Tag: 100 untimed books

Quite often, a book catches my eye and I know the name because it’s been mentioned in another book. Here’s a case in point. Edmund de Waal is Elisabeth de Waal’s son; he talks about The Exiles Return in The Hare with Amber Eyes:

In December 1945 Elisabeth decides that she has to return to Vienna to find out who and what remains. And to rescue the picture of her mother and bring her home.

Elisabeth wrote a novel about her journey. It is unpublished. And unpublishable, I think, as I appraise it in typescript, 261 pages with painstaking tippexed corrections. The rawness of its emotion makes for uncomfortable reading.

It did in fact get published: Persephone, who specialise in obscure and out of print titles by women, brought it out in 2013. I bought it the other week, having read, and loved, The Hare with Amber Eyes earlier in the year.

100 untimed books

This book is rather interesting: it’s a collection of poems chosen by modern poets, who in turn write a poem inspired by or addressed to or arguing with the poem they chose.

I don’t know about zero tolerance, but some of the poets have very little patience with the poems they’re talking to.

100 untimed books

Did you know E. M. Forster wrote sci-fi? I didn’t!

100 untimed books

The Provincial Lady inhabits a very different world from the one that we live in, but her constant battle with domestic chaos is nevertheless familiar. And very funny.

100 untimed books

Is it possible to get earwormed with a fictional song? A song that exists only in a book? I think Ann Leckie may have managed this with:

My heart is a fish
Hiding in the water-grass
In the green, in the green

and particularly with:

It all goes around, the station goes around the moon, it all goes around…

… My mother said it all goes around, it all goes around, the ship goes around the station

100 untimed books

Not just sands: tides, gales, channels, fog. Geography and weather are as much players in this book as any of the characters.

100 untimed books

Some years ago, I read Planet Narnia: the seven heavens in the imagination of C. S. Lewis, which argues that the seven Chronicles of Narnia correspond to the seven classical heavenly bodies. It’s an attractive and plausible theory, and I think that’s as far as I’ll go.

Anyway, if we’re to believe the author, Michael Ward, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is associated with the Sun, and that’s good enough for me to include this book for this prompt. Even if it weren’t, there’s the Sun front and centre on Caspian’s tunic.

It’s my favourite of the Narnia books, and has one of the best opening lines of all time.

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

100 untimed books

I read a lot of school stories in my childhood and teens, but I only discovered Antonia Forest’s Marlows series a couple of years ago. They’re great: much more nuanced and cynical than the average example of the genre. Or genres, I should perhaps say, because Forest drags her characters through everything from spy thriller to roleplay game gone wrong.

The only problem is, they’re very difficult to find. Some Forests change hands for hundreds of pounds on Amazon. Happily, Girls Gone By Publishers are republishing a selection of titles at irregular intervals. I have End of Term on order, and it should be showing up any time now.

100 untimed books

I’m reading this very slowly indeed: one poem or extract every Sunday. I had to skip ahead some way to find this, from a paraphrase of Psalm 57 by Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke:

My heart prepar’d, prepared is my heart
To spread thy praise
With tuned lays:
Wake my tongue, my lute awake,
Thou my harp the consort make,
My self will bear a part.

But really the whole book seems to speak to this prompt.

100 untimed books