hogglestock

 

Not only was I a lazy blogger in May, but we have been out of the country since the 25th. That last post with all the pictures was meant to fool you tide you over until we returned. And now that we have returned I have lots of fantastic pictures to share, but it is going to take a while to sort through them all.  So in the meantime I will give you a bookish teaser of what is to be culled from the 1,846 photos we took over eight days in the UK. (Although it might be a bit misleading since the vast majority of photos are not book related.)

When we make our reservation to stay at The George in Rye, I couldn’t help but notice that they had a room called “The Book Room”. Luck was with us and our room request was honored. So we got to spend the night in a room full of Penguins.

Cozy room in Rye. But when one can only stay for one night, having all these Penguins in one spot doesn’t really do one much good. To add to the charm of the setting, that little Tivoli radio seen on the nightstand was in the middle of Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis when we arrived. A very nice, very English, and since it was playing on the radio, a very serendipitous touch.

 

I had every intention of putting all of these in alphabetical order by author, but alas, the quaint charm of Rye and beautiful weather won out and I ended up without much time to do it. Not to mention the fact that I ended up taking a lovely hot bath and going to bed by 10:00.

 

I started to pull the ones I wanted to buy or own off the shelves. Then it dawned on me that they weren’t for sale, and unless I intended to steal them, I really needed to just put them back on the shelves.

 

After seeing others post about these great 1960s Muriel Spark editions during Muriel Spark Reading Week, it was fun (and frustrating) to see them in person.

 

I picked out a selection of titles that I knew would appeal to my readers. Not only a Miss Hargreaves and Ivy Compton-Burnett for Simon T., but a pair of Monica Dickens, a little Waugh, some Forster, a couple of Bowens and two copies of High Wages by Dorothy Whipple. I must admit, if they had had a Whipple novel that wasn’t in print with Persephone, I would have put it in my suitcase and then gone around the corner to the antiquarian bookshop that had vintage Penguins to fill in the gap. I wouldn’t have felt too bad about this either given that there was clearly no rhyme nor reason to the assemblage of Penguins and that it seemed like one vintage Penguin could just as easily take its place with no one being too upset about it. (Slippery slope, I know.)

I have been really bad about blogging lately. And I don’t really have time for a post today, so I thought I would leave you with some stuff to look at. A bit of a mixed bag, so hopefully there is something for everyone.

Lovely yellow rose next to our front door.

John just took these two photos this morning.

Back in February Lucy decided she was a cheetah and found a high point for looking for prey.

Sniffing the breeze.

Delicious devilled eggs that my friend Ron made on Easter.

Books in our old apartment.

A delicious winery stop in Sonoma in 2006.

Our friends first newborn goat was named after yours truly.

On our way over the Great Barrier Reef to Lizard Island in 2006.

Sunset from Lizard Island.

This April my parents were with us when they celebrated their 50th anniversary. Here they are opening a picture of a street sign at an intersection in St. Paul where a street with our last name intersects with a street with my mom’s maiden name.

John set a lovely table.

He did the flowers as well.

I made the food.

Rub my tummy…please.

I’m still waiting.

I’m not sure they wanted their tummies rubbed. Somewhere south of Big Sur, California.

Doesn’t get much more peaceful than a lake in the Adirondacks.

The other day I was buying a stack of books at a charity bookshop when I spied a book with a picture of books on the cover. Always a sucker for pretty pictures of books (like the one to the right which has the added bonus of having a real phone in it), I had to find out what it was. Turns out it was a book club journal. You know, one of those pretty, but probably useless journals that stationers/publishers like to dangle in front of people who like journals (more likely people who like the thought of journaling), or people who like lists. Don’t get me wrong, I love a list, but I think that a good list doesn’t need special formatting or pretty pictures. Especially when the journals are produced especially for the keeping of such list. Like once I saw a little spiral bound journal that was strictly for keeping track of wine consumed, where you were when you drank it, and who helped you. That might be interesting information to keep track of, but there is something kind of cheesy about these single purpose journals. I know what it is, they seem like journals for poseurs. Anyone with a real desire to list things just needs a blank sheet of paper or a spreadsheet. Granted those blank sheets of paper could be in a bound journal, but they don’t need to be adorned with helpful little hints. In the case of the book club journal, it has a headings like “Conclusions Reached”.  Gimme a break.

BUT, the book club journal was only $1 and it included lists of suggestions for book club books broken down by category. I don’t belong to a book club so I don’t need the helpful suggestions, but I can never pass up a book list. Especially if I can cross off (or usually for me, highlight) the books I have read. It always makes me feel so smug, both about the ones I have read as well as the ones I haven’t read (no doubt I have really good reasons for not following the crowd…)

What surprised me about these particular lists was not so much what was included and what wasn’t included, but the fact that the list that had the most titles that I have read was a category of fiction that I really don’t read much of. I know it is more coincidence than anything, it just so happened that these are the titles they included, but who’d a thunk that I would have read more SF/Horror/Future than some of these other categories?  You guys know me well enough to be surprised as well.

And for you listophiles, here you go…

Who ever would have thought that this would be my most read list with 9 of 20 books read. The only one other one I am certain I will read is Fahrenheit 451.

Between the page above, and the one below I have read 12 of the titles listed in Contemporary Fiction, but that is with twice as many to choose from, so on a percentage basis, I didn’t do as well. I will definitely read the Mitford and the Amis.

I read a chapter or two of the Barnes back in 1995, otherwise there isn’t much on this list I am drawn to.

I might feel bad about my poor showing in this category if I hadn’t read plenty of others that aren’t here. I loved Colette’s the Ripening Seed but have been stand offish about her since I saw that horrible film version of Cheri.

This is a category I should have done better in, but their list just isn’t very good.

I think this is the list I am most interested in exploring more.  I definitely don’t like formulaic mysteries. I want to like them but I just don’t. I will definitely read The Moonstone, but otherwise I don’t know if this is a good list or not. What do you think? If I want to expand my reading in this category what should I try that is, or isn’t on this list?

My worst showing of all. The only one that is on my TBR radar is the Graves.

Ah, the classics. I feel like I should get credit for reading three other Lawrences so I don’t have to read this one.  I see myself getting to the Alcott, Eliot, Austen, Hawthorne, Gaskell, and maybe the Hardy, Fielding, and Thackeray.

  
This was taken at Christmas, but I just came across it on a flash drive and couldn’t resist…

 

Mozart trying to write something that will make everyone forget about Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. (Tom Hulce playing Mozart in the brilliant film Amadeus.)

Too much of a good thing can be a very bad thing. The following is my list of music that I think has been overplayed and/or overmarketed to the point of being painful to me. It doesn’t mean they are bad, it just means I never want to hear them again.

• “Respect”, “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman”, “Chain of Fools” and almost every hit by Aretha Franklin. I will keep listening to her gospel album however.
• Anything by the Beatles. Full stop.
• “At Last” by Etta James
• “What a Wonderful World” by Louis Armstrong
• Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. I love Beethoven’s other 8 symphonies and his opera Fidelio is one of my favorite operas, but I really have learned to loathe the 9th.
• Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.
• The “Hallelujah Chorus” from Messiah by Handel.  I can listen to Messiah a lot, but the HC I can live without.
• Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik

Actually, when it comes to the classical music, if I can suspend my aversion, I can still appreciate them, especially if they are performed well. Except for Eine Kleine, that one I just plain hate.

What’s on your list?

   

Regular readers of My Porch know that I haven’t been able to muster the strength for an actual book review in quite some time. Today’s post about The Takeover by Muriel Spark, will be no exception. So it is time for one of my famous (infamous?) bullet list reviews.

• Although I quite enjoyed the general setting and narrative style of The Takeover, and looked forward to reading it whenever I could, I can’t really say that I really enjoyed the overall message. Perhaps because I am not sure what the message was.
• Spark creates an Italy in the loosey goosey 1970s with a cast of expats, Eurotrash, and shifty Italians.
• There is much in Spark’s writing in which one can delight. I was particularly taken by this passage: “They talked of hedges against inflation, as if mathematics could  contain actual air and some row of hawthorn could stop an army of numbers from marching over it.” I mean how poetic is that? I love the image of a lovely hawthorn hedge blocking not just inflation, but numbers themselves.
• You know how Iris Murdoch in the 1970s had everyone hopping from bed to bed and saying scandalous, cruel things to each other in a very clever ways. In some ways I feel like Spark takes that same kind of ethos to a kind of slapstick extreme.
• I don’t understand why Maggie gets the brunt of the bad luck in the book. She was really the innocent party in most cases but ended up being treated quite poorly by everyone.
• I think this would be a fun book to discuss in a book club. It may not be the best book, but it is full of things that would engender great discussion.

And you know I can never resist a character who likes a list, and never more so then when index cards or typewriters are involved:

Later, in Maggie’s room, they counted the coins and made a list. It was Mary’s idea to make a list. She made lists of everything. A good part of her mornings was spent on list-making. She had lists for entertaining and for shopping. She listed her clothes, her expenditure and her correspondence. She kept lists of her books and music and furniture. She wrote them by hand, then typed them later in alphabetical or chronological order according as might be called for. Sometimes she made a card index when the subject was complex, such as the winter season’s dinner parties, whom she had dined with and whom she had asked, what she had worn and when.

   
Knowing next to nothing about Muriel Spark’s life, I decided to see what I could come up with on Ancestry.com.  The service is not cheap but I think they still have free temporary memberships so you can play around if you want. I use it for work as well as personal research, so the expense makes sense for me. Anyhoo, there isn’t much that comes up on Ancestry.com for Spark. I did, however, find an arrival record for March 20, 1944. Even more curious, I went to Wikipedia and came across this:

“On 3 September 1937 she married Sidney Oswald Spark, and soon followed him to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Their son Robin was born in July 1938. Within months she discovered that her husband was manic depressive and prone to violent outbursts. In 1940 Muriel left Sidney and Robin. She returned to the United Kingdom in early 1944, taking residence at the Helena Club in London; years later the club would be her inspiration for the fictional May of Teck Club in The Girls of Slender Means.”

So the arrival record, appears to document Spark’s return to England after she left her husband and son in Rhodesia. You might want to read her entry in Wikipedia if you don’t know her story. Frankly, after reading it, I think a little less of her as a human. Not knowing the whole story, it seems like she abandoned her son and then disowned him later in life and made sure none of her estate went to him upon her death.

On March 20, 1944 the Empress of Scotland of the Canadian Pacific Line arrived in Liverpool from Durban (Cape Town), South Africa.

This is a photo of the page on which the 26 year old Muriel Spark is listed.

Three lines from the top you can see Spark’s details. The c/o address in Edinburgh must be her father.

 
Wasn’t sure what to post today for Muriel Spark reading week until I saw Simon’s post about Spark book covers. It made me go to my shelves and pull down all the Sparks I own to take a look at their covers. Out of the thirteen I own (which aren’t actually the same as the thirteen that I have read) most of them have really bad covers. In some instances there are covers that I don’t particularly like, but they at least capture something about the book or author that makes them seem just right.

I decided to do a side-by-side comparison.  (After you are done looking at these, you really should go over to Simon’s blog where he has some much more interesting ones. I particularly like the old Penguin covers from the 1960s.)

I think both are bad design. I like the image better in mine on the right, but the photo is a bit misleading.

I really like Simon’s cover on the left, but I think it is more appropriate for something by PG Wodehouse.

I think the one on the left from Simon’s blog wins hands down. Not only is it a million times better than my lame cop, but it is interesting and evocative in its own right.

I don’t like the one on the left in general because I tend not to like this kind of photo illustration. Plus this one makes the book look like chick-lit. The one on the right captures the subversive quality of Spark like a Blathus painting.

While this book is pretty amusing, I think it has bite as the cover on the right says. The one on the left is just too frivolous.

These are both boring as toast. (Although I love toast, and love books and movies that have English people buttering toast.)

I really don’t like my copy on the right in person, but I kind of like it better on the screen. But overall I would say that Simon’s version is more Sparkian. Although I haven’t read this particular title.

 


  

Forty-two years before Dame Maggie Smith dominated Downton Abbey as the Dowager Duchess, and seventeen years before she brilliantly played “poor Aunt Charlotte” in A Room With a View, Maggie Smith won an Oscar for Best Actress for her role in the film adaptation of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

If you haven’t seen the film, what are you waiting for?  If a young, glamorous Maggie Smith isn’t your cup of tea, maybe you could be enticed by a young, virgorous Gordon Jackson (Hudson from the original Upstairs Downstairs).