Tag: Mary Stewart

Recent reads: January

kathleenjowittLeave a comment
A fluffy black cat lies on a sofa, looking ill-used
As it happens, I have been yelling, if not ‘Touch not the cat!’, ‘Not her face!’ and ‘Not her tail!’, and ‘Don’t pull her fur!’, quite a bit of late…

Mostly non-fiction so far this year. The exception is:

Touch Not The Cat (Mary Stewart), which I read for my romantic suspense book club. We started it last year: I’d been keeping myself to the two chapters per week for scheduled discussion up until the second week of January, when I gave in and finished it off. Having read a fair few Stewarts for this group – and not the Arthurian ones – I was rather surprised by the ESP element (this isn’t a spoiler; it’s introduced very early on) but it worked rather well. I wasn’t so convinced by the parallel 1835 timeline. Usually I read Stewart romances for the armchair travel; this was more armchair nostalgia, as the bulk of the action is set in the region where I grew up. It was equally enjoyable: Stewart is always good for an evocative description or several.

Permanent, Faithful, Stable: Christian same-sex partnerships (Jeffrey John) has been  on the shelf for ages, and I felt both that I really should have read it and that I was fed up with it being there making me feel guilty. A quick read – and it is one – sorted that out. I think it’s probably the most succinct summary of the theological debate around same-sex relationships that I’ve read and would recommend it on that basis, though I did have a few quibbles. (Specifically: I did not feel that the author engaged adequately with the argument that marriage is a human institution and replicates human, patriarchal, systems of exploitation. More generally, I have been bearing a grudge to the tune of the most biphobic remark I’ve ever heard from the platform at a supposedly LGBTQ affirming event. The scene in The Real World where Colette walks out of the LGBTX West Country meeting? Not terribly far from real life.)

This was a fairly old edition, and events, in the form of thousands of actual same-sex marriages, have overtaken it. The arguments still feel very familiar, though.

The Queer Parent: everything you need to know from Gay to Ze (Lotte Jeffs and Stu Oakley) – very much the book I needed to read, squaring as it did the vicious circle where I’ve been feeling increasingly adrift from my bi identity but very conscious that as parenthood goes I haven’t had to deal with any problems that are not common to all. In a weird way, it was most affirming to read an interview with a bi couple who said that they were finding it hard to reconnect with the queer community. But it was interesting (and often humbling) to read about the experiences and decisions that I haven’t even had to think about, from surrogacy to IVF to doing the whole thing as a trans person.

The Road Less Traveled (M. Scott Peck) – was a wild ride. It’s one of those books whose existence I’ve been vaguely aware of for a long time, but could have told you nothing about beyond ‘er, self help?’ Then I read bell hooks’ All About Love last year and was intrigued by Peck’s definition of love which hooks quotes:

the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth

And I think that probably was the most useful part of the book. To summarise the rest of it: life is suffering, because life is change and change inevitably involves suffering; we have the choice as to how we engage with that. It was extremely readable – short chapters, and with most of them the promise of a mystery worked through, which is what I always enjoy about case studies (really I should just go and read more Oliver Sacks). I did feel that it rather lost its way when it got more heavily into the spiritual side of things. And there were a few ‘yikes!’ moments where it became less possible than usual to forget that this was published in 1978.

So it’s going back to Oxfam and I’m keeping All About Love. I’m not sure that I entirely adopt that definition, but it’s still better than a lot that I’ve seen.

Week-end: ancestral

kathleenjowitt1 Comment
Head and front half of large eel made from tie-dye fabric with several pairs of human legs visible beneath

The good and the mixed

Spending time with family (and the friends who might as well be family). We buried Pa’s ashes in the family plot, as he’d always wanted, on the most beautiful April day with the bluebells coming out and a cherry tree in blossom, and had a long late lunch afterwards.

Then there was a theatre trip with the brothers – of which more later.

And it was a good week. But everything felt like a dreadful rush, somehow. (Bolting a meal at Wagamama and dashing to the theatre is fast becoming a tradition for me and my eldest brother…) I didn’t speak to many people for as long as I’d have liked, and I have a nagging sense of having missed opportunities. Part of it, of course, is being tired (partly because it’s a lot of rushing around, partly because I am just tired all the time these days) and therefore not being able to engage as fully as I might otherwise; and part of it is pure practicalities: it’s difficult to talk to people when they’re at the opposite end of the table from you, and of course you can’t talk in the theatre.

The difficult and perplexing

I could really have done without skinning my knees again. I suppose there’s a certain symmetry in bookending my week with sticking plasters.

What’s working

Naps. Naps continue to improve everything.

Reading

I finished Wildfire at Midnight. Hmm. Personally I’d have murdered some other characters, but there we go. It’s a very compelling read. Then I finished Bad to the Bone. This was excellent: a five-minutes-into-the-future (at least, at the time of publication), quasi-surreal account by an anonymous narrator of a doping(ish) scandal in the professional cycling peloton. The prose was excellent and, while the mechanics were far-fetched, the racing felt incredibly real. I feel that it could have tried to answer a few more questions, though.

Yesterday I had a ‘lounge in bed’ sort of a day, and read a lot of Agatha Christie: A Murder is Announced (very good, but I remembered too many of the twists from last time for it to be surprising), Ordeal by Innocence (not one of her best, and very of-its-time in the way it thinks about adoption), and Appointment with Death (OK, but not brilliant).

Mending

Some things that have been waiting for a very long time – Tony’s dressing gown, a fancy T-shirt, the collar of my Apollo blueprint dress.

Watching

Sweeney Todd – subtitled The Victorian Melodrama, and sub-subtitled NOT the musical by Stephen Sondheim (Opera della Luna). This took the script of the original 1847 production and added – as seems to have been consistent with period practice – background music from a small orchestra. The music came from various (higher-brow) composers of the era, including my great-great-great-grandfather Julius Benedict. Hence our going to see it: I may never hear Benedict’s music performed live by professionals again. Of course, the problem with its being so very obscure is that I couldn’t distinguish it from that of the other composers (though I did recognise Home Sweet Home – Bishop – and When Other Lips – Balfe). But anyway, it all sounded great, and the orchestra also did sterling service making the sound effects.

Quite apart from family pride, it was extremely enjoyable as a piece of theatre – a proper old-fashioned hiss-the-villain fun, with a small and talented company playing a very large cast. The theatre (Wilton’s Music Hall, in the East End) is a fantastic building.

And today Tony and I went to watch the eel parade, which is one of those delightfully specific local celebrations. The eel was constructed along the lines of Chinese New Year dragons, and followed by: representatives of the Royal British Legion; a samba band; a couple of dance schools; and Brownies/Guides/Rainbows. And one enterprising youngster had a smaller papier maché eel. Very much like Remembrance Day, except for all the ways in which it wasn’t.

Looking at

St Swithun’s, Martyr Worthy, which is a delightful little church with a Norman door. According to the lay reader who took the ceremony for us, it’s still regularly used and there is a decent variety of services. There’s a monument to someone from Sir John Moore’s company – Pa was always interested in the retreat from Coruña and I wonder if that was where that started.

I was interested to see that the visitors’ book was chock full of people walking St James’ Way, which seems to have really taken off since I did it in 2015. (For starters, I don’t think the church was open then, or I’d have looked in; these days it has a sello.)

Cooking

Not much this week, as I’ve mostly been out, but I did rösti with purple sprouting broccoli and fried eggs yesterday. Pretty good.

Eating

Scampi and chips in Winchester; ramen with vegetable gyoza at Wagamama; Scotch egg from the market today.

Noticing

A bush with blue flowers and loads of bees. From the train, several deer. In a charity shop in Sutton, several James Bond tie-in model cars.

In the garden

I did quite a lot this afternoon: trimmed a couple of bushes, sowed sweet pea and nasturtium seeds, watered the pear trees, pulled up some weeds. I also repotted the agave and aloe veras. Our predecessors’ compost bin has obligingly produced a load of compost (I’m not sure I looked into it at all last year). The wisteria is looking likely to produce more flowers than we’ve ever had here; the lily-of-the-valley is beginning to flower, and I think the peony may not be dead after all.

Appreciating

Sunshine. Small towns. The way you don’t need to explain family to family.

Acquisitions

Two parcels today: a new bra and Run Away Home.

Hankering

I was rather taken by a lampshade with a print of eels. I shall continue to think about it. It would certainly be an improvement on the ribbon-and-plastic-bead monstrosity that’s currently in my study.

Line of the week

There were several candidates from Bad to the Bone.

Their nerves are running on ninety seven per cent adrenalin, their fuses so short that if they were off their bikes and a leaf fell on their head they’d beat it to a pulp; and then somewhere inside someone’s head the little glass capsule shatters, the acid snaps the spring, muscles convulse, tyres lash tarmac and they’re on their own, elbows overlapping, bikes barrelling through forty five degrees beneath them as they screw them left and right, arms heaving, feet whipping, riding inside the arc of each other’s elbows, trying to get down the inside, through the gap that opens and closes three times a second, round the outside of a guy who’s going nearly as much across the road as along it because he’s got his head down between his knees because that way he can concentrate exclusively on pulling the bars off his machine without distraction.

This coming week

Bank holiday. Antenatal class. Midwife appointment. And we are going to a spa.

Anything you’d like to share from this week? Any hopes for next week? Share them here!

December Reflections 20: best book of 2020

kathleenjowittLeave a comment
Trumpet - Jackie Kay Station Eleven - Emily St John Mandel Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin How I Live Now - Meg Rosoff Between The Woods And The Water - Patrick Leigh Fermor The Gospel Of Eve - Rachel Mann i Madam, Will You Talk? - Mary Stewart The Real World - Kathleen Jowitt My Year In Small Drawings - Matilda Tristram

I’ve read a lot this year, and taken a lot of pleasure in reading. I’ve enjoyed many books. Even after excluding rereads, I had a lot left to choose from, and I think I’d present this photo more as a representative sample than any sort of top picks.

These aren’t in any particular order, though the top three were all begun and finished before the pandemic really hit the UK. I have a particularly vivid memory of standing on the platform on Cambridge station some time in February, overhearing two men discussing what was going on in China, before I boarded my train and went back to Station Eleven (Emily St John Mandel). It’s one of the least depressing post-apocalyptic books I’ve ever read, and I was glad to have read it going in: it made the first national lockdown seem tame by comparison.

Trumpet (Jackie Kay) follows the family and friends of a trans man who’s outed after his death: a really good book with a convincing (and often infuriating) array of voices.

Giovanni’s Room (James Baldwin) gets points for having not one but two scenes including a proper Paris bus; but it also made me think a lot about relationships, and about what impossible expectations people can place on each other.

Had someone warned me that The Way I Live Now (Meg Rosoff) takes place in World War Three, I would probably not have picked it up. It made for a heavy afternoon, given the circumstances. But it’s so good that I can’t regret it: it has the eccentric, matter-of-fact quality of I Capture The Castle followed up with the devastation of the war narrative.

I read a lot of travel writing early on in lockdown, particularly older work, finding it refreshing to move in time as well as in space. Patrick Leigh Fermor gets the slot here, for the lovely luminous character of his writing.

I was in three book groups/readalongs at one point. One folded after the first book, and I’ve got behind on reading for both of the other two, but it was an absolute joy to read Madam, Will You Talk? (Mary Stewart) with perceptive and witty people on the internet. I even bought a dress because of it.

I’m generally behind everyone else in getting round to reading new releases, and several books that I thought might have been published this year actually date back to 2018 or 2019. But 2020 books that I enjoyed in 2020 included the first two of the Will Darling Adventures (K J Charles) and, particularly, The Gospel of Eve (Rachel Mann), which was a dark, twisty, theological college romp.

I only published one book this year, so obviously The Real World must be simultaneously my best and my worst book of 2020. Actually I think it’s probably the best book I’ve ever written.

Technically a book, although not one to be read as such: My Year in Small Drawings (Matilda Tristram). I’ve had enormous fun with this. There’s something very liberating about allowing yourself to not be very good at something.

Not pictured, because not a book, are any of the issues of hidden europe that I’ve read this year. Not pictured, because I haven’t finished it, is Women and Angels, a Virago anthology of women’s spirituality. Not pictured, because I never read it all in one go, is any of the poetry. Not pictured are the books I bought but haven’t yet got around to. My reading brain has been more or less shot recently; I’ve mostly been watching the skiing instead. Nor have I been doing much writing, apart from this blogging, obviously. I hope to catch up with all of this over the Christmas break and in 2021.