Twelve in May

I read twelve books in May.

Twelve.

Accomplishable partly because I was on holiday in London for a week, travelling there and back by four-and-a-half-hour train journeys; and partly because, ahem, I was not doing much writing. But I was having a long-overdue tidy-up of writing-related bumph, about ten years’ worth of notes from classes and workshops, scribbled bits of stories etc. Etc. Also had big reorganisation of bookshelves – nothing I like doing better, apart from reading what’s on them.

Between You and me: Confessions of a Comma Queen by Mary Norris

I wrote about the last chapter of this book in a previous post A Penchant for Pencils. Mary Norris has been a proof reader at the New Yorker since 1993. As the blurb says: ‘Now she brings her vast experience, good cheer and finely sharpened pencils [yay!] to help the rest of us in a boisterous language book as full of life as it is of practical advice.’ See also:

http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/mary-norris

The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton

I finally got round to reading one of the highest selling and critically acclaimed books of recent years – and found it deserving of all the hype. Love the writing and the story, and the picture it paints of 17th-century Holland.

Rescue in Ravensdale by Esme Cartmell

This is a book I loved when I was about ten and I rediscovered it during the aforementioned bookshelves reorganisation.

I must have reread it several times because I found I could remember great chunks of it. It’s about a family – parents, four daughters and their eighteen-year-old male cousin (from whose point of view the story is told) – on holiday in Yorkshire in August 1939, who get involved with the search for an apparent German spy.

It stood the test of time for me, and I think this was why. It is unusual in a children’s book for the parents to be so much involved – generally they are got out of the way as quickly as possible. Here, with their writer/reviewer father and artist mother, the girls (I remember being intrigued by their names – Thelma, Kyra and twins Daphne and Dione) and their cousin have wonderfully wordy, punny, literary conversations that I enjoyed this time round too.

Neither the book jacket nor Google can tell me anything about Esme Cartmell and whether she/?he wrote anything else.

Hysteria 3 – read on Kindle. An anthology of winners from the Hysteria Writing Competition, which include my fellow Edinburgh Writers’ Club member Olga Wojtas, and her typically amusing, and wonderfully named, story Green Tea and Chocolate Fudge Cake.

The Highland Lass by Rosemary Gemmell

Read on Kindle. A dual narrative, cleverly interspersing contemporary Eilidh’s return to the Scottish town she left as a child, and the story of Robert Burns and his doomed romance with the lass known as Highland Mary. With its great sense of place, the book is also a love letter to Burns’ home county of Ayrshire.

Sunshine Through the Rain by Gilly Stewart

Read on Kindle. Ellen’s transition from no-baggage career girl to hands-on guardian to her sister’s children is very believable, as is her slow-burning romance with neighbour Kit. I loved the farming background too.

The Pearl Locket by Kath McGurl

Read on Kindle. Enjoyed this even more than The Emerald Comb. Again, it’s a dual narrative, this time contemporary and WW2.

Some Tame Gazelle by Barbara Pym

Read umpteen times before but never stales. Have just joined the Barbara Pym Facebook page and thought my favourite title of hers was due for a reread.

The Trinity Six by Charles Cumming

Love a good spy story. Was there a sixth man – along with Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Cairncross and Blunt?

Kissing Mr Wrong by Sarah Duncan

‘Lu Edwards may write and illustrate books for children, but she's certain she doesn't want children of her own. She believes in travelling light, with not even a goldfish to tie her down, until Nick – a WWI expert with more baggage than Heathrow, right down to the kids, ex-wife and hamster – blows into her life.’ A good read.

What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty

Christian Aid sale purchase. The second LM book I’ve read, following The Husband’s Secret. Much enjoyed this one too – her characters are really … real. Alice hits her head and when she comes too she thinks it’s ten years earlier, but her whole life has changed.

Wedding Night by Sophie Kinsella

Christian Aid sale purchase. Enjoyably farcical situation. And a reminder, if it’s required, that trying to relive your youth with your first love is never a good plan.

Re-reading childhood books on the other hand is, mostly, a very good plan.

A Penchant for Pencils

One of the books I read in May (of which more in a separate post) was Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen by Mary Norris. She has spent more than thirty years in The New Yorker’s copy department. Her descriptions of some of the most common problems in spelling, punctuation, and usage – and how to fix them – are made in an amusingly helpful manner.

I fell out with her over her objections to putting a hyphen in ‘coworker’ but I completely forgave her when I read the chapter – yes, a whole chapter – on pencils and pencil sharpeners called Ballad of a Pencil Junkie.

I was soooo jealous to find out that in her early days at The New Yorker: ‘There was an office boy who came around in the morning with a tray of freshly sharpened wooden pencils.’

Obriously that doesn’t happen anymore … and I totally empathise with her current frustrations over having to use pencils which are lovely and pointy when new but whose lead breaks the first time they are sharpened. Is the pencil the problem, or the pencil sharpener?

After I read that bit I stopped and counted up the number of pencils I had that were in various stages of bluntness – there were EIGHTY-EIGHT.

Pencils are a cheap and useful souvenir –eg I have pencils from the Giant’s Causeway; Ellis Island; the 9/11 memorial; the Louisa M. Alcott House in Concord; Holland; the pencil museum in Cumbria; a Caledonian McBrayne ferry; the Imperial War Museum; Liverpool Cathedral; the National Library of Scotland; and (my favourites) three from the shop of the Rhode Island School of Art and Design which are pure graphite (when I dropped one of them it snapped clean in half).

A pencil is my writing implement of choice for shopping lists, other lists, lists of lists … And I love my laptop but if I get stuck when writing a story, or I want to write somewhere I don’t have the laptop with me, I reach for paper and pencil. The brain can make connections on paper that it doesn’t onscreen, plus it’s easier not to listen your inner editor and keep going, rather than polishing sentence by sentence.

I kept reading snippets out to my ever-patient husband:

 ‘guess what, there’s a pencil sharpener museum in Logan, Ohio’

‘someone called David Rees has written a book called How to Sharpen Pencils’

‘David Rees “specialises in the artisanal sharpening of No 2 pencils” and charges $15 a time’!

When I came to Mary Norris’s advice on what constitutes a decent pencil sharpener (an all-metal industrial strength X-acto, Boston Ranger 55) he must have detected a longing tone in my voice because he asked me if I’d like one as a birthday present.

Who needs chocolates or roses? Lovely though they both are at the time, ultimately, they: make you spotty/wither.

A pencil sharpener, securely attached to the desk, is for life, not just for the end of May.

Pardon? Well, thank you very much for your advice but I have got a life actually. 

It happens to be one that happily embraces punctuation problems and – oh joy! – it now includes 

eighty-eight 

perfectly pointed

pencils.

Had we but world enough, and time …

Around eighty years ago the economist John Maynard Keynes, anticipating further technological innovations on top of those which astonished the 19th century, predicted that in a couple of generations people would only have to work a fifteen-hour week.

As we know this hasn’t come to pass and various reasons are put forward for why he got it wrong, for example: JMK did not anticipate how much stuff we would all ‘need’, including many more technological innovations he could never have dreamt of; telling everyone how busy you are has become a matter of one-upmanship; and we spend a lot of time thinking about how much we have to do.

I read all this in an article called ‘No Time’ in a copy of The New Yorker bought recently in the airport before my flight home from the USA.

Elsewhere (sorry, can’t remember where) I read that every second we make decisions about how to spend our time. So if we say ‘I haven’t got time to … write a novel, get some exercise … ’ or whatever it happens to be, that isn’t true. We have the time but choose to spend it in other ways.

I proved that point when I chose not to catch up with current thinking/look intellectual by reading my copy of The New Yorker on the plane as I’d intended; instead, with a plastic glass of red to hand, I slumped in front of Blue Jasmine.

Writers are notorious for procrastinating and in the 21st century they can spend hours being distracted by emails, social media and the highways and byways of the internet.

We are told in a new book, John Buchan and The Thirty-Nine Steps: An Exploration, that John Buchan planned his time to the nth degree. One evening he told his family he would finish writing his biography of Montrose at 11am the following day and he did, just as the clock was striking. He began his next at 11.15.

Now maybe JB didn’t have to worry about what to make for dinner, nor did he have to update his Facebook page or worry about his Amazon ratings, and he didn’t have the option of slumping in front of a movie. But as well as being the author of around 35 novels and 50 non-fiction titles, including single-handedly completing the 24 volumes of Nelson’s History of the War, he was in the course of his 65 years a lawyer, diplomat, WW1 propagandist, publisher, MP and Governor General of Canada.

No one could accuse him of procrastinating.

My favourite multi-tasker though is Queen Margaret of Scotland (1045-93) as described by author Eileen Dunlop:

‘She managed to fit in the most extraordinary amount of activity – the management of two households, the choice of clothes and furnishings; the supervision of building work; the opus anglicanum [needlework]; charitable works; hours on horseback; visits to shrines and hermitages; discussing theology; spending time with the king and overseeing the upbringing of her growing family, while almost constantly pregnant.’

Writing is not mentioned but I'm quite sure if she'd been asked to dash off a serial or two for a medieval woman's magazine she'd have fitted that in as well.

And that, if you take out the word medieval, is what I should be doing right now.