PERSONAL: Paris and some of the books I read there
I have just returned from my first ever trip to Paris, where I was staying at a hotel that did not have Eurosport, sadly, so I couldn't watch the men’s US Open final. I really, really wish I’d been able to see it!
While there, I stumbled upon the famous Shakespeare & Co. That is to say, I meant to go there, but did so accidentally. It’s a cramped shop - too little space between the floor-to-ceiling shelves and too many of us tourists and bibliophiles shuffling through it. I felt obliged to buy something (in English, my French is about good enough to order food I want to eat these days). I popped into several bookshops - some catering for English readers, but quite a few definitely not - just because it's a compulsion of mine.
I visited a lot of touristy places and found quieter formal jardins to recover and in which I could read incongruous books such as the following
The Headland Mystery: Arthur Groom. The Children's Press.
On a holiday with their godmother at her seaside cottage, Jean and Pat get caught up in shady goings on at the nearby Headland House, where a criminal gang is trying to get their hands on a piece of paper that will nab one million dollars or pounds or was it three million...
I have never read (or met) girls like Groom wrote them - calling each other ‘darling’ or ‘pet’ nearly every other utterance. I felt as if he was writing girls as he thought they should be rather than based on life (and I didn't like the unsavoury undertone I was picking up on. Furthermore, I don’t generally have issues with epithets, but his use of them was beyond clunky and confusing. Given also his tendency to use the girls’ full names throughout the book, I got more and more irritated.
Madensky Square: Eva Ibbotson. Arrow, 1998.
I don't think this will get republished as its heroine-narrator is old enough to have a daughter the age of a young adult heroine. However, it has all Ibbotson’s delightful charm and wit (even if I ended up feeling more querulous about the view of men and women and their roles offered up in this book than I normally do with Ibbotson, and perhaps that’s why I didn’t cry while reading it). Susanna, a dressmaker in pre WW1 Vienna, owns her own shop and lives above it and is deeply involved in the life of the titular square. There are births, deaths and marriages, but there's also time to be concerned with whether Susanna’s valiant pear tree will bear fruit - and glimpses of Ibbotson's other books are all around. Very little was unexpected - the reader was often a few steps ahead of Susanna, but not always - and for me this was part of its charm.
The Goats: Brock Cole. Cornerstone Books, 1989.
I don’t think I’d have enjoyed this book as much if I’d read it when I was the ‘right’ age for it. It’s a deceptively simple tale of a prepubescent boy and girl, bullied at a summer camp, who decide to make their own way out in the big wide world, as adults misunderstand them and push them away. Their growing 'us against the world’ relationship is sensitively handled and Cole does a good job done in conveying the time and place. I also liked that we had a different and adult POV, as the girl's mother comes into the story.
This entry was originally posted at http://www.dreamwidth.org/12345.html. Please comment wherever you prefer to.
While there, I stumbled upon the famous Shakespeare & Co. That is to say, I meant to go there, but did so accidentally. It’s a cramped shop - too little space between the floor-to-ceiling shelves and too many of us tourists and bibliophiles shuffling through it. I felt obliged to buy something (in English, my French is about good enough to order food I want to eat these days). I popped into several bookshops - some catering for English readers, but quite a few definitely not - just because it's a compulsion of mine.
I visited a lot of touristy places and found quieter formal jardins to recover and in which I could read incongruous books such as the following
The Headland Mystery: Arthur Groom. The Children's Press.
On a holiday with their godmother at her seaside cottage, Jean and Pat get caught up in shady goings on at the nearby Headland House, where a criminal gang is trying to get their hands on a piece of paper that will nab one million dollars or pounds or was it three million...
I have never read (or met) girls like Groom wrote them - calling each other ‘darling’ or ‘pet’ nearly every other utterance. I felt as if he was writing girls as he thought they should be rather than based on life (and I didn't like the unsavoury undertone I was picking up on. Furthermore, I don’t generally have issues with epithets, but his use of them was beyond clunky and confusing. Given also his tendency to use the girls’ full names throughout the book, I got more and more irritated.
Madensky Square: Eva Ibbotson. Arrow, 1998.
I don't think this will get republished as its heroine-narrator is old enough to have a daughter the age of a young adult heroine. However, it has all Ibbotson’s delightful charm and wit (even if I ended up feeling more querulous about the view of men and women and their roles offered up in this book than I normally do with Ibbotson, and perhaps that’s why I didn’t cry while reading it). Susanna, a dressmaker in pre WW1 Vienna, owns her own shop and lives above it and is deeply involved in the life of the titular square. There are births, deaths and marriages, but there's also time to be concerned with whether Susanna’s valiant pear tree will bear fruit - and glimpses of Ibbotson's other books are all around. Very little was unexpected - the reader was often a few steps ahead of Susanna, but not always - and for me this was part of its charm.
The Goats: Brock Cole. Cornerstone Books, 1989.
I don’t think I’d have enjoyed this book as much if I’d read it when I was the ‘right’ age for it. It’s a deceptively simple tale of a prepubescent boy and girl, bullied at a summer camp, who decide to make their own way out in the big wide world, as adults misunderstand them and push them away. Their growing 'us against the world’ relationship is sensitively handled and Cole does a good job done in conveying the time and place. I also liked that we had a different and adult POV, as the girl's mother comes into the story.
This entry was originally posted at http://www.dreamwidth.org/12345.html. Please comment wherever you prefer to.