The Chronicles of St Mary's by Jodi Taylor

Something devastating happened in November and I turned to my mum for some advice, advice about what book I should listen to on audible… Normally I listen to a lot of detective novels: Nicola Upson’s wonderful Josephine Tey novels, the gory Robert Galbraith books and Miss Silver Mysteries. I love them dearly, even though I regularly get so engrossed in them that I scream every time my boyfriend comes into the room. In November I needed something very, very different from these books, I needed comfort. My mum suggested I might like the Chronicles of St Mary’s and she was oh so right.

The Chronicles of St Mary’s belongs to my second favourite audible genre – children’s books for adults (see also: Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London books). These are books for and about adults which share characteristics of children’s literature. The St Mary’s Chronicles are about a group of time travelling historians who live and work at The St Mary’s Institute of Historical Research and hop around the timeline visiting important historical events.

St Mary’s is essentially a boarding school full of adults. It shares many features with the standard boarding school of children’s fiction – hospital wing, library, large grounds with a lake, crazy professors, grumpy gamekeeper and caretaker. But St Mary’s also has a bar. I know where I’d rather go… St Mary’s is made up of Technical Officers, The Security, Historians, Researchers and a whole host of others who work together to get the Historians ready for each mission. The most important part of St Mary’s are the pods – time machines that look like little stone shacks that smell of cabbage, hot electrics and bad plumbing. The historians travel through time in their pods getting into scrapes, avoiding volcanic eruptions, meeting Mary Queen of Scots, and narrowly avoiding death. There are baddies that need outsmarting, the universe to save from paradox and history to investigate.  

The world Jodi Taylor has created is embedded within the real world, the same way that the wizarding world exists in secret within our muggle world. I love this. I want to believe, as I almost did as a child, that all sorts of amazing things are happening in secret all around us, that there’s more to the world than we are aware.

I suppose I should tell you about the characters now! Our girl is Max, real name: Madeline Maxwell, who joins St Mary’s in book 1. She is a short ginger historian with an addiction to chocolate, interest in ancient civilisations and pretty passionate love for Leon Farrell, chief technical officer at St Mary’s. She is fearless, dedicated, clever, funny and loved by everyone – basically, she’s who I wanted to be when I grew up. The only problem with Max is that she is incredibly hotheaded, a massive lightweight and seems to have a serious problem with constipation (my only criticism of the books is Jodi Taylor’s insistence on mentioning this A LOT).

I can’t tell you any more about the books because I don’t want to ruin them. I love them so much. Read them and tell me how much you love them! 

5 things I've learned from Josephine Tey (at least the fictional version of her as portrayed in the novels of Nicola Upson)

I’ve been reading, well, listening to, Nicola Upson’s wonderful Josephine Tey novels and I am addicted to them. Josephine Tey was the pen name of Elizabeth Mackintosh, a celebrated mystery writer and novelist during the 1930s and 40s, and Nicola Upson has turned her into the main character of her own series of detective novels. I have described that really badly, all you need to know is that these books are really awesome and Josephine Tey was a real person. 

see? real person!

Here are a few things Josephine Tey* has made me realise:

1. I need to make friends with a detective inspector, preferably one who clearly harbours romantic feelings for me and takes me on holiday with him but never makes me feel guilty or uncomfortable. Archie Penrose is Josephine Tey’s detective best friend and he is the BEST, better even than Jack in Miss Fisher! Archie is a highly intelligent and competent police officer blah blah but he is also an emotionally sensitive and all round awesome human being. He drops everything so see Josephine every time she rings him up and he is incredibly liberal and enlightened for a 1930s man, let alone a 1930s detective inspector. His friends are all actors and writers and nearly all gay women.
2. I need more names. Josephine Tey is actually one of two pen names used by the real-life Elizabeth Mackintosh. Josephine Tey was the name she used for her detective novels and she wrote her plays under the name Gordon Daviet. I think I need some more names pretty urgently… I also need to do something that requires me to have so many names. It might be time for me to start writing Mills and Boon under a ridiculous name like Saskia Montgomery.
3. I need to be a member of a London club. Josephine lives in Inverness most of the time but she regularly comes to London to visit her friends or oversee a play and always stays in her London club. I thought that London clubs were only for men in costume dramas! I didn’t know there had ever been clubs like that that women joined. How wonderful would it be to have a club like that where you could stay whenever you fancied, get a nice meal and have a chat with other awesome women? It would be the perfect mix of staying with friends AND disappearing off alone.
4. I need one of my godmothers to leave me a cottage so I can do it up and have a gorgeous rural escape. This is extremely unlikely to happen as my godmothers both have about million people to leave their houses to before me, 
5. I need to go on more holidays. Josephine is always off to Cornwall or Port Merion or simply staying in London for a few weeks at a time. I haven't been away since I went to Edinburgh last December.

**or at least Nicola Upson's version of her

Peak Fran

I don’t think that anything dramatic has happened to me in the last week. I had to struggle through the finale of Outlander season 1 which was the SECOND episode to be all about torture and near death and I had to pause it a lot to deal with what was happening. I would love someone clever to write about it, especially the way they deal with certain things that happen to Jamie... I am desperate to have someone to discuss it with! But alas, it cannot be.

I am coming to the end of some long training at work and I’m about to put it into practice which is pretty nerve-wrecking. I think this is the reason that most of the things I’m enjoying at the moment are old favourites.

I am essentially reliving my late teens at the moment. It feels good to revisit all the things that I loved so much then because they are what made me into me, revisiting them makes me fee like I’m renewing my essential me-ness. When I am hanging around in long wooly socks and a massive jumper or cardigan, listening to Jeff Buckley and reading Angela Carter I feel like I have reached peak Fran. 

What are these favourites?

I listened to Jeff Buckley and Suzanne Vega constantly as a 17/18 year old. I listen to them lots now too, but it's not as intense. I don't think anything can ever be as intense as it is when you are 17. 

Rediscovering my love for Angela Carter. Angela Carter would have been 75 this year so there have been a couple or articles written about her that I have come accross over the last couple of days. This on Bitch about the Bloody Chamber and this on Salon. I ruined her in my mind a little bit by writing my dissertation on her books but with 5 years between me and that terrible ordeal I am able to enjoy her once more. I’m reading Nothing Sacred which is a selection of her writing published in the late 80s. Next want to read A Card From Angela Carter. Her writing is so gorgeous I want to eat it (or something less weird).

I finally fixed my Lady Luck teenybopper ring. I’ve had this ring since I was 17 when I bought it as a treat for not dying during my AS French Oral. I failed the exam but I got this ring out of it so it was ok in the end. Earlier this year the original ring snapped in two! But I got a new one and yesterday I transferred all the charms across to the new base and I will never stop wearing it. Mad jewellery is one of my main interests (alongside cheese, gin and hatred for tories) and it all began when I was about 17 with Lady Luck. 

I didn't love this when I was 17 BUT I've been rewatching Big Love. I love Big Love because I have a weird fascination with Mormons and um it’s about a polygamist family with Chloë Sevigny as the grumpiest sister-wife of all time, I don’t think I need to explain why I love it. Bonus: God Only Knows by the Beach Boys is the theme song which means I get to hear it every 50mins or so when I watch it.

The Monogram Murders by Sophie Hannah

For some reason they (I'm not sure who this 'they' is) decided it would be a good idea to have a new Poirot mystery. I'm pretty sure the only possible reason can be monetary – it's not like Agatha Christie left us a tragically small number of novels. As a lover of Poirot AND a person with access to her parents' audible account, I had to give it a go.

I don't want to tell you what it's about because, DUH, spoilers. But, I don't think I'm giving too much away when I say that Poirot is investigating murders that are linked by a monogram, or more precisely, a monogrammed cufflink. But that is all I shall say about the actual mystery…

Sophie Hannah gives us a new narrator – Edward Catchpole, a young detective from Scotland Yard who just lets Poirot take over the case when the murders are discovered. Catchpole is no Captain Hastings, but he is likeable and having a new sidekick for Poirot allows Hannah to bring her own flavour to Poirot as well as marking her tale apart from Christie's Poirot novels. The more I consider Catchpole, the more pathetic he seems, for example, at one point he visits a village to speak to the inhabitants and find out secrets from 15 years before. This is surely not unusual for someone whose job is to investigate murders, but Catchpole gets very anxious when Poirot tells him he will not be accompanying him. He seems too much of a wet blanket to be a Scotland Yard detective.

I'm not going to comment on the writing style itself because I don't feel I have read enough Christie to properly judge how well Hannah writes like Christie. There were moments that seemed to jar a little. I can't remember the exact phrases, but I remember finding the odd line anachronistic and wincing a little a lines that just didn't sound very 1920s. But I did find it easy to fall into the world of Poirot. (How great would it be to be Poirot? So certain, so clever and so moustached.)

And now I come to how I felt about the actual story. I really enjoyed listening to the story, I finished it in less than a week and listened to it when all the time I wasn't sleeping or working. I enjoyed the experience of listening to it. I loved the way that the story unfolded and the way secrets were carefully uncovered. But I found it very convoluted. At one point there were 3 different versions of what could have happened and Hannah insisted on getting the characters to repeat them over and over again. While the book itself was enjoyable, I felt that this part deviated from the clever simplicity of Christie's original stories. 

So overall I enjoyed it but I was also quite irritated by it! I don't know if I would have persevered if it had been a book rather than an audiobook. I thought that Julian Rhind-Tutt was a brilliant narrator and I'd love to hear him read other Poirot stories.  

Good Afternoon

I was supposed to conclude October with a post on the 31^st with a little update and a celebration of the end of my 11 hour days at work… I didn't really manage that and then Paul fractured a bone in his foot and I became a tired house elf for a week while I did every household task that involved standing.

So here's a belated update on my life.

In mid-October I went to New Market with some old friends to meet another old friend who now lives in New Zealand.

Here is the selfie I made us take in a windy multi-story car park:

We've all been friends since primary school and we've not been all together since Issi's last visit to the uk when we were 18. But the strangest part of the day was how natural it felt to be together. It doesn't matter that we don't spend whole weeks together at school, or that we don't get to see each other as often as we should, we all still get on and tease each other for the same reasons we always did. 

I think this day marked the beginning of the intensification of my Christmas excitement which has already caused me to buy and eat these:

I spent the weekend dressed in what Primark so beautifully (and rightfully) labelled a "smock" with my very sexy woolly penguin leggings underneath. This is how I intend to dress until the end of the winter.

Each month brings a new Lucky Dip Club box and October's was diner themed and contained this golden doughnut necklace:

I wish I could say that this is the only jewellery I bought this month but that would be a massive lie...

Here are the books, blogs, tv shows, films and music I've read, watched and listened to over the last month:

Reading/Listening
1) I have become hooked on Serial and listened to all the episodes so far within 24 hours.
2) I listened to The Monogram Murders and Little Face both by Sophie Hannah, courtesy of my Dad's audible account
3) I've been reading Carol by Patricia Highsmith on the bus into work 
4) Bad Feminist by Roxanne Gay
5) I also listened to Lady Susan by Jane Austen from the library's awesome and freee audiobook app. Lady Susan is brilliant. Hilariously funny and, to use my favourite granny phrase, Lady Susan is no better than she should be.
6) She & Him's version of Time after Time from their new album that isn't out till December 

Watching
1) I've give the Gilmore Girls a bit of a wee rest, mostly because it's getting to the angsty bit with all the heartbreak and boat-stealing.
2) My friend from New Zealand told me about a really depressing film called Once Were Warriors and a work friend (who happens to be from New Zealand) lent it to me. The film is brilliant but incredibly harrowing. I wept throughout.
3) Paul and I have begun watching 1 Harry Potter film per week ready to watch the last one with my family on Christmas Eve. This is making me extremely happy.

New Blog Crushes
These are some blogs I've recently discovered
Ella Masters - Ella is an illustrator who sells prints and awesome bags and tshirts (like this) her blog is full of tips for creative people and lifestyle posts.
Miss West End Girl - Lynsay is a awesome Glaswegian blogger who wears awesome clothes and feeds my obsession with Scotland. 
Lemon Freckles - cute lifestyle blog written by Toni who has blue hair and lives in Sheffield 

Like sand through the hourglass, so are the Gilmores of our lives…

SO it's October, huh? Where did that come from? Time, you merciless bastard…..

Anyway... So the internet has gone crazy with Gilmore Girl lists and quizzes and trivia because as of 1^st October, the entirety of the Gilmore Girls is on US Netflix. This means that I, the owner of the entire series on DVD, have begun to binge watch as soon as the news came out. It has become my life. Luckily Paul, who claimed it hate GG when it was originally on, seems to be softening and actually enjoying it this time round! This means that I don't need to feel bad about commandeering the TV. Bake off? What Bake off? I really have been watching Gilmore Girls constantly. The other day Paul was out and I didn't want to start the next season without him, and I was trying to think of something else to watch when I suddenly remembered Netflix. This is home Gilmore-obsessed I have become.

I really really love Gilmore Girls. My last couple of weeks have been: Work – Gilmore Girls – Bed – Work – Pub- Gilmore Girls – Bed – Repeat.

However, there has been the odd moment when I've been torn away from the sofa...

These are the things I've been watching/reading/listening to when forced to be be separate from Gilmore Girls:

• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark audiobook from the library. Read by Miriam Margoyles. Brilliant.
• Fresh Meat on Netflix – This is especially weird when I remembered that my younger brother is closer to this than me.
• Animals by Emma Jane Unsworth – I've been reading this for a million years and I'm not massively enjoying it. I just can't care about the characters.
• Letters between Six Sisters edited by Charlotte Mosley

Other exciting news from my week:

I made this fox sleepmask from a kit in the September Lucky Dip Club Box:

 
But, by far the best thing that has happened to me this week is discovering how wonderful it is to get stuff delivered to collection points. Thanks to Amazon Prime trials (yea, I know Amazon is evil, but what can you do?) and the pick-up point that's less than 5 mins from my house, I can order books one day and collect them on my way home from work on the next. It's much better than having to try and collect them from the impossible to find the royal mail collection place or organise redelivery for a day I'll be in.

Here are the books I ordered:


I've already started Pretty Honest and Bad Feminist and they are both Awesome. The whole title for the third book is Girl Trouble: Panic and Progress in the History of Young Women. Which sounds really interesting. I hadn't heard anything about it but the title alone is awesome and it has tattoo-style cover art.

Fangirl

Laura and I are going to see Rainbow Rowell in a couple of weeks so I thought I should read her books! I have already read Attachments and I seem to be holding off on Eleanor and Park, so it was the turn of fangirl. 

For some reason I thought Fangirl would be about a fan fiction writer who somehow met her characters, or people exactly like them, and that as she wrote her fanfiction she would be manipulating reality like a kind of waking Marianne Dreams*. This is not at all what Fangirl is... but someone should totally write that book. 

Fangirl is actually about Cath (Cather), a college freshman and fanfic writer. She is a twin (her sister is called Wren. Cather and Wren, get it?), the quieter, shyer, and, she believes, plainer twin. Obsessed with Simon Snow books, a Harry Potter-type series amusingly set in Watford. She writes slash fiction about simon and his nemesis Baz - think Draco/Malfoy. Cath would rather stay in and work on her fanfic masterpiece Carry On Simon that go out and be a college student. 

Naturally for the world of fiction, Cath manages to meet a super hot guy who likes her WITHOUT EVEN LEAVING HER ROOM. And while this is fun to read about, I can tell you now that you don't get to have a interesting and fun life by sitting around in your room and hoping that someone will pop by. People won't seek you out, they will just write you off as a loner weirdo and no one will spend time coaxing you out of our room - like a little life advice for you. But it is still nice to believe world where awesome guys can find and fall in love with you wherever you are. 

This review is making it sound like I didn't like Fangirl which is not at all true as I loved it and read it super fast. Despite my comments in the previous paragraph about how unrealistic it is that someone would find an fall in love with you without ever leaving your room, I did enjoy that part of Fangirl. I like that Cath is not a standard 18 yr old, she isn't interested in partying and drinking, and that is ok. She is still a person deserving of friendship and love, she is still interesting. But most of all, I loved Levi. Levi was super hot. 


In conclusion, Fangirl has a) made me sad that I never got deep onto Harry Potter fandom because there must be some excellent fan fiction out there. And b) made me want to write my own dirty Fangirl fan fiction. like seriously, Levi is really hot. Why does 18 year old Cath just want to hold his hand all the time?


*This book must have made a very deep impression on me when I was a child because I mention it all the time. 

The Man of Property (book 1 of the forsyte saga) by John Galsworthy

Love is no hot-house flower, but a wild plant, born of wet night, born of an hour of sunshine; sprung from wild seed, blown along the road by a wild wind. A wild plant that, when it blooms by chance in within the hedge of our gardens, we call a flower; and when it blooms outside we call a weed; but, flower or weed, whose scent and colour are always wild!  And further – the facts and figures of their own lives being against the perception of truth – it was not generally recognised by Forsytes that, where, this wild plant springs, men and women are but moths around the pale, flame-like blossom. 

Persepolis

Don't the colours look nice together? I only read books that match my decor.

Laura lent me this when she came on our little holiday in my house (about a million months ago now...bad blogger). I like to think that my devious plan, involving taking her to charity shops so she bought more books and couldn’t take ALL her books home, was the reason she lent it to me. But it might have been her plan to lend me them all along.

First of all: Persepolis is super awesome. (The second of all, I’m glad I’m writing this down so I don’t have to try and say Persepolis. I said it in my mangled way and my Archaeologist father went “It’s Persepolis” so fast that I’ve no idea how he said it.)

Persepolis is a graphic novel by Marjane Strapi about her childhood in Iran and then her return to Iran after spending some of her teens in Austria. Before reading it by knowledge about Iran was this:

1) There was some kind of Cultural/Islamic revolution in the 70s

2) Comedian Shappi Khorsandi is Iranian and her family moved to Britian in the 70s because her father wrote a satirical poem

3) Iran used to be called Persia

Have you been blown away by my knowledge?

The first awesome thing about this book is that it’s really informative. After reading this I actually have some idea of Iran’s recent history, including the part that Britain played (non-spoiler: it was not good). The history of the Middle East is SO confusing and Persepolis describes it in a way that I could understand (I sound really thick so far...).

But the best thing about Persepolis is that it is a personal story. It cuts through all the distance that news reports give and the way that they can “other” people. News never focuses on people in a way that you can relate to them. Through Marjane’s eyes, we can see her experiencing the Iranian Revolution alongside being a teenager. It reminded me of how people find the term "first world problems" offensive because people all over the world get annoyed if their wifi is down or whatever. People are just people and they still live their day-to-day lives, even if their day-to day lives involve having to wear the veil. We can all too easily look at women who live under oppressive regimes and assume we know everything about them. That there is nothing in their lives beyond their limited freedoms. We rarely seek out their voices or stories. Not only does Persepolis do this but it's really engaging and funny. 

So even if it hadn’t been so interesting and entertaining, I would have liked it just because it helped to make me less ignorant!

Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics - bell hooks

Feminist politics aims to end domination to free us to be who we are -- to live lives where we love justice, where we can live in peace. Feminism is for Everybody

I have finally finished this. It’s a ridiculously short book to have taken me so long but I had to read it short bursts to stop myself copying it all out into my notebook. I need everyone I know to read this so that we can discuss how wonderful it is and then make bell hooks our queen. I don’t think she’d be down with being a queen, but I’m sure we could work something out.

I think bell hooks is the only feminist author that I’ve never seen anyone criticise and bad-mouth. Now I know why. 

I don’t even know what to say about it. JUST READ IT.

I guess that won’t do.

 

Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression

 

bell hooks wrote Feminism is for Everybody because she wished she had a book she could give to people when they said things like “I’m not a feminist but....” and clearly miss the point of what feminism and the feminist movement are all about. She wanted it to be an accessible book for people outside academia, one that simply explains all of the issues around feminism, and how it intersects with race and class and religion etc. without alienating people with complicated terminology. I think she does a pretty good job of explaining all the terms that she uses and making it accessible for all readers*.

 

Where Feminism is for Everybody is different from traditional introduction to feminism books is that it’s not all about pay gaps and white girls. I've borrowed a copy of The Equality Illusion by Kat Banyard and (as far as I can tell from the back) it seems to be about pay gaps and unequal numbers of women in top jobs in the city. While this is obviously important stuff, it seems to me, and bell hooks, that this is really just tinkering with a system that is inherently wrong. The system is unfairly stacked in favour of white men, not because it is broken, but because it is working exactly as it was designed. Helping some women, inevitably privileged white women, will not further the cause of feminism for all women. This book is about how feminism is truly for, and will benefit, everybody whether they are male, female, straight, queer, working-class, middle-class, white, non-white etc. And most of all, how we need to change our society because it is built on domination and oppression. But rather than depress me about how much oppression their is in the world, this book has made me feel excited to imagine a world built on justice and love respect.

Who's coming to smash this white supremacist capitalist patriarchy with me?

Because my review made NO SENSE here are some quotes:

We do know that patriarchal masculinity encourages men to be pathologically narcissistic, infantile, and psychologically dependent on the privileges (however relative) that they receive simply for having been born male. Many men feel that their lives are being threatened if these privileges are taken away, as they have structured no meaningful core identity.

 (on feminism being associated with hatred and anger:)
In actuality we should have been spreading the word that feminism would make it possible for men and women to know love. We know that now. 

Sexually conservative feminists, gay and straight, found and continue to find consensual rituals of domination and submission inappropriate and see them as betraying feminist ideals of freedom. Their absolute judgement, their refusal to respect the rights of all women to choose the sexual practice they find most fulfilling, is in actuality the stance which most undermines the feminist movement.

If any female feels she needs anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self-defining, her agency.

When we accept that true love is rooted in recognition and acceptance, that love combines acknowledgement, care, responsibility, commitment, and knowledge, we understand that there can be no love without justice. With that awareness comes the understanding that love has the power to transform us, giving us the strength to oppose domination. To choose feminist politics, then, is the choice to love.

 

*I am a very bad judge of this because I love reading anything with words like “Diaspora” or “hegemony” and everything seems beautifully simple after trying to decipher Judith Butler. 

Blood Sisters by Melanie Clegg

I haven’t forgotten how to read! I just keep watching Game of Thrones.

Last week I finished Blood Sisters by Melanie Clegg (known as Madame Guillotine on twitter and her blog). I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to write this review. Book reviews are hard because I just want to go I LIKED IT! READ IT! This one is definitely more of a record than a review... 

Blood Sisters is about 3 sisters during the French revolution: twins Lucrèce and Cassandre, and their more rebellious younger sister Adélaïde. The book moves from sister to sister as they marry other aristocrats and experience the Reign of Terror first hand. The book is basically romance and gore... and a fair amount of guillotining. I read Blood Sisters in 2 days, thinking “I’ll just read a litttttle bit more and then I’ll do something useful.” It is so readable and engaging and thankfully free of the glaringly obvious historical inaccuracies! You can tell that the author has spent years researching this topic and it really makes a difference.

I’m now off to read lots and lots of short books to make up for being about 10 behind on this challenge... oops.

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeannette Winterson

When I was a pretentious teenager who had just stolen the spare tv to watch inappropriate tv secretly in her room I used to watch a lot of Newsnight Review. I really don’t know why because I’d never read the books or seen the films they were talking about. I just liked it because it made me feel clever. The main things I remember about it are Miranda Sawyer’s hair (I drew diagrams in my diary) and Jeanette Winterson.

The Jeanette Winterson I saw on that programme was the Jeanette Winterson that stayed in my imagination for a long time. She was intense and argumentative and she seemed like a twitchy little squirrel. I was a little scared of her. Then I read Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit as a teenager (like everyone does) and I can’t say I remember much about it except for the foreword in my edition where she talked about being poor and glad the coloured knickers were the fashion because she couldn’t afford a separate whites wash at the laundrette. This didn’t tally at all with my idea of her as scary and twitching and severe. For a long time I left it there. Jeannette Winterson was the embodiment of scary and serious feminism that I didn't understand and found intimidating and severe. 

I thought of Winterson as very severe and intimidating (aka. someone who would definitely think I was an idiot) for a long time. It faded a bit once I'd learned more about feminism but I never really lost the idea that she was serious and would hate me! But then I watched this tv programme she did about 

Shall I talk about the book now?

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Is the best title. Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit was pretty good but this is better. How could anyone resist a book with that title and a cute child with a beach ball on the cover? The title is like a self-help book gone-wrong and it feels like a magical self-help book, a book that demands to be re-read regularly. I want to get it back from my mother (who demanded to read it as soon as possible) and underline huge sections. 

I still haven't talked about what's actually IN the book. It's a book about loving books and being adopted and being gay and mental illness. Jeanette lives in a house where "HE WILL MELT THY BOWELS LIKE WAX" is on the back of the loo door and her mother's church starves her when she has a relationship with another girls. So much of what happens to Jeanette, at least at the start of the book, is awful and yet I mostly remember laughing. 

Go and read it. 

p.s. I am totally mentally adding it to my teenage girl pack

Shadows Of The Workhouse by Jennifer Worth

As everyone knows, I am obsessed with nuns and midwives. Are there two more awesome types of people than nuns and midwives? The answer is no. I am addicted to the tv series Call the Midwife and I basically inhaled the book  last year. 

If Call the Midwife is a massive love letter to the NHS, then Shadows of the Workhouse reminds us how much we owe to the Welfare State as a whole. The book is in 3 parts and the first and third are about the effect of the workhouse on the lives of working class people in the first half of the 20^th century.It’s so shocking to me that the workhouse existed so recently that my great-grandparents must have lived in fear of the workhouse, that my grandparents could have been taken there as children. We are so lucky that this could never happen to us. 

I don’t know if people outside the UK know about the Workhouse (although everyone has seen Oliver so I guess they know what it is?). The workhouse was pretty much the only safety net for the elderly, orphaned, disabled, ill and unemployed in Victorian and early 20^th century Britain. The workhouse was tough – the inmates had to do tough physical labour and the conditions were so crowded that disease spread quickly and easily, killing huge numbers with each outbreak. The great tragedy of the workhouse was that families would be broken up as soon as they arrived: adults were separated from children, male inmates from female. Once they had entered the workhouse, families knew they were unlikely to see each other again. The fear of the workhouse and the shame of having to enter it led people to take their own lives rather than go and the fear continued long after the last workhouses closed. 

SO, the actual book!

Part one : The Children of the Workhouse.

This part is the most upsetting part of the book. I read the first few chapters late one night and I felt physically sick and cried so much I had to spend ages cheering myself up before I could sleep. This bit tells us the story of three people she knew who had been in the workhouse together: Fred and Peggy (who were brother and sister) and their friend Jane. This section is pretty tough going. I find it incredible that this type of thing happened less than 100 years ago. 

Warning: there is incest and a very graphic description of a child being whipped.

This bit is what I imagine those misery lit/true life stories are like.

Part Two: The Trial of Sister Monica Joan.

Everyone’s favourite crazy old nun has been caught shoplifting and goes on trial. Do I need to say more? This section also tells us about Sister Monica Joan’s background and how she left her rich and privileged family to become a nurse and then a nun. 

“Were you a suffragette?”I asked. 

“Bah! Suffragettes. I’ve no time for suffragettes. They made the biggest mistake in history. They went for equality. They should have gone for power!”

well?

Part Three: The Old Soldier

This section is about an old man that Jenny befriends and he tells her stories about his life and his time as a soldier. Pretty straightforward. 

How do I sum up? I can't sum it up without making it sound really horrific! It's pretty downbeat and depressing in places and there is no midwifery(!). But the book is incredibly moving and it shows us just how lucky we are to live now, even if we do have a government of EVIL. 

p.s. still bad at the review thing a waaay behind. oh well. 

A Treacherous Likeness

I take all pictures on my bed

The very first thing to say about this book is just how gorgeous it is. My dreadful picture does not do justice at all to the gorgeous cover, but the background is like beautiful wallpaper and the ornate frame is all embossed. And just look at the endpapers:

I've been reading quite a lot on kindle recently and it's great when you can get a book for 20p* or if you MUST READ IT NOW but you don't get endpapers. Lovely endpapers. 

A Treacherous Likeness is the third of Lynn Shepherd’s novels where she weaves a mystery story through an existing novel or novels. The first of these is Murder and Mansfield Park, obviously inspired by Austen’s novel, and the second Tom-All-Alone’s, which uses Bleak House as its starting point.  For A Treacherous Likeness, Lynn Shepherd has taken her inspiration from the life of Percy Bysshe Shelley and the mysteries of his life, which include the suicide of his first wife and an incident when he claimed someone tried to kill him. 

A Treacherous Likeness begins in 1850, immediately after Tom-All-Alone's when young detective Charles Maddox is employed by Sir Percy Shelley, the only surviving child of the Shelleys, to investigate a case of blackmail. This blackmail case leads Charles to uncover long buried secrets of the Shelleys and challenges the romanticised view of Shelley that Sir Percy and Lady Shelley have been carefully cultivating.  

Lynn Shepherd has filled the gaps in Shelley's life, offering explanations for some of the mysteries and using existing letters and facts to build up this fiction. This book is so well researched that nothing you read about Shelley will directly contradict the events of the novel.  So often books with continue or engage with other works, or with provide fictionalised accounts of real people, feel trashy and are often very badly written (I'm looking at you, Mr Darcy Takes A Wife) but Lynn Shepherd's books are the opposite of that. Lynn Shepherd's books are joyful book-nerdery rather than tragic fanfiction. 

As with Tom-All-Alone's, you don't need to know anything about the source material for this to be interesting, but it is more fun when you know the references and can compare the novel with the original. If you are familiar with the lives of the Shelleys, Claire Clairmont, and WIlliam  Godwin you must be prepared for them to be portrayed in ways that you may not like, for people that you admire to be portrayed as selfish, unhinged and possibly evil. For this reason I am very happy that Mary Wollstonecraft does not figure in this novel at all because I really couldn't deal with her looking evil! It is incredible to think how young all these people were -- Shelley died when he was only 29 and Mary Shelley was 17 when she had Shelley's first child. And how they could have lived easy and unremarkable lives now, when all the things that they held as radical views are now pretty mainstream - Shelley was expelled from Oxford for being an Atheist and he was vegetarian who believed in free love. 

Read it (and be grateful for access to free and effective birth control (as long as you live somewhere you can get free and effective birth control)) 

Mary Shelley portrait from the Harry Potter Studio tour. DUH, Mary Shelley was a witch.  

Lynn Shepherd's website (has great videos for all her books) 
Shelley's Ghost Website (amazing virtual exhibition about the Shelleys with suicide notes and all sorts)

*You can get John Lanchester's book Capital for TWENTY PEEEE here

Stitch 'n Bitch by Debbie Stoller

(this is a slightly cheaty review for my 50 Books thing but I made up the challenge so I get to decide what counts) (also, this is really boring... but I wanted it to get up before I got anymore behind on the book thing)

This week I finally got a copy of Stitch ‘N Bitch: The Knitter’s Handbook by Debbie Stoller. This book by Bust editor Debbie Stoller, must be one of the few knitting books that has a discussion about feminism and craft in the introduction. Thanks to things like Bust (and their Craftaculars) I think of craft as a feminist thing, I honestly don't see how learning to make stuff could ever be considered unfeminist and this is Debbie Stoller's view as well. 

I got this book for the jumper patterns and techniques because I can do all the basics and I’ve made hats and stuff now, but I want to take the next step towards becoming a super knitter. The book has all the basics – knit, purl, cast on, bind off and explains both English and continental knitting but then it also has instructions on knitting with colour and how to fix mistakes. 

I have another knitting book – Knitty Gritty by Aneeta Patel which is intended for absolute beginners, and it is a useful book although I found most of the patterns aren’t things I actually want to make – who on earth would want to wear a knitted tie? But I chose Knitty Gritty initially because it’s by a British author and there would be no need to translate measurements or need sizes and because it has a lot of good reviews. Over all Knitty Gritty is good a good guide to getting started, and the instructions and pictures are helpful, but I think Stitch ‘n Bitch is the more useful book because it's designed more like a reference book than a course to work your way through.  Despite being much older than Knitty Gritty (the mobile phone in one picture even has a little aerial), the patterns in SnB are much more wearable, if a little dated, whereas most of the patterns in KG are for baby clothes which I have absolutely no interest in making. I know that they are quick and a good way of testing out techniques, but I know no one with a baby and it seems a bit jinxy to knit for a baby that doesn’t exist. And it’s a massive waste of time. Having said all this, I do want to get Aneeta’s next book Knitty Gritty: the next steps because the reviews are pretty promising and the book is probably more my level anyway. 

Stitch ‘n Bitch is great for beginnerish knitters who don’t want to be patronised and I like that Debbie Stoller has included sections about social knitting, online communities and how to set up a stitch and bitch group and the book also includes patterns for knitting accessories to sew. Stitch ‘n Bitch is really useful and I can’t imagine that I would give it away anytime soon whereas I could happily be parted from my copy of Knitty Gritty.

Next review will be of a proper book! Lynn Shepherd’s A Treacherous Likeness, sequel(ish) to Tom-All-Alone’s

You Had Me At Hello by Mhairi McFarlane

Yet again I have failed to read something high-brow or literary! But I started Delusions of Gender today so next week I will be talking about gender and sexism and neurology and all sorts! This week I’m talking about a girly girly romance book.

The tagline is: What happens when the one that got away comes back? And that is pretty much the essence of the story: Ben and Rachel meet at uni in Manchester and become incredibly close, both harbouring secret feelings for each other, but Rachel isn’t single so they are never more than friends. Ten years after graduation Rachel is newly single and Ben is back. But why haven’t they spoken for ten years, and will they get together now? It’s fairly standard romance stuff but I really enjoyed it – despite the line: “the kettle boils windily,” which made me feel a little queasy.

You Had Me At Hello is the comfort food of books because it plays out exactly how you want it to, taking you on a familiar journey to the heart-warming ending. Yes, it’s predictable, but that’s what you want. You know how the book will end before you open it; you just want to enjoy the journey there. I am very concerned about the Amazon reviewer who abandoned it when they found it too confusing... 

The book is very straightforward and sweet and perfect if you need a bit of comfort... or need to read a book quickly because you’re behind on your book a week challenge. 

Pride and Prejudice is 200 years old..... here are my strange ramblings about it...

The other day I was watching You’ve Got Mail (because I am awesome) and Meg Ryan’s character said:

When you read a book as a child, it becomes part of your identity in a way that no other reading in your life does.

I didn’t read Pride and Prejudice as a child-child because I was a child and not a precocious knob (I recently read someone claim they had read Les Misérables as an eight-year-old) but I watched the 1995 tv version obsessively when it was on (I was six) and became completely obsessed. There is so much about myself that comes from my life-long love of Pride and Prejudice, not that I am a carbon copy of the characters but it's more in my head and the way I think about things and people. 

I'm not going to go on about Mr Darcy, although I clearly love him (see my lovely keyring there? that picture actually makes it look a bit creepy...but it's lovely in the perspex) But I will add in this one little link so you can see why I love the 1995 Mr Darcy so much. And why I love Colin Firth. And the one look that I really require from someone I love -  The Glow. But the internet is FULL of love for Darcy so I don't think anymore needs to be added. 

So Darcy is lovely blahblahblah. (I don't know if I could deal with Darcy in real life, I think I'd prefer a Captain Wentworth but I definitely wouldn't turn Darcy down) but the real reason I love Pride and Prejudice is Elizabeth Bennet. 

When I first watched Pride and Prejudice as a six-year-old, I had no interest in Mr Darcy. Mr Darcy was far too grumpy and rubbish for my liking, I didn't understand why anyone would like boys at all, let alone such a horrible grumpy man such as Mr D. I was obsessed with Elizabeth. 

Elizabeth Bennet is a common answer to "which Jane Austen character would you like to be?" etc. but I wonder how often she is picked for herself, and how often she is picked because she gets Darcy. In modernisations Lizzy is often lost - Austen's Elizabeth Bennet bears absolutely no resemblance to Bridget Jones. BUT SHE IS THE BEST PART OF THE BOOK. 

Jane Austen herself said,"I must confess that I  think her as delightful a character as ever appeared in print, and how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least, I do not know."I quite agree. People who admit they don't like Pride and Prejudice are really just admitting that they are morons.

What makes Elizabeth the best Austen heroine is that you would actually want to be her friend. She isn't hard work like Marianne, or boring like Fanny Price. She makes fun of those who deserve it but she is never cruel like Emma. She is serious and understands how precarious their situation is, and how hard their lives would be if Mr Bennet were to to die, but it doesn't make her serious like Elinor. She is playful and intelligent and, I suspect, the most fanciable Austen heroine.
 

Tom-All-Alone's by Lynn Shepherd

This week I finished Tom-All-Alone’s! It took me nearly 2 weeks to read the first half (I spent too much time singing Les Mis*) and then read the second half in 24 hours. It’s really really good and you should read it.

The main thing I’ve learned from this book-a-week challenge is that I can’t write book reviews.  I want to go, READ IT BECAUSE I THINK IT’S GOOD! Or just give away massive spoilers. Perhaps this is a sign that I need to join a book club and just discuss books everyone has read?

Tom-All-Alone's is a detective story that takes place between Bleak House by Charles Dickens and The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, with inspiration from Henry Mayhew and a bit of Jack the Ripper thrown in. I can see a lot of purists getting their knickers in a twist about the whole thing but really it's like like jazz or some kind of literary mash up.  This is Shepherd on how the novel is situated within these works:

Tom-All-Alone’s really came to life for me when I realised that the time-scheme of Bleak House could be made to run parallel with Collin’s very precise chronology for The Woman in White...This allowed me to create a ‘space between’ these two great novels, where I could locate a new and independent story of my own, and explore some of the same nineteenth-century themes of secrecy, madness, power, and abuse, though with the benefit of twenty-first-century hindsight. 

The independent story that shepherd has created between her re-imagined Bleak House and The Woman In White, is the story of private detective and ex-police officer, Charles Maddox. Maddox has a legendary detective as an uncle (He features in Lynn Shepherd’s re-writing of Mansfield Park – Murder at Mansfield Park) and the story begins when he is employed by the lawyer Edward Tulkinghorn  on behalf of some clients. Some characters from Bleak House are simply transplanted – Tulkinghorn, Inspector Bucket and Jo the crossing-sweeper – whereas others are renamed and altered – Esther becomes Hester; Ada, Clara; Mr Jarndyce, Mr Jarvis.

At first I wondered why Lynn Shepherd didn’t just take characters like Tulkinghorn and Bucket and explore the other things they get up to, the things that we aren’t shown by Dickens, and uses them as an interesting way into the Victorian underworld. In some ways this is what she does, at first Charles Maddox’s work seems to be very separate from Bleak House and the Woman in White, and we hear about some very dark things that would never appear in a book like bleak house. But Hester’s Narrative, where there is no Jarndyce versus Jarndyce and the house in which they live is not called Bleak House, but Solitary House, is inserted every few chapters giving us tiny clues.  Having finished the book I am glad that she chose to rename the characters, I’m glad that they are altered, because it hasn’t permanently changed them for me. The end of the novel, where The Woman in White part really kicks in, feels like one of those horrible theories – like the one that Harry Potter never went to Hogwarts, but remained in the cupboard under the stairs in his own fantasy world.

In Tom-All-Alone's there all the fascinating squalor of Victorian London, the rookeries, the gin houses and whores roaming the streets, Jack the Ripper as well as Asylums and extreme poverty – all the things we know are horrible but find endlessly fascinating all the same – plus some darker things we are used to reading about in more modern novels. 

It doesn’t matter if you’ve never read Bleak House or The Woman in White because you won’t miss anything, and the books won’t be ruined for you if you read them later. If you have read one of these books, you will recognise little bits and it will be fun to compare it with the original. If you know all the sources she has been inspired by and drawn on, you will feel really clever as you recognise her allusions.

 READ IT!

*I am listening to it again RIGHT NOW because I'm seeing it again tomorrow!

The Bees by Carol Anne Duffy

This weeks books - the book I was supposed to finish, the book I actually finished and my newest book

This week I started Tom-All-Alone’s by Lynn Shepherd, and it is really good, but I haven’t finished it because of Les Misérables. Last Sunday I went to see Les Mis and I haven’t been able to stop singing and thinking about it long enough to finish Tom-All-Alone’s. Instead I took the cheat’s route and finished a book of poetry that I’ve had for ages (since last Christmas at least): The Bees by Carol Ann Duffy.

As with all Duffy’s poetry, there is a strong feminist tone to the poems in this collection, which is something I always enjoy, and a lot of the poems are about women  – her mother, her daughter, the woman in the moon. Unsurprisingly there are also a lot of bees in this collection, sometimes at the centre of the poem other times they just a minor detail. The blurb tells me that this is because: “the bee symbolises what we have left of grace in the world, and what is most precious and necessary to protect.” This reminded me of that quote about how we are all stuffed once the bees start disappearing (which they are) and there is definitely a strong environmental message in this collection as well. I don’t know how to talk about poetry without turning it into an essay so I will stop here.

In a nutshell : Poetry is good and this collection has a very pretty cover. 

Next week: Probably Tom-All-Alone’s. 

Lace by Shirley Conran

Now let me ruin the improving and clever part of my resolution by telling you about the first book I read this year...

I chose Lace as my first read because I kept hearing about how it was a cult classic and the kind of book teenage girls passed around at school, reading the dirty bits out to each other, and I didn't want to miss out on that kind of action. It's also been referred to as the original 50 Shades of Grey -- but more because of the popularity of a book for women that was full of sex than the worrying abusive relationship as romance undertone. 

The book opens with prologue describing, in wince-inducingly graphic detail, a backstreet abortion performed upon 13 yr-old girl -- not a typical sexy saga opening. But the action quickly moves twenty years on from that to a hotel room in New York where LIli, international movie star, has gathered four school friends to ask them the wonderful question: "Which one of you bitches is my mother?" And that is pretty much what the story is about.The book follows the lives of Lili and her possible mothers, Judy, Pagan, Maxine and Kate, starting in the 1940s in a swiss boarding school right up to the 80s where they all finally meet Lili again. I can't really begin to explain all the things that happen in the book but it includes: lots of sex, a story about goldfish as a sex aid, war, divorce, rape, and possible accidental incest. That looks bad written out in a list... In short, Lace is the type of book you hope to come across as a teenage girl and the perfect holiday book. 

Next week: something very worthy and high brow (or not...)