In Holiday Mode (or Mood)

Well, my addiction to book buying gets no better and in fact is probably getting somewhat worse. You see, I have discovered that it is possible to source second-hand paperbacks from Amazon's subsidiary sellers at ridiculously cheap prices. Starting at 1p (yes, that's £0.01!) plus the statutory £2.75 p&p, that makes a grand total of £2.76 for a paperback. The quality is usually higher than the second-hand ones you get from charity shops (in fact, some are pristine) and c/s prices (depending on where you shop) are quite often higher. Plus serendipity plays a great part in charity shop finds - you get what's there: buying online you can source what you want. I still mine charity shops looking for books, so in fact they don't miss out, because I still buy as many books as ever from them. But the biggest buzz is when the anticipated package comes through the letter-box: I LOVE it!
The Husband was finding the Paul Torday book he was reading a bit of a downer.....poor old Wilberforce obviously has his downhill path mapped out for him, and although he found it a gripping and well-written book, it didn't help the Husband to de-stress at the end of the day, so I picked him up acopy of Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (which he hasn't actually started yet...) blurbed as 'the happiest book I have ever read' on the back cover. Should do the trick!
Having finished Dan Simmons Drood (excellent if weird), I am re-reading his Ilium and have purchased Children of the Night online (for the grand total of £2.76). That's a potential holiday book, but when I went out to lunch with my eldest daughter, we swung by Waterstones and I got a bit carried away at the 'three-for-two' counter (Zafon's Shadow of the Wind, Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and Alexander McCall Smith's Corduroy Mansions). I actually went in for a book of Carol Ann Duffy's poetry - which I found, and is a thing of beauty in itself - so I spent rather more than I intended too. Hey ho! But the McCall Smith will be definitely accompanying me to Greece in the near future, The Bloody Chamber is just a masterpiece and I've been intending to read The Shadow of the Wind for some time (but had failed to find it in a charity shop).

When I had my last supervisory meeting, we got to talking about how much we enjoyed the writings of Evelyn Waugh, particularly his shorter works, and it occurred to me that a collection of his stuff would be an excellent holiday book. As I read in the Guardian recently, a collection of short stories is a sure-fire winner on holiday when the right book is crucial to one's enjoyment (see earlier posts): if one story fails to amuse, another most likely will. Certain that I'd find a copy - if not in a charity shop - then in a second-hand book shop (of which we have an abundance in York) I set off with Daughter #2 and the Bouncing Babba to dig one out. Sadly, it was an unsuccessful hunt, and not even Waterstones had a copy. I did, however, find another volume of short stories the Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories, (in the Arthritis and Rheumatism Council shop) which contains a wide spread of 20th century authors from Graham Green to Julian Barnes to Beryl Bainbridge. I'm not sure they're all that modern, but the publication date is 1988 (22 years old!). Looks like ideal holiday fodder, but even that did not stop me buying a second-hand copy of The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh online when i got home. And The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold to boot. Ooopsy!

Force of Habit

I've been reading Simone de Beauvoir's Force of Circumstance and, to tell the truth, I'm finding this volume of her autobiography slightly dull. Starting at the end of the war, it concentrates on the period of her literary heyday, her strange relationship with Sartre and her many political and social connections. And I think this last is the main problem: I've never heard of most of them, but she takes it as given that these faceless names mean something to the reader. There's also a lack of personal reflection (at least as far as I've read) that made the previous two volumes interesting. I don't care who she knew - I want to know what she thought. As it is, it reads a bit like a meeting schedule. It may improve, but it had better do so pretty damn soon!

I've also been trying to bone up on the basics of linguistics, and to that end purchased a Hodder 'Teach Yourself' linguistics book. It is utterly fascinating -no, it's better than that. If I was going to do another degree, this is the subject that I'd study. The book is by Jean Aitchison, although I didn't realise this until just now, when I looked for the author's name (not very prominent). This is the linguist recommended to me by my doctoral supervisor as being clear and accessible - and I have to agree. It's rivetting stuff.

Before long I'm going to have to sort out a 'holiday book' again. As I'm anticipating doing a lot of wine-soaked lazing about in the sun, I want something not too heavy, amusing but well written with enough pages to keep me going throughout the whole week. If I get the selection wrong, I stamp my tiny foot, pout and sulk, so I had better start looking soon! I must also get over the temptation to take anything scholarly with me: I'm pretty good at pretending to read the heavy stuff, i.e. moving my eyes over the page at a convincing rate, but actually thinking about something entirely different (and usually banale). Usually food.

Holiday Reading

I am very, very pernickety about what I read on holidays. The book has got to feel j-u-s-t right or I really do get quite grumpy. I've made some real mistakes in the past: St Augustine's 'City of God' on a Greek beach holiday when daughter no.3 was three months old (what was I thinking of?); Nikos Kazantzakis' 'The Fratricides' which just filled me with gloom as I finished it off on the last day of a holiday filled with rain; 'The Thirteenth Apostle' which I threw across the apartment in disgust....and so it goes. I feel a bit like Des Esseints in Huysmans' 'Against Nature' neurotically trying to match aesthetic experiences. But, for me, holiday reading is part of the whole holiday experience. Thus I am wondering what to take with me to Venice. I am stricken with regret that I have already read Sally Vickers' 'Miss Garnett's Angel' as that would have been little short of perfect - well-written, but easily digested and with the correct sort of atmosphere and sense of place. As would 'The Seven Sisters' by Margaret Drabble. Or 'The End of Mr Y' by Scarlett Thomas - but I've read them already too, and I rarely do re-reads. I want something with a decent plot that will distract me if there's any turbulence on the flight, but not too complex. It has to be well-written.....nothing Dan Brown-ish, not pure thriller, but definitely with some intrigue. The local library hasn't turned up anything for me as yet, although the husband is happily getting on with Neil Gaiman's 'American Gods' (which I am eyeing enviously). I guess I'm just going to have to head for Borders and grumpily poke at the shelves. I am emphatically not like one of my former colleagues who took with him to Crete Denniston's 'Greek Particles' and a few volumes of Livy (in the original)!!!