An Enchanting April

Swoon. I took my new Diana camera for a walk in the park on a beautiful April day, and felt arty smushing myself  in amongst the blossom and twisting around at peculiar angles. I'm sure that the pictures will all be disastrous, but I had so much fun playing at being a photographer and waiting in anticipation for the film to be developed is a bit of added excitement. Using real life film makes you feel very professional, even if, like me, you have no clue what you're doing. I found myself doing a lot of muttering about 'the light' much to Paul's entertainment. I also liked that I took one roll of film with me, which meant 12 pictures. Yes, 12 pictures. I usually run off twice that amount trying to get one picture of me with my eyes open. Having to think carefully about what I chose to spend my 12 precious button presses on was like being a child with a limited amount of pocket money in Toys R Us (i.e not easy, and not the sort of decision one makes lightly.) We also took the digital camera so Paul could take pictures of the first Diana experience. Gosh, we're so meta.

Speaking of swoon-worthy things,  a perfect, sunny April day seemed like the ideal time to delve into Elizabeth Von-Arnim's The Enchanted April. What a beautiful, beautiful book this is.It has a sort of spell-binding quality that is difficult to pin down, and which leaves you upon closing the book with that feeling of waking up from a particularly lovely dream. The book tells the story of four very different women who share a desire to escape their every day existences. These four strangers rent an idyllic Italian castle for the month of April and the novel becomes a gentle and lyrical love letter to their surroundings. Beneath all its quiet beauty however, this book has a sense of heartfelt rebellion, of an almost desperate spiritual need that can only be met in one's complete abandonment to the natural world. Von Arnim's descriptions of the landscape are pure poetry, and the drug-like effect it has on the inhabitants of this novel really seems to creep out of the pages and pull you into that world of simple pleasure.It left me feeling like I wanted to walk barefoot in the grass, and curl my toes into the soil. Really, truly lovely stuff.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

Do you remember when you were a child and the summer hols rolled around  you’d escape to the country, enjoy lashings of ginger beer and maybe solve the odd mystery while having a jolly good time? I do. Sort of. I used to eat up Famous Five books, I begged my Dad to let me turn our garden shed into a clubhouse à la the Secret Seven (to no avail), I wanted to get a dog and call him Timmy, and to have a kindly relative who lived on some distant farm and who had, seemingly, not a care in the world about my comings/goings/mixing with smugglers.

Imagine my delight when I stumbled across ‘The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie’, a book which captured all the things I loved about these children’s books and moulded them into a fantastic adventure for adults. Meet 11-year-old Flavia de Luce- the most charming protagonist I’ve encountered in quite some time. She’s a precocious eccentric who mixes a love of mystery and lateral thinking with the chemistry lab of a mad scientist.

Described on the jacket as  a cross between Dodie Smith’s I Capture The Castle and the Addams Family I had high hopes of this novel and it certainly didn’t disappoint. It is easy to see the nod to Dodie Smith in the crumbling de Luce family pile, the emotionally absent father, and the deceased mother. There’s something about Flavia’s amusingly hands-on, no-nonsense attitude that will strike a chord with Cassandra fans as well. As for the Addams Family, the reference takes its cue from Flavia’s extraordinary laboratory where she indulges her true passion in life – the study of poisons. Some of my favourite moments in the book centered around Flavia’s disputes with her two older sisters (they tie her up and stuff her in a cupboard, she poisons their lipstick) Very funny.

All of this is just the background to a tightly wound murder mystery. Following her discovery of a dead man in the family cucumber patch it quickly falls to Flavia to clear her father’s name of the murder. A cast of eccentric villagers will help and hinder her in this quest, as she pedals around the 1950′s English countryside on her trusty bicycle, Gladys. All in all the overall tone of the book is one that lovingly (and in a way that is slightly tongue in cheek) returned me to those books I loved so much as a child. Definitely great armchair reading, I can’t recommend this book enough.

beginnings

"Just the jam and the poetry?" he said into my ear. I didn't know who he was. He approached me in the stacks as I browsed. He spoke BBC english and wore a slightly preening twisted smile. In my string bag, over my shoulder, I had a jar of cherry jam and a paperback John Donne. 

- Brother of the More Famous Jack, Barbara Trapido
There are several reasons that I fell in love with Barbara Trapido's Brother of the More Famous Jack, but perhaps the first one was this quote, found somewhere near the front of the book, and from which this blog takes its name. Trapido's writing is so sparing, so elegant, that this is just one of dozens of throw away statements that made me pause to enjoy the quiet skill that belies her simple descriptions. I have taken a couple of creative writing classes and can't tell you how many times I have heard that old standby: 'show, don't tell.' (which should tell you (or show you) a thing or two about the state of my own creative writing.) To anyone else struggling with this I would recommend reading Trapido if you want a masterclass in this philosophy. Anyway, the reason that this particular quote resonated with me, and the reason that I carried it around with me for weeks after reading it, and the reason that I kept flipping the book open to the page it was on, and the reason it inspired me to start this blog is because I WANT TO BE THAT GIRL. I want to be the girl who walks around with nothing but a jar of jam and a book of poetry. I love what that says about Katherine, the character, and I want a piece of it for myself. 
I love to read, and I'm fascinated by reading- the what, why, and how of it all. In October I'll be starting my PhD which centers, in large part, on these questions. I'm excited about it. I wanted to create a blog as a way to keep track of my own reading, and my immediate responses to different books. I also want my reading to be an even bigger part of my life. Something I love about my degree is that it gives me the chance to extend the pleasure of reading a book by thinking more deeply about it, and writing about it, by really throwing my whole self into a text. I'm no book snob, I read for pleasure, and often that means reading things that are light, funny, and- yes- a bit trashy. It also means that I read a lot of more 'literary' books, which I appreciate passionately as pieces of art. I have a soft spot for children's literature, and the way it makes me feel. I will try and write about them all here.