Happy Christmas Eve Eve

I have long felt a special affinity for 23 December. In my childhood we called it Christmas Eve Eve, which delighted me. For several years (or maybe only three, but enough for it to feel like a tradition) this was the day when we would go to the woods in search of holly, mistletoe and other foliage to decorate our house with (along with all the usual paper and foil stuff).

I’m not sure why this was a big deal to me. I mean, I loved romping through the woods, but we lived in the Forest of Dean so that wasn’t exactly unusual. It’s been a long time now, but my memory of those Christmas Eve Eve forages is overwhelmingly of being with my Dad, so perhaps that’s what it was – he worked long hours so time with him was (and still is) precious.

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Recent reads in brief

While I am slowly making my way through more than 600 pages of Sophie’s Choice, I am actually a little behind on book reviews, so here are some brief thoughts on recent reads.

Letters to a Young Poet
by Rainer Maria Rilke
translated from German by Stephen Mitchell

This small volume was written 1903–1908 but its advice still feels relevant and wise, which is presumably why it quickly became a classic.

Franz Xaver Kappus was put in touch with Rilke by the chaplain at his military academy, who had known Rilke when he too was a student at the school 15 years earlier. Kappus aspired to write and Rilke was a revered (rightly so) poet. These 10 letters constitute Rilke’s advice on how to look at life as well as how to write and some non-advice observations from Rilke such as his thoughts on Rome (he was not a fan) and other places he travelled to (all the letters seem to be written from a different location, and often include reference to months spent somewhere else in-between).

What most caught my attention was Rilke’s thoughts on gender equality. He was a feminist if ever I read one. He truly believed that the two sexes were created equal and that society still unfairly favoured men as a relic from a bygone age when man’s superiority of strength and size was relevant to everyday life. Rilke not only believes that the time will come when women will be considered equal in all respects to man, he also thinks that in time women will take their turn as the gender running the show.

Rilke is sweet, earnest, but also troubled. He’s also extremely eloquent. Because he’s Rilke.

“Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would have us believe, most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.”

Briefe an einen jungen Dichter published 1929 by Insel Verlag.

This translation first published 1984 by Random House.

Source: Shakespeare & Sons, Berlin.

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The shadows resumed their jerky dance

The Silence of the Sea
by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir
translated from Icelandic by Victoria Cribb

I picked up this book because Sigurðardóttir was recommended by Gav Reads and Savidge Reads, whose taste I often share. I managed somehow to start this crime series with the sixth book about lawyer Thóra, but I don’t think that spoiled the story and she seems pretty badass.

In this episode of Icelandic noir, a luxury yacht crashes into Reykjavik harbour wall with no-one on board, not one of the seven people known to have boarded in Lisbon. The parents of one of the missing people employ Thóra to prove that their son Ægir is dead – they really need to claim his life insurance money to be able to afford to raise their (now presumably orphaned) granddaughter.

A second timeline follows Ægir from the day he, his wife and their older two children leave Lisbon on the yacht. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience luxury beyond their means – the yacht is being repossessed by the bank Ægir works for. But from the surly skeleton crew to hideous seasickness, it’s a nightmare from the start. One that only gets worse.

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Sunday Salon: 10 years in Bristol

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The Sunday SalonThis past week I celebrated 10 years in my current job, which means that last month Tim and I completely missed celebrating 10 years of living in Bristol. 10 years! For Tim that’s the longest he’s spent living in one place (though not quite yet the longest in one house as we have moved around Bristol a little); I still have a ways to go on that front as I lived in the same house from age 0 to 20. But I’m happy enough in Bristol that I can well believe I’ll still be here in another 10 years.

I love Bristol. And not least because the music scene here is fantastic. This week I’d made a note that Amy Rigby was playing at a pub near our house, but then realised we wouldn’t be able to see her because we already had tickets to see Kate Tempest that night. Which I can’t complain about at all because the Kate Tempest gig was one of the best of my life. Absolutely incredible.

She performed her new album Let Them Eat Chaos in its entirety, which is the only way to do it as it’s a single story told in poetry, rap and song over the course of 50 minutes or so. It is smart, politically and socially motivated, beautiful, funny, angry and hopeful. As when we saw her perform this without musical backing at the Downs Concert, Kate put so much of herself into it that she was in tears at the end, and not just one or two stray tears either. I love Kate and truly think she is a force for good and positivity in this world that seems to be sorely lacking in those things far too often.

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What a ripping thing life was

uneasy-moneyUneasy Money
by P G Wodehouse

I needed to read a book published in 1916 for my Books on the Nightstand Book Bingo and it was surprisingly tough to find anything that appealed. But then this jumped out at me. It’s not a Jeeves and Wooster title but the style of writing is much the same. This leans more towards romantic comedy than skewering of the upper class, but there’s plenty of that too.

It’s the story of Lord Dawlish, or Bill, a lovable chap whose title came without a fortune but is happy working as secretary to a London club in exchange for free lodging and £400 a year, which is plenty enough to play all the golf he likes and give away a few shillings to every fellow with a sob story. Happy enough, that is, except for the fact that his fiancée, the beautiful but only moderately successful actress Claire, is determined that Bill must have more money before she will marry him.

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My Lorelai moment

talking-as-fast-as-i-canThis blog post is part of a blog tour organised by Virago for the release of Lauren Graham’s new book Talking As Fast As I Can: From Gilmore Girls to Gilmore Girls and Everything In Between. Obviously I am very excited about this book, and the new Netflix series Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, and the excuse to talk about Gilmore Girls.

Gilmore Girls used to be a guilty pleasure for me, until I realised how very much love there is for it, allowing me to stop hiding my love and full-on geek over it! It’s basically a really high quality soap opera. I’ve always related to both the main characters, Rory and Lorelai. Rory is a bookish nerd, as I was as a teen, but Lorelai is cool, capable and almost always cheerful, as I aspire to be now. I can never hope to be as beautiful as Lauren Graham or Alexis Bledel, but I can definitely learn a lot from how Lorelai is such a great friend and all-around person.

Which brings me to my favourite Lorelai moment. I suppose this includes some minor spoilers if you’ve not watched any Gilmore Girls, but most of these details aren’t intrinsic to the longer plotlines through the series.

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New Gilmore Girls reading list

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gilmore-girls-year-in-the-life

When the new Netflix series Gilmore Girls: a Year in the Life was announced I was so excited I marked the date in my diary. But it turned out that last weekend was the only date I would be able to see my best friend before the end of the year, which is basically the only thing that could possibly have delayed me shotgunning those new episodes the second they became available. (The three-day delay was totally worth it. We had a fab weekend together at the seaside.)

Once I did get back home to our own sofa and TV, it didn’t take me long to watch the new mini series. And because it’s what I do every time I watch Gilmore Girls, I kept note of every book, author and play mentioned. I don’t think these should count towards the original Gilmore Girls Reading Challenge, so I haven’t followed my usual rule of limiting the list to only Rory and Lorelai’s reads. And I know I’m not the first to do this. But I figure it’s still interesting, and probably not just to me, so here goes.

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November reading round-up

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(Corrado Ricci 1858-1934)
(Corrado Ricci 1858-1934)

Well we had three weeks of autumn before winter arrived. I quite like winter – Christmas and my birthday! – but I’ve realised in the last few years that at the start of both summer and winter, my lupus flares. In summer it’s the UV, that’s easy to figure out. In winter, well I guess cold isn’t good for arthritis, which is closely related to lupus, plus I have low vitamin D all year round anyway.

Which is a long-winded way of saying I’m not feeling all that healthy but I know it will pass soon. In the meantime I have been watching Gilmore Girls: a Year in the Life, which is both perfect and really not perfect at the same time. I’ve kept a log of books, authors and films mentioned, of course, which I’ll blog about soon.

I have one month left to complete my Books on the Nightstand Book Bingo card, and it’ll be tight but I think I can do it. If you want to help me pick my book for the “500 pages or longer” category, you can vote in my Twitter poll!

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It is poverty only which makes celibacy contemptible

emmaEmma
by Jane Austen

In my late teens I went through a serious period drama phase, fuelled by TV miniseries based on classic books. A particular favourite was the 1996 ITV production of Emma starring Kate Beckinsale. I loved that show and watched it so many times I can still picture every scene now, a good 15+ years after I last saw it. Plus, of course I’ve seen the Gwyneth Paltrow film (meh), the 2009 BBC series starring Romola Garai (okay) and the greatest (or at least the most fun) Austen adaptation of them all, Clueless.

So you’d think I would have read Emma long ago. However, to date my experience of Jane Austen has not gone so well. I quite liked Northanger Abbey but I gave up multiple times on both Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, finding the stuffiness outweighed the wit. I can’t say finally reading Emma has won me over; largely I think I only got through it because I already knew it so well.

Emma Woodhouse is young, rich, devoted to her family and determined to be cheerful. Her elderly father doesn’t like to go out and she doesn’t like to leave him home alone, so ever since her governess Miss Taylor left to marry Mr Weston she has been pretty bored. She makes friends with Harriet Smith, a girl of unknown parentage who was raised by the local schoolmistress. Harriet is dull but straightforward and quick to adore Emma. Emma’s friend and adviser Mr Knightley (her sister’s husband’s brother, who lives nearby) thinks she would do better to befriend Jane Fairfax, who is intelligent and accomplished. But Emma has always found Miss Fairfax cold and distant, not to mention being a little jealous of her musical skill.

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Great swaths of her life were white space to her husband

fates-and-furiesFates and Furies
by Lauren Groff

This is some ways the very epitome of “literary fiction” and yet it defied my expectations many times. I had expected to like it, after thoroughly enjoying Groff’s previous novel The Monsters of Templeton. This is quite different, but once again, really good.

It’s the story of a marriage, that of Lotto and Mathilde. What makes this book different is that the entire marriage is told from Lotto’s perspective, and then from Mathilde’s. The narrative voice, revealed occasionally in square-bracketed asides, is first the Fates (for Lotto) and then the Furies (for Mathilde). As you might guess from that, Lotto’s story is all about his fate: who he is meant to become, what is meant to achieve. Mathilde’s story is largely about her fury, how it drives her.

“The Buddha laughed in silence from the mantelpiece. Around him, a lushness of poinsettias. Below, a fire Lotto had dared to make out of sticks collected from the park. Later, there would be a chimney fire, a sound of wind like a rushing freight train, and the trucks arriving in the night.”

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