Apologies to my dear blog.

Dear Blog,

I do apologise for not having time for you recently. After a fairly nomadic six months I promise I’ll have my home online before Christmas.

You will be pleased to know I thoroughly enjoyed Jo Nesbo’s The Snowman (having enjoyed the Millennium trilogy I was keen on trying more Scandinavian crime fiction) and have now leapt massively back in time with The Birth of Venus. A dear friend of mine bought it for me and so far it doesn’t disappoint. I am confident it will prove to be perfect fodder for a blog post.

In other news, the Christmas tree is up and I’m really starting to enjoy the most wonderful time of the year.

Adieu, for now, blog.

Love from the girl with blue eyes, green jeans and a Christmas tree up in November.

x

Review: 'Anything Goes' by Lucy Moore

While posting a separate review, Amazon just asked if I wanted to review Lucy Moore's 'Anything Goes'. I absolutely ADORE this book so I popped a few words down to try and convince Amazonians that they should buy this book, love it and buy it for friends and family. Just like I did.

'I am going to keep this very short indeed - Anything Goes is a fabulous book. Lucy Moore's style of writing is so easy to read, and each chapter addresses a different yet fascinating part of the roaring twenties, so the book remains fast-paced and exciting. Buy this book and read it. I urge you.'

Off you trot, go and buy this book. Or support your local library by borrowing it!

Review: 'The Passages of Herman Melville' by Jay Parini

Apologies to the lovely, lovely people at Bookhugger for this slightly tardy blog post! They were kind, as ever, to send me a book to read that I otherwise would never have picked up but am very pleased to have received. Thanks go to them!

The book in question? The Passages of Herman Melville by Jay Parini (Canongate, 2011).

First of all, hats off to the design team - the cover of this book is truly gorgeous and the spine alone is beautiful enough to warrant a blog post. (Regretfully I cannot find a picture of the spine, but do check it out at a bookshop.) Inside, as well, the little details add to the overall impression of beauty - the fonts and chapter openers, while not screaming from the rooftops, ooze class. I like.

I have not yet read any of Herman Melville's work, so I was not looking for a detailed biography or an analysis of the writer's life. Instead, as a newcomer to the 'topic', I was hoping for a novel and that is what I got. Parini's writing is very easy to engage with, and I particularly enjoyed the fact that we see 'HM' largely from his long-suffering wife Lizzie's perspective, as well as from HM's point of view. So we experience her domestic abuse but we also experience HM's besotted relationships with such different characters as Fawn Away and Toby.

Throughout the book, the juxtaposition of youthful voyage and discovery with the older, more sinister and dissatisfied HM serves to make the opposite sides of his life experiences resonate strongly. The tales of HM's encounters on a number of whaling ships of varying quality are well related, and I could almost sense the salty air, social groups and sexual frustration beaming from the pages. HM's experiences in port towns and paradise, including a stay at Calabooza Beretanee (probably the most idyllic prison known to literature), are exciting and Parini succeeds in making each scene come vividly to life.

In short: do pick it up, do 'ooh' and 'aah' over the design, do read it and do put it on your bookshelf for all to admire. That way, even if none of your friends read it (although they ought to), they can still bask in its external beauty.

Review: 'Where would I be without you?' by Guillaume Musso

Another pre-publication book courtesy of those lovely folks at bookhugger!

I have to admit that my heart sank a little when I opened the packet, and this over-sentimental looking book emerged, complete with soppy title. It sank a bit more in the opening section which was as gushy as the book's cover and title!

But then - crash bang wallop - art thievery, crime and a decent plot! What more could I want? Not a lot really. The characters and locations are thoroughly well portrayed and Musso succeeds in bringing these fundamental aspects of his book to life. Can I imagine this as a film? Yes sir. It's quick and easy to read, and keeps the interest. Bravo.

The reader doesn't have to be a crime-solving old lady from St. Mary Mead to figure out the connections between leading man Martin, lost love Gabrielle and van Gogh-pinching Archie, but Musso doesn't set this side of the plot up to be a big twist. Instead, he draws on the parallels and points of intersection between the characters, and the relationships and connections involved are fundamental to the whole shape and make-up of the story. There are twists in the tale, but like black coffee at the end of a long déjeuner avec les amis, Guillaume Musso saves these for later. To flag up one particularly strong part of 'Where would I be without you?', the airport scene at the end of the story helps bring the book to a thorough and satisfying close.

In short, this is a story of romantic and familial love, and life's strange parallels and coincidences. There is no shame in reading a book simply because it's entertaining, so to this end I recommend you sit down and get comfy with Martin, Gabrielle and co. Even better, do so with a сafetière and a plate of madeleines.

#savelibraries

Today book lovers and internet users all over the UK are doing their bit to show support for our libraries, which are so very at risk in this difficult economic pressure cooker.

In an open letter to Oxfordshire library users, the county librarian opened with the following:

'Oxfordshire County Council is asking local communities to come up with innovative ideas to run their local libraries as it proposes to cease funding 20 of the 43 facilities that currently operate in the county, with possible further changes in future years.'

I knew libraries were at risk, and that all public services are being squeezed at the moment, but stopping funds to 20 out of 43 libraries is just ridiculous.

Please jump on the bandwagon and use your local library. It's a good bandwagon to be on (definitely more so than Pokemon, yoyos, t-shirts with slogans and rooibos tea).

Fitzgerald, 70 years later

Last year saw the 70th anniversary of F. Scott Fitzgerald's death. To mark this, Penguin issued some absolutely gorgeous hardbacks. The covers are outstandingly beautiful with clever bookmarks secreted on the inside back cover flap. A colleague of mine in the production and design department informs me that the books would have had each dust jacket wrapped around its book manually - so all in all a massively indulgent end product.


My response when I first saw these? Gawp. Want. Add to Christmas list.

Fortunately my wonderful mother treated me with all six on Christmas Day and I proceeded to run my fingers over each cover before taking way too many photos of what is, essentially, a whole load of paper and ink. But what lovely paper and ink!

Everyone I've shown them to thinks they are gorgeous, and they've made a substantial number of publishing bods coo enthusiastically. In fact I think I've even dreamed in shiny, repeating patterns.

However, there may be a flipside to this beauty. There are many people that know far more than I do about the expiry of copyright after 70 years, and while I was busy hankering after these volumes there were people delighting in the fact that they could get all Fitzgerald's work electronically and for no exchange of payment. While this may be absolutely fine in terms of law and, frankly, these people's knowledge about such matters, it did annoy me a little bit. There may well be people who saw the following puzzle flowing out of Penguin HQ:

Problem: 70th anniversary = copyright free text = reduced profits. How to reverse?
Solution: expensive new editions + appeal to Fitzgerald fans + appeal to human magpies.
Result: some degree of balance.

However I say PAH! to the above and instead prefer the following outlook:

Big anniversary + Fitzgerald is great + ooh, can we make it shiny? = happy customers.

Naive? Perhaps, but a happy owner of some damn fine books.