Just a quick, punchy update for this late Friday afternoon, I think, especially since it has been an extroadinarily busy (and, at times, stressful) week with very little time for reading.
Firstly, if you don't already subscribe to or buy the London Review of Books, you should go here and read Rosemary Hill's erudite and insightful piece on Alison Light's new book Mrs Woolf and the Servants. I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to getting my hands on a copy and sitting down to it with a cup of tea on a long lazy day. The book, which is one of half a dozen tomes published on Woolf in the last year or so, promises to be a cut above the usual foray into the minutiae of her life and seems to actually engage with her fiction. (NB: The Book Despository has it at a very good price. Sold!)
- That issue of the LRB also has a great article on Elizabeth Gaskell but unfortunately it isn't available online. Apparently there is a new Chatto and Windus edition of her complete works (a snip at £900!) and Rosemarie Bodenheimer uses that as a springboard to discuss what makes Gaskell different from other great Victorian authors. It makes me doubly eager to read more of her work - North and South is one of my favourite re-reads - perhaps Mary Barton or Ruth (the latter sounds particularly intriguing, about a young, unmarried mother who is taken in by a kindly clergyman and his wife.) But perhaps her biography of Charlotte Bronte would be more appropriate? Esther and I are going on a trip to Haworth later this month, and I've been contemplating reading a Bronte novel in preparation. Perhaps a contemporary biography would be even better?
- What of the Bookerthon? I'm plodding along slowly but surely. As of this moment, with five books read or nearly read, I think Darkmans remains my favourite. It is so boisterous and funny, and yet so tender and dark; it has a spirit almost as irrepressible as the jester that possesses it. Consolation and Self-Help have both proved tolerable, with moments of pure poetry mixed in with more mundane stuff, while I have had my first proper failure with The Reluctant Fundamentalist. I mean to write a post about it soon, but in the meantime: I thought it highly and increasingly predictable, with only a flimsy cleverness about it. If it had been longer, I would almost certainly have ditched it. Not for me at all.
- And woo! I finally turned the last page of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, a novel about which I now have decidedly mixed feelings. Originally it was meant to be for this month's Lesbian Reading Group but, unfortunately, our library has had to temporarily cut its hours because of low staff levels and we weren't able to meet for discussion. Hopefully they will be back to normal by next month (fingers crossed!) Still, I'm very glad that I've read it - it certainly has a seminal flavour to it and, of course, the history of the book itself is very interesting. More on it soon.
Finally, I came home early from work today (for one reason and another) and found myself not in the mood for any of my current reads. Instead I picked up Rachel North's Out of the Tunnel, a woman I first heard of through the Fidra blog, which links to her extroadinary journal. A victim of vicious rape in 2002 and then of the London bombings on 7/7, Rachel has published an account of her experiences and recovery with the Friday Project. I bought it almost as soon as it came out earlier this summer but have been shying away from reading it for fear that it would be too distressing. Which it certainly is - I don't think I could ever have survived what Rachel has been through - but it is also moving, uplifting and very well written. No doubt a more effusive recommendation will follow in due course.
But for now,
~~Victoria~~