August books
Haywire, Craig Brown
Jane’s Parlour, O Douglas
Demon Copperhead , Barbara Kingsolver
Tea is so Intoxicating, Mary Essex, one of Ursula Bloom’s pseudonyms.
Serpents in Eden, ed. Martin Edwards
Priorsford, O Douglas
Secret Diary of Adrian Mole
Sally on the Rocks, Winifred Boggs
Diary of a Nobody
Thunderclap, Laura Cumming.
Penny Plain, O Douglas
I challenge anyone not to have laughed out loud by the fourth page of Haywire, a collection of Craig Brown’s writings from various publications. It’s not all hilarious; there are serious (yet amusing) book reviews. Occasionally I found, as with his Diary in Private Eye, that the victim has been captured so perfectly that the article is as boring to read as the original; this happened with his piece ‘by’ Vivienne Westwood. But so much is brilliant. He totally nails Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and their inconsistencies and captures Dawkins’ irritability with anyone who has the nerve to disagree with him. I enjoyed Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Elizabeth I: ‘Wh-what? You’re telling me your father beheaded your mother?’ He can discuss both high culture and pop and always have something interesting to say.
Laura Cumming, a professional art critic, has written a rather beautiful book which won’t please everyone because it’s reflective and therefore slow; it took me ages to read. It’s part memoir of herself and her beloved father, the Scottish artist James Cumming, part history of Dutch seventeenth century art, part portrait of the Netherlands, part detective work in pursuit of Carel Fabritius, painter of The Goldfinch. (Spoiler: very little is known about him and few pictures remain.) Much of the book is about how we look at pictures and is very enlightening for the non-specialist. I’ve visited the Netherlands several times and, after reading this book, find that all my mental snapshots have turned into paintings. A thought-provoking book which I liked very much. The ‘Thunderclap’ of the title took place on 12th October 1654 in Delft. A gunpowder store exploded, flattening much of the town and killing many people, including Fabritius.
I’ve been very disappointed by the two books I’ve read so far in the British Library Women Writers series. Tea is so Intoxicating is not well written and had a Blyton-esque number of exclamation marks. I can’t even remember what it was about. Sally on the Rocks, has been greatly cried up but oh dear. Sally, thirty-one, returns to her clergyman guardian’s village from Paris in 1915 after making a mess of her life. She is determined on: what? To get a job and do something useful during the war? No. To marry someone, anyone, rich enough to provide her with a comfortable life. The local bank manager fits the bill nicely but then she meets a handsome but war-damaged man and soon both men are in love with her. My bad luck but I didn’t like Sally and couldn’t have cared less which of them she chose.
I’ve so often said that the trouble with the BLCC books is that the covers are better than the stories but Serpents in Eden was rather good. All the murders are set in the countryside. Several are by well-known authors but not about their most famous characters: Conan Doyle but not Sherlock Holmes, G K Chesterton but not Father Brown.
The other books I read last month were all re-reads and all come into the category of comfort reading, which I was sorely in need of. I never tire of either Charles Pooter or Adrian Mole.