand and it’s an import. And this has reminded me that I really should get around to reading that soon….
Having spent a couple of days last week wandering around Norfolk, for this week’s Recommendsday it seemed like an obvious choice to talk about books set in the county.
I’m starting with the most obvious books – because they’re the ones I’ve read/binged the most recently: the Dr Ruth Galloway series. They’re mostly set around north Norfolk – up around Kings Lynn and Hunstanton (which we visited on our trip) as well as Norwich (and occasionally further afield). And as I’ve also written about them in two other posts, so this is all you’re getting on Ruth today.
I have got another mystery novel set though: The Norfolk Mystery by Ian Sansom. It’s the late 1930s and Spanish Civil War veteran Stephen Sefton gets a job as secretary for Swanton Morely “the People’s Professor”. Morely is planning to write a series of guides to the different counties of England and the first stop is Norfolk. Accompanying them on this trip is his daughter Miriam, but the trip soon turns into a murder investigation. This is the first in a series set and suffers a bit from needing to set up the premise and the characters (who aren’t always that sympathetic!) but I liked it enough that I went on to read the next three books in the series too, although I’m still to read the fifth and seemingly final one.
I’m not going to miss an opportunity to recommend some Laurie Graham, and Future Homemakers of America is set on and around a US Airforce base in the early 1950s. The future homemakers of the title are five wives of US servicemen stationed in Norfolk who initially seem to have very little in common except that their husbands are all in 96th Bomber Wing. The book opens with the death of George V when the women meet Kath, a local, when they go to watch the funeral train go by. It’s been years since I read this, but writing about it has made me want to read it – and its sequel The Early Birds again.
Also in line for a re-read at some point are the Arthur Ransome’s set in the Norfolk Broads. I don’t think I’ve read Coot Club in 30 years – it’s one of the ones that doesn’t have the Swallows and Amazons in it, just Dick and Dorothea from the previous book in the series Winter Holiday. Ramsome was smart to expand the series out beyond the original characters, but Child Verity didn’t appreciate that at all! Anyway, as well as Coot Club, Big Six is also set in Norfolk – and that is one of the ones that I don’t own and in fact I’m not 100 percent convinced I did actually read it even back then!
Still in the classic children’s books area of my reading is Margaret Finds a Future by Mabel Esther Allen*. Margaret is an orphan and at the start of the book the aunt who was her guardian has died leaving behind debts which mean she can no longer stay at her boarding school in Wales. Instead she moves to a stately home in Norfolk (described one of the most famous in Norfolk besides Holkham and Blickling) where another aunt is a custodian. This was one of my early forays into career books (as opposed to boarding school books) and it’s a bit old fashioned, but I enjoyed reading it – and in fact read about 75 pages of it again while I was writing this post – and it has some atmospheric descriptions of Norfolk too.
And finally to end, as you may have noticed, I don’t often read award-nominated books but Rose Tremain’s Restoration is one of the ones that I have read. It tells the rise and fall of Robert Merivel in Stuart England. He starts as a medical student, gains the patronage of the King and is given an estate in Norfolk when he performs a service to the King. And when he falls from favour, he finds work in Norwich. I don’t want to spoil the plot too much, but if you like historical literary fiction you should read it.
Happy Humpday!
*Who also wrote my beloved Drina series as Jean Estoril
Following on from The Celebrants two Tuesdays ago, today I’m writing about A Star is Born, which I discovered is written by Steven Rowley’s husband when I read the thanks for The Celebrants. And as I had on the pile already of course I went on to read that. And so here we are.
Charlie needs a new job and a gig as personal assistant to Kathi Kannon, an iconic Hollywood actress who played a character he had a figurine of as a child. He’s searching for meaning in his life and a way of moving on past his difficult childhood, she needs someone to organise her chaotic life. She’s impulsive and carefree, and everything that Charlie is not. She’s also Hollywood royalty with mental health and addiction issues and an octogenarian mother who was also an actress who lives next door.
Now if this sounds like Carrie Fisher (and her mum Debbie Reynolds) that might be because Bryon Lane worked as Fisher’s assistant for three years and says that that job inspired the novel. Now you can draw your own conclusions about how much of Kathi is Carrie and I can see from the reviews on Goodreads that it’s a polarising one. And if you’ve read any of Fisher’s memoirs that may also colour your opinions.
For me, Kathi’s hedonistic devil may care manic presence was there as a foil to Charlie’s own issues. He’s totally lost and allows the job to consume him and become his identity. It’s all amped up to eleven and Kathi’s antics seem purposefully extreme and exaggerated so that the reader is often thinking “come on Charlie, surely this is the thing that will make you wake up”. The blurb calls it hilarious, but a lot of the humour is too much towards the cringe for me, and I definitely wanted Charlie to pick himself up and grow some self worth well before he did. But by the end I was pleased with the journey that he had gone on and the person that had come out the other side.
Like The Celebrants, this one isn’t on Kindle and is going to be a special order, to the point where it’s not even listed on the Waterstones website. I’m not sure it’s a spend loads of money to get it type buy, but if it should come your way at a reasonable price it’s an interesting read. And I’d happy read another book by Byron Lane if that came my way.
A good week – in life and in reading. We’ve wandered Norfolk, I read an entire book while sitting in a field at Sandringham waiting for bands to perform, and I’ve finished another non-fiction book – two now this month. Bravely I’ve started two more, here’s hoping they don’t end up on the long-running list…
Read:
Wigs on the Green by Nancy Mitford
Seams Like Murder by Dorothy Howell
The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
It’s summer and we’re trying to take advantage of the good weather to get out and about a little bit and make use of our National Trust cards a bit. We live in a little bit of a National Trust desert, so you have to go a little bit further afield meaning we often end up doing things on the way home from somewhere else. Our latest jolly was over to Norfolk for a couple of nights, mostly to a concert at Sandringham, but it we did two Jacobean mansions on the trip.
Lets start with the bigger of the two: Blickling. This is a Jacobean house built on the same site as an earlier house that is believed to be the birthplace of Anne Boleyn. Designed by the same architect as Hatfield House, it has a main building with two wings alongside and framing the main building. The main house has an important and large collection of books and manuscripts in the various libraries and galleries. It’s got huge grounds including a lake, a big walled kitchen garden and a parterre. It’s also got a museum dedicated to the RAF base that was set up nearby in World War 2 and whose personnel were housed at the house. It’s also got a big second hand bookshop. There is plenty to do and see – we were there on a really, really hot day, so we didn’t do any of the walking trails (there are loads) because we didn’t want to melt, but you could really easily spend the whole day here.
Felbrigg is the smaller house – and we were expecting it to be the quieter one, but it actually seemed a bit busier, possibly because we arrived just as the house was opening for the day and so maybe it seemed like there were more people in the house than at Blickling. It was in the same family for most of its life and has a really interesting collection of artefacts from the family’s travels over the centuries. It also has a fair bit of bird taxidermy, which is in the process of being conserved. In fact there are a few conservation projects going on here, including on their state bed, and I appreciate the information that the National Trust now gives you about the work that they’re doing on their properties.
Talking of taxidermy and conservation, I present Calke Abbey in Derbyshire, which we visited a few weeks ago after a night out seeing Tim Minchen in Nottingham. This is a very different stately home, because it has had very little restoration and is largely in the state that it was when it was handed over to the trust, at the end of about a century of decline. The work at the Abbey has been about preventing further decay and stabilising what remains. So many grand houses were lost in the 20th century as the world changed and the families who owned them could no longer afford the upkeep and Calke demonstrates that – as the money started to run out, the family just shut up more and more of the house and lived in smaller and smaller portions of it. So there is peeling wallpaper, abandoned rooms, and so much taxidermy. I cannot tell you how much taxidermy. Honestly, the last time I saw this many stuffed animals and birds was when we visited the National History Museum at Tring. And yes, Tring has more, but it’s a museums you expect that!
One thing that all three of these had in common was that the National Trust have made a big effort with the activities for kids this summer. All three of these had a Summer of Play area with games and activities to do, there are passports for children to get stamped and trails and treasure hunts. I’m pretty sure I would have been a lot more enthusiastic about National Trust trips when I was little if all this had been about then!
Oh this looks bad. Really bad. But it’s not as bad as it looks. Honestly. Let me explain: nearly a third of these were pre-orders, so really they shouldn’t count right? I mentioned the Nev Fountain on Thursday, and the new Dahlia, and I really should have mentioned the Elissa Sussman too, but it came out the same week as the Sarah MacLean. Then the Otto English and the Richard Coles were my airport purchases on the way to Ghana – and were the only books I took with me. Now I was so busy that week that I only read one of them, but that still means that that one is going straight from the incoming pile to the shelf. And A Howl of Wolves is going onto the shelf too because it’s that fourth Sam Clair that you can’t get on Kindle, so really buying it was the only way I was going to get to read it and thus finish the series. And then while I was buying it from Abebooks, I checked what else the seller had that was on my list, because you get postage on a scale if you’re buying more books from the same person, and that’s how/why I got the Jill Churchills. And then finally the Jackie, Ethel, Joan was my purchase in Waterstones last week. So really that’s the only one that counts as an impulse purchase. And that’s what I’m meant to be working on…
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 