Coralie Bickford Smith

This woman not only has the coolest and poshest name ever to have been conceived, but she also designs incredibly beautiful books. My favourites are her hard backed editions of Penguin classics. A set of 10 appeared at the end of 2008...

...and last Christmas, more beauties arrived in Waterstones (as these editions are exclusive to the store):

I have a few from each series (I was not allowing myself to buy books that I already had more than one edition of, so no Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility) and picked up the edition of William Shakespeare's Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint last week. I do have the sonnets in a collected works of Shakespeare and my Norton anthology but I seemed to conveniently forget that when faced with such a lovely crimson and peach coloured confection.

The sonnet I know best is still number 130:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips' red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks; 

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound;

I grant I never saw a goddess go;

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:

   And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

   As any she belied with false compare. 

This sonnet played a pivotal role in the episode of My So Called Life when Jordan discovered that he did love Angela. The English teacher Mr Katimski reads out the entire sonnet and, with the help of boffin Brian, helps to tease out it's meaning for a passive class. I have said it already, but that was such a great programme. What other teen drama would leave you with a Shakespeare sonnet memorised and explained?

Bloomin' Brilliant

I have had a very culturally bereft week, I am afraid. We went away for a city break and I mainly shopped and quaffed wine which, although delightful pursuits both, caused me to neglect my book reading, film watching and pop medleys on the hairbrush microphone.

After the lovely 'smush' of loads of mail behind the door when you first open it, the best thing about returning home after a holiday is the change in your garden. When I left, it was a vale of bluebells, but now it is studded with cheery yellow poppies. Every thing is a little higher, fuller and greener and the sparrows have hatched another nestful of chicks in the bird box. When I stand underneath it, I can hear their tiny squeaks and see the nest material which includes grasses, hairs from our heads and threads from our house and garden, poking through the corners and seams.

The thought of people deriving joy from bird watching used to make me weak with mirth. I once went over to some one's house and his parents had special high chairs which they placed by the window especially for the purpose of spying on blue tits and thrushes. Ha! I thought that this was the saddest, most ludicrous thing that I had ever seen and my friend was extremely embarrassed about these, the uncoolest chairs in the world. Now I quite want them. Birds are great and we have a tame blackbird who  we spy on like a couple of creeps as he leaps over our flowers and pecks at crumbs and worms.

Musing upon gardens has led me to look out Weeds and Wild Flowers, a collaboration between poet Alice Oswald and printmaker Jessica Greenman. The poems and etchings are all about flowers with titles such as Stinking Goose Foot, Narcissus, Bastard Toadflax and Rambling Rose complemented by etchings of orchids, wildflowers, foxgloves, nettles and snowdrops.

The etchings are incredible and represent what must have been months of work. Etching is a slow and exacting process. The copper or zinc plate is coated with a thick wax which is then scratched into with a metal implement. As with most printing methods, the image on the plate must be a reverse of the desired finished print.

The worked plate is placed into a bath of acid and the exposed sections are corroded by the acid while the wax coating protects the rest of the plate. Some printmakers use feathers to brush the bubbles of fizzing acid away from the plate so that they can judge how far the plate has been bitten into.

This resulting positive image, when the plate is cleaned, is recessed from the surface of the plate and therfore, ink needs to be rubbed into the deep grooves before damp paper is placed over the plate and the whole thing is rolled through a printing press and squeezed between blankets and a roller. It is only when the paper is removed on the other side that the artist can see if their labour has been worth it and the image works.

I am particularly impressed by the etchings that Jessica Greenman has made which contain only hand-lettered versions of Oswald's poems as it is very difficult to get an entire page of lettering right when you are scratching its mirror image into a black surface revealing silver letters. I have spotted one mistake but that is pretty good going.

The poems are anthropomorphic. Bastard Toadflax is a 'Ponderous, obstinate, cold skinned person', Narcissus relates her own tale ( 'yes once I was half frail, half glittering...I was half skin half breath') and Hairy Bittercress is described as a drunk who sits in watching TV who 'when she pulls off her tights ... sits with her white feet bare and her legs a-prickle with hair'.)

All About Eve

When reading the chapter on the making of the film All About Eve in the wonderful Vanity Fair book, Tales of Hollywood, I remembered that someone had given me the DVD a couple of Christmases ago. I dug it out and watched it, worrying that my knowledge of the plot and behind the scenes rivalries and shooting methods would spoil the experience a little.

I was also wary as, quite often, when watching older films that have been praised and lauded over the years, I have been distinctly underwhelmed. This is usually because the ground-breaking technical aspects of these gilded movies have been copied so many times over the years that they no longer seem so special to modern movie audiences. I needn't have worried on either account.

The quality of All About Eve, however, is in the script and acting, both of which are often sadly lacking in many high-profile films today. Based on a short story by Mary Orr, which was in its turn based on the real-life experience of one of Orr's acquaintances, the film follows the fortunes of Eve Harrington,(Anne Baxter) a shy backstage Jenny who reveres Bette Davis' Broadway actress Margo Channing. Eve is befriended by Margo and kind Karen Richards (Celeste Holm) who is the wife of a playwright and the film follows the gradual revelation of the true, manipulative and madly ambitious nature of this supposedly timid fan

This film held the record for the most academy award nominations for a single film until Titanic's 1998 Oscar sweep. These nominations included four for the actresses involved. Davis and Baxter were in the running for best actress and Holm and the wonderful Thelma Ritter were both nominated for best supporting actress (none of them won.) You can appreciate the quality of the acting even more when you know that Davis and Holm loathed each other off set. They play best friends and manage to convey an easy and fond familiarity despite the seething tensions off-camera.



The stand-out performance must be Baxter's Eve, however. Her first scenes show a quiet, dowdy young woman who is simply happy to be in the company of talented people. Eve's character slowly and almost imperceptibly reveals darker depths as the film goes on, slowly wresting control of Margo's life from her faithful assistant Birdie (Ritter), showing more and more interest in the plays that are being offered to her mentor, putting herself forward as an understudy and grimly clawing her way to the place where she wants to be: in Margo's shoes.

Image: Hulton Archive

The pivotal scene is a Ladies Room conversation between Karen and Eve. It begins with both women suspicious and tense, relaxes into a kind, comforting meeting between old friends and then ignites as Eve finally shows her true colours. Eve's hitherto warm, throaty and measured tones become harsh, hard and nasal as she spits out the line "I'd do much more for a part that good!" Even though I knew the plot, I was still shocked at the absolute and yet believably portrayed change in Eve's personality.

Eve's use of the tabloid press to promote herself and denigrate her rivals means that this film still feels relevant and the lovely direction pleased my eyes greatly. Favourite images were Margo's lover Bill walking down a snow-covered country road in silhouette, brightly lit taxis streaming along Broadway at night-time and Eve-obsessed fan Phoebe trying on her idol's glittering cloak in front of a three-way mirror which reflects her satisfied expression back to her a hundred times.

On Re-reading

Edward Ardizzone illustration taken from The Little Book Room byEleanor Farjeon

I was talking to someone about books once, and was stunned when they airily declared that they had never re-read a book in their lives. "What's the point?" they asked as I reeled backwards in horror, calling weakly for the smelling salts "I already know what happens in the end."

This declaration shocked me far more than friends who admit that they have never finished a book, ever. I always understood that there were people who just were not readers, for whom the concept of reading for pleasure makes no sense. I can respect this, some derive great enjoyment from playing sports or doing exercise, for instance, two healthy and undeniably popular ways of spending time but the sight of a rounders bat or a treadmill make me feel queasy and incredibly bored in equal measure.

However, I thought that those of us who are 'readers' would be similar in our enjoyment of books. I assumed that every one who has read and loved a book would eventually return at least once to spend more time  with favoured characters, re-live the thrilling highlights and examine the tale from a different perspective. Whenever one visits a book again, it is with different experiences and opinions, we are older and have read more in the interim, which will colour our view and change the reading experience.

When we love a song we play it again and again until our neighbours are crying and begging us to stop and it is not considered odd to want to look at a painting more than once even though you already "know what happens in it."

I suppose it depends on what kind of books you like to read. A beautifully wrought novel examining the inner lives of the characters may reward a re-reader more than a plot-driven detective novel but I still think that a mystery is still worth re-reading when you know the culprit, motive and weapon because you are reading the book with new knowledge which will change your attitude to characters and allow you to appreciate the cleverness of the writing.

There is of course one big fat con for re-reading and that is the massive amount of books that all voracious readers want to read, feel that we should read and yet know that we will have less time to read  if we keep wallowing in beloved tomes that we have already read several times over. It is a dilemma, I do admit. But never re-reading a book? Madness...

Whatever Happened to Unklejam?

...I wondered to myself as I boogyed around to their hit 'What Am I Fighting For?' yesterday afternoon. They also had a cracking single called 'Stereo', but I've not heard from them in three years, what gives? They were the British Outkast!


WAIFF? is ace. It starts off with doom-laden 'ooooohs' and a great bass-line with synthesisers whining and then one of them sneers 'yeeeah, yeeaah' and then they sing the brilliant:

Take my love I dont need, take my mouth, I cant breathe.  
Take my balls, organs too. All I ever wanted was to love you

Ha, 'take my balls...'

The video is great too, but embedding is disabled, so direct your delightful eyes here.

The dancing, videos, singing and lyrics were all very pleasing so WHERE IS MY NEW UNKLEJAM SINGLE?!!

Here is Stereo. And here is Love Ya, with it's big scream at the start and ridikulus dancing. It only got to number 55 or something.

Perhaps the problem is my tainted, career-killing love. I am beginning to worry that I am the kiss of death for pop acts. I blogged about Mini Viva's One Touch and it went into the charts at number 124. Sorry Unklejam, sorry Mini Viva.

Multi-tasking...

I wonder how many people read three or four books at a time? I used to be constantly hopping from book to book but don't seem to have the ability anymore. Perhaps you need a young, springy brain to keep all those plots sorted out.

At the moment I have a few books on the go but, as they are all episodic in nature, it feels quite natural. I rarely read a book of short stories all in one go, as I like to give thought to each story after I've finished it and I don't want to taint the next.

I received a wonderful book at Christmas, Vanity Fair's Hollywood Tales: Rebels, Reds and Graduates and the Wild Stories Behind the Making of 13 Iconic Films. I absolutely love reading about behind the scenes on Hollywood films and I particularly like when you hear about how films were originally conceived. Quite often, the main players are the fifth or sixth actors on the directors' lists. In the case of 'All About Eve', Bette Davis' signature film, she was turned to "as a last resort".

Claudette Colbert had signed up to play the queenly stage actress Margot Channing but suffered a ruptured disc. The only actress available and capable enough to fill in the role at short notice was Davis. The last time she and producer Daryl Zanuck had met, he had screamed at her "You'll never work in Hollywood again!" She nailed the role of Margot Channing, and it is one of the classic movie performances in a film which received 14 Oscar nominations, an unbeaten record until Titanic.

Other chapters cover Rebel Without A Cause, The Graduate (which was originally to star Robert Redford), Cleopatra, The Producers and Saturday Night Fever. The book is written with the typical Vanity Fair tone, well researched, respectable reportage which is deliciously gossipy at the same time. The best bits in the 'All About Eve' chapter are when you get to hear what everyone thought of each other and how George Sanders got on flying to San Franciso with his wife Zsa Zsa Gabor on one side of him and a flirty young Marilyn Monroe on the other.

I have already told of this lovely book's unexpected arrival and it was worth it for the first story alone. I have never read any Katherine Mansfield but have heard many good things about her. Her First Ball is about country girl Leila attending her first formal dance with her four cousins. Leila's girlish excitement and the assaults upon her senses are incredibly vivid and, although there is little traditional 'plot' to this tale, its waters run deep. The story is a polished pearl, light, sparkling and precious.

"Meg's tuberoses, Jose's long loop of amber, Laura's little dark head, pushing above her white fur like a flower through snow. She would remember forever."

A couple of years ago I bought the Christmas Stories in this series and it is actually one of the few short story collections which I have read all in one go. The quality and range is magnificent and I enjoyed it so much.

Love Stories contains works by Collete, Dorothy Parker, D. H. Lawrence,Vladimir Nabokov and F. Scott Fitzgerald to name a few. Yeah the standard's pretty high! My favourite so far has been 'Blood Sea' by Italo Calvino which ostensibly takes place in a car containing four people but the real story is in the blood, under the fingertips of two lovers on the back seat.

"The underwater depths were red like the colour we see now only inside our eyelids, and the sun's rays penetrated to brighten them in flashes or else in sprays. We undulated with no sense of direction, drawn by an obscure current so light that it seemed downright impalpable and yet strong enough to drag us up in very high waves and down in their troughs. Zylphia would plunge headlong beneath me in a violet, almost black whirlpool, then soar over me rising toward the more scarlet stripes that ran beneath the luminous vault."

My new edition of Slightly Foxed arrived today! I've not started it yet, but I'm certainly not going to finish the above three books before I do. This quarterly is beautifully produced on cream paper with a new watercolour illustration on the cover each month. The publishers also make a point of mentioning that the size of the editions means that it can be slipped easily into a handbag or a coat pocket, which makes me want to hug them.

There is a Slightly Foxed book shop(selling their own editions as well as second hand books) and look at the map they provide to it, it is the perfect illustration of the feeling of this publication, sweet, whimsical and a little eccentric.

They also produce stocking fillers!

Book Anticipation

Stories to Get You Through the Night is described as an anthology of "stories that will brighten and inspire, move and delight, soothe and restore in equal measure", and includes work by Chekov, Elisabeth Gaskell, Katherine Mansfield, Haruki Murakami, John Cheever, Virginia Woolf, Richard Yates, Angela Carter....


I pre-ordered this as soon as I saw the description a few months ago and then completely forgot about it, so I was delighted to receive my dispatch email this afternoon. I just did a big amazon binge and so was trying to be good about buying books. Ha! in your face, restraint!


 It was like finding a fiver in my pocket that I thought I had spent or chocolate in the cupboard that I was sure I had eaten. 

Bodacious!

Chelle from Time Out blog has very kindly bestowed this Bodacious Blogging Book reviewer award upon me and, I'm not going to lie, I am dee-lighted. The 'pass it on to 5 others' part reminds me of scary chain letters from the 80s (thanks a lot, Swedish pen-pal) but I think it's safe... anything called 'bodacious' can never be wrong.

If you are given this award you can accept it by leaving a comment on the post you were nominated on. Then copy and paste the post and add it to your own blog. Make a list of the last 5 books you read and pass the award on to 5 other bloggers (but not to the person who nominated you).


My last five books were: A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh, Tusk Tusk by Polly Stenham (do plays count?), The Night Watch by Sarah Waters, Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple and The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield - Fisher.


My nominations are...


Lydia at The Literary Lollipop. Lydia reads faster than any other blogger out there and provides an interesting mix of  Young Adult fiction, Classic literature, Short Stories, Croatian Literature and more. She is currently ploughing her way through Middlemarch so the rest of us don't have to.


Any blog which hops from L.A. Candy by Lauren Conrad to The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf to Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino is definitely worth keeping an eye on. Lila at BabyGotBooks gives everything attention and writes some great reviews.


Irish playwright Rosalind at The Vanishing Lake not only shows impeccable taste by naming her blog after a magical body of water, but she blogs about writing, reading, current affairs, dresses, all sorts. She also provides links to really interesting articles.


Number four is Desperate Reader. This Shetlander's blog is packed with gorgeous pictures and never fails to relax me when I am reading it. She also likes a dram and George Mackay Brown, like any sane person.


Claire from Kiss A Cloud's blog is also very lovely to look at. I really look forward to her beautiful, thought provoking posts. Her celebration of the film Bright Star was wonderful.

RIP Louise Bourgeois, 1911-2010

Look at this cheery old lady with the big willy under her arm that she made herself!

Her work was so rude and scary. She made terrifying, huge spider sculptures and her first work was an image of her father made out of dough and spit, right in front of his eyes.

She really freaked him out, as well as countless others, but her sculptures and installations had a fascinating, dreamy quality to them which fused nightmare and childish imagination so perfectly.

This is a big miss for the art world.

Portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe, Room installation by Peter Bellamy and Maman spider at  Capodimante Museum Bourgeois retrospective.

A Handful Of Dust by Evelyn Waugh

I had been meaning to read some Waugh for some time and, as this was published in 1934, I thought that it would kill two birds and contribute to Nymeth at Things Mean A Lot's mini 1930s challenge which I signed up for a wee while ago.

This book was surprisingly easy to read and for some reason this surprised me. I think that Waugh has been looming over me for a while.

Although highly readable, this novel is quite disjointed. The first chapter reminded me of Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love and Love In a Cold Climate. The social setting and tone are initially very similar; waspy and witty with a wry authorial eye. Mrs Beaver (mumsy) and her son gossip about the socialites of their acquaintance and idly wait around between luncheon invitations.

" I should say it was time she began to be bored. They've been married five or six years."

"Mumsy you are wonderful. I believe you know about everyone."

"It's a great help. All a matter of paying attention when people are talking."

The characters of Brenda and Tony Last are introduced and Tony Last is described by one man as "one of the happiest men I know."

Chapter two changes the tone with the sentence "all over England people were waking up feeling queasy and despondent."

The tone becomes a lot less arch and more realistic. Brenda and Tony's relationship is described naturalistically and seems to be fond, playful and close.

By the end of the chapter, however, Brenda is preparing to embark on an affair with John Beaver almost out of boredom and with the amused and detached help of her sister.

" Oh he's pathetic all right, d'you fancy him?"

Evelyn Waugh's first wife had left him for another man, an event which apparently changed him forever, so it is not difficult to see the impetus behind this novel about a heartless woman casually tossing a devoted husband aside.

He is so very fair to Brenda though, she is shown to be a cold and careless woman but there is no vindictive twist of the knife and this is definitely not a misogynistic book. None of the women end up looking particularly good but then, neither do the men. Even Tony, who is kind and decent, is not held up as a misunderstood and badly-treated cuckold, but a bit foolish, dull and naive.

A Handful of Dust is a weary sigh of a book which shrugs its shoulders at a shallow and broken world. This weary tone is leavened by Tatler-esque gossip and farcical trips to the sea-side but there is no real redemption for any of the characters. These people may be silly and fey but Waugh does not shy away from following the consequences of their actions realistically.

This despair at modern life reminds me of another famous novel from the 30s, Brave New World. There is no mention of WW1, apart from a few sentences about a character being too young to have fought, but there is a feeling of the shock and numbness that often follows catastrophe. People are determined to enjoy themselves and yet have forgotten how.

Reading Women by Stefan Bollmann

Anyone who enjoyed the images of women with books posted by Persephone last week in honour of the publication Forbidden Fruit may also be delighted by this book which was bought on impulse a couple of years ago. It was useless to resist.

It has recently been repackaged and renamed Women Who Read Are Dangerous:

The foreword by Karen Joy Fowler begins "We women who read should take a moment, put down the book, this or any other, look around us. We are experiencing a rare period of triumph."

Fowler goes on to explain that the idea of reading silently, especially if you were a woman, was once seen as a threat. It was idle, it was secretive, independent and even unchaste. People worried about their daughters reading in the same way that modern day parents fret about hours spent on the games console.

 "She might while the book lasts, be a completely different person from the one we are seeing. She might be a man; this is all too likely. She might be a horse and at the very moment we look at her, she might despair, finding herself sold at auction, sent to the glue factory. She might be a rabbit. She might be a hobbit."

Several images follow, some spread across two pages of, yes, women reading. There are images from the Middle Ages:

Photographs: (this one is of Alice Liddell, namesake of Alice in Wonderland.)

We are shown women who are young...

...and those older:

Women indulge themselves in books leisurely and with lazy pleasure...

... but some have to sneak a few moments from a working day:

Illustrations also appear:

Paintings by Van Gogh,  Hugo Van Der Goes and the wonderful Carl Larsson are included as well as photographs of Lee Miller (she's reading the paper whilst having breakfast in bed!) and Marilyn Monroe.

This volume can be read as a book or dipped into whenever the mood dictates. Buy it, buy it, buy it.

Whip It by Drew Barrymore

Ah Drew...

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways...

You made the child to adult actor transition after being written off by everyone as a messed up Hollywood wild child.

You used to turn up to premieres wearing not 'vintage' dresses, but charity shop finds with your grungy boyfriend in tow.

You used to talk about your best friends and how much you loved them in interviews.

You introduced me to glitter spray.

You have done lots of very rude photo shoots but you never looked like a potential rape victim/Barnardos child, you were having a laugh and didn't care what people thought.

Boys On The Side and Donnie Darko.

You have just directed a film which, had I seen it at age 14, would have a) blown my tiny little heart up and b) shunted Empire Records into a very distant second place.

Bliss (Ellen Page) is a 17 year old from a tiny town in Texas who is a reluctant beauty pageant contestant at the behest of her mother. While buying some second hand boots to complete her mid-nineties grunge look, she picks up a leaflet for a roller derby in Austin.

Bliss soon joins the Hurl Scouts, an unambitious roller derby team who, despite their inability to win, are the best of friends and filled with joie de vivre. There is a cute boy and there are great parties, a climatic sports event and tears between friends and family.

In some ways this film has the ingredients of every teen movie but it is so great because it is actually a girl's film. The main character does not have massive boobs and the person she cannot beat is not a nubile cheerleader but a hard as nails 36 year old played by Juliette Lewis. One element of the story is Bliss lying about her age so that she can hang out with these super-cool 30 somethings.

There is a relationship with a boy but the passion that Bliss (AKA Babe Ruthless) has for Roller Derby is the focus of this film.

At the end of this movie I wanted to buy all of the soundtrack on LP, dig out my old 90s Seattle clobber, strap on a pair of roller skates, make best friends with Bliss's best buddy Pash and watch the film all over again.

Like I say, if I had been 14, I would be typing this whilst already wearing roller skates, a Mother Love Bone t-shirt, listening to The Breeders and arranging a pre-order of the DVD.

Polly Stenham's Plays

I first became aware of Polly Stenham when I read this Lynn Barber interview. I have been a fan of Lynn Barber's interviews for years but my love for her was fully cemented when she revealed her hatred of theatre.

As anyone who read this post will know, I fear live performances almost as much as I fear skinny jeans and have not really enjoyed any plays that I have seen. To be fair, I've seen less than ten and most of them were amateur productions. I don't like the thought of audience participation though, even when I've been assured that it will not happen.

And yet I ended up in the front row of a comedy gig recently and was speaking to the comic during the show (it was for work) and I didn't have a stroke or die of embarrassment. (Although all hearing was lost in my right ear for the duration. Probably something to do with the blood pounding in my head). So I may return to the theatre because I love the idea of, and the reading of plays.

So. The interview begins with Lynn Barber saying that if anyone could tempt her back to theatre, it would be Polly Stenham. So, That Face, and later Tusk Tusk, were purchased.

There are similar themes running through both plays; sibling love, unstable mother figures, absent fathers and children trying to negotiate the adult world with no support.

That Face starts with a ritual, Tusk Tusk starts with a scream but both end with a reality check for Stenham's characters that hurts your heart.

That Face revolves mainly around three characters. Martha is mother to Henry and Mia, but really, they are the adults. Henry has devoted his life to caring for his mother and, while Mia can see that Martha is falling into the abyss, her brother cannot bear to let go.

Tusk Tusk explores this theme of children being adults further by removing parents altogether. Eliot, Maggie and Finn, all under 16, are waiting for their mother who has disappeared from their new home. They watch their phones hopefully but one of them doesn't expect to see her ever again.

Both plays are very upsetting reads but apparently draw tremendous laughs from the crowd so seeing them live is obviously ideal. The writing is so good, however, that they are great as books in themselves; like novellas written in dramatic form.

That Face was a big hit, but I think that I was moved by Tusk Tusk even more. Apparently Polly Stenham is adapting That Face into a film so I will definitely be seeing that and, maybe one day, I shall experience both plays live. They seem worth it.

A Box Full of Lovely Books Arrived Today...

Eh... the picture's shaky because I'm so excited about my new books and definitely not because I was too lazy to take another.

Working from the bottom up:

The Norton Anthology of English Literature


I first became aware of this when my friend had to buy it for her English Literature degree almost ten years ago. It's basically an overview of notable works in English from the middle ages to the end of the seventeenth century. It includes works by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Donne,  Swift,  Pope,  letters written by Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots, excerpts from the Bible and a description of a trip to the arctic in 1576. And much, much more, hooray!

It looks to be a cornucopia of delights and I look forward to dipping into this treasury.

For Coloured Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enuf by Ntozake Shange

I ordered this as soon as I read this post at Paperback Reader and it is part of my effort to read more drama.

Little Women and Good Wives by Louisa May Alcott

A classic, that all should own. I do have a copy at my mother's house, but that's not my house and the vintage cover is so very delightful:

 Plays by Chekhov

These were read and loved at school but have never been owned. Again, the cover is by Maurice Denis, so it's great lit and great art, my favourite combination.

Tusk Tusk, Polly Stenham

I am going to read plays this year and started with This Face which was Polly Stenham's highly acclaimed debut. This is her second play. She is still only 23, which makes me sick.

Enron by Lucy Prebble


Yet another acclaimed play by a young English woman. Enron is what it sounds like, a play about the collapse of Enron, the Texan energy company. This is Lucy Prebble's second play and she is also the creator of ITV2's Secret Diary of A Call Girl.

The Night Watch by Sarah Waters

I'm late to the Sarah Waters fan club but shall be sending away for my badge and password as soon as I've posted tonight.

I had heard increasing amounts about her on blogs/in papers and had heard from her in various forewords and articles on writing so when I spotted two copies of Night Watch in my local library, side by side, I picked one up, took it home and let the unwashed dishes and piles of laundry sit as I lost myself in 1940s London.

This novel is quite exhausting to read as it veers from scenes of almost unbearable tenderness to visceral, horrific blood-filled tableaux without ever missing a beat. The structure of the novel is also a three part step back through time, so that we meet the characters near the end of the decade and pick our way back through their tangled, interwoven pasts.

The main theme seem to be relationships that have run out of steam or never had any steam in the first place; relationships which are based on the premise that "we could be blown to bits tomorrow", (so let's ignore the sensible voices in our heads and the gnawing doubts.)

I finished this book wanting to read it again, and determined to read more Sarah Waters.