busy busy busy

Before we do anything else, I need to tell you about this:

My next book has just been announced from One More Chapter, and I am quite giddy with excitement. LITTLE GIRLS TELL TALES is available for preorder now. Please do check it out.

ALSO! Me and a few friends have teamed up to make a podcast. It's called WELL RED and involves us drinking wine and chatting books. This month we're discussing FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC (the 40-year-old classic that I am ashamed to say I've never read until this year), and trying to decide which wine you should drink while reading it. If that sounds like your sort of thing, give it a listen on Anchor.fm or find us on Spotify. Ta.

Anyway, last week for Reading the Library, the book was THE GLASS LAKE by Maeve Binchy and, honestly, it was quite good.

It’s a big community-saga, following the ebb and flow of life in a small village in Ireland as people fall in love, fall out of love, fall in the lake, run away with shady men, and question whether true love is really all it’s cracked up to be. It’s got a perfect sheen of ‘real-life’ all over it – people occasionally make ridiculous decisions, things don’t always work out neatly, people have the same name as each other (I’m certain there were two Kevins), sometimes fate is cruel and random: just like in real life. This does become annoying sometimes (just like in real life) because there are loose ends which don’t fit with the story (did we really need the whole subplot about the fella who breaks into the car shop?), but that’s not really the point. This book is essentially a soap opera. You can cut it a lot of slack for that.

Plus the main(ish) character, Kit McMahon, has some wonderful moments – for example, when some boy starts telling people she slept with him, she promptly sues him for impunity her virtue, and wins. Hats off to you, missy.

Next week, we’re looking at the C-shelves:

25 of these buggers, including three that belong exclusively to Catherine Cookson.

The random number generator gives us shelf number 9:

Hmm. So it looks like my choice is Harlan Cohen or Jonathan Coe or... oh hey, what’s that?

Okay, this looks interesting. I’ve never heard of this book or this author (the inside flap says she was a scriptwriter on Shameless). Let’s give it a go then.

neat things

A bunch of neat things I found this week while withdrawing old books from the library shelves.

This pithy review, tucked into the flap of a hardback:

Secret codes, used by readers so they’d know at a glance whether or not they’d already read a certain book:

Many author pictures of Catherine Cookson, each of which made me think for a moment she was Carrie Fisher:

This wonderful sentiment in some of the ancient large print books:

And THE TINFISH RUN, published 1979, with its five full pages of issues, suggesting this copy may have been read by up to 200 people in its forty years of circulation:

Week 2: B Shelves

Today in the library, someone made me cry (in a good way, this is a happy story).

A local group, who assist adults with learning difficulties, come into our library fairly regularly on a Friday morning. They always manage to time it for our busiest period, when we also have a toddler group doing music time, so they often wander into the middle of a group of twenty toddlers and their grown-ups doing the hokey-cokey.

(As a side note, yeah, I think we’re quite a non-traditional library. We almost never shush people. The only time I’ve ever told someone off was when one grandpa ignored the sign saying DO NOT TOUCH THE LOBSTERS.)(That was the day we had lobsters visiting the library.)

So anyway, one of the women who comes along with the care group is super-keen on the royal family, especially Princess Diana. She has already read all the books we have on the shelves about the Royals. I always feel a bit sad when we can’t find her anything knew to read. Plus she needs a specific type of book – preferably one with less writing and more pictures. So I ducked out to the stacks in the other room, where we keep our thousands of home library service books, and had a quick rummage in the Royal section. Long story short, I came up with three nice big picture books, including one of Charles and Diana that predated Diana’s death.

I figured this was a fairly average, everyday thing to do – I mean, it’s literally my job to find books for people. But this woman was so happy to see this new selection of books that she got completely overwhelmed and on the verge of tears. She had to ask her carer whether she could borrow all three books instead of the one she usually gets (obviously the carer said yes). Usually the woman gives me a high-five before she leaves; today I got a hug. Hence why I was crying like an eejit at lunchtime.

(Also, the Charles and Diana book had not been borrowed since 1997, and I’d just been reading this thread on Twitter about neglected library books, so that set me off again.)

At the risk of sounding super-pretentious, it turns out distributing a hundred books to a hundred people isn’t necessarily as important as getting one particular book to the right person at the right time.

Anyway. Back to my 2020 reading project.

The first book of the year was THE BEHAVIOUR OF MOTHS by Poppy Adams. You can check out my less-than-comprehensive review here.

We now move on to the B shelves.

There are NINETEEN of these buggers. Nineteen. I haven’t even counted how many separate authors that includes. So, with the help of a random number generator, I picked shelf number 10:

Which is... hmm. Well, I guess this was bound to happen. Quite a lot of these shelves are taken up by just two or three authors (and sometimes just one – Danielle Steele has two full shelves to herself) so sometimes I won’t have a huge choice. This fortnight we’ve got Maeve Binchy, Tim Binding, and Charlotte Bingham. I’ve not read any of these people. None of these books look like my usual comfort zone.

I eventually settled on Maeve Binchy:

It’s a solid, hefty tome of a book.

I’ll post an update at the weekend to see how I’m getting on. At that time, I will hopefully also have SOME EXCITING NEWS about another new project we’re working on. It’s gonna be awesome.

It’s been noted that, rather like Rizzo in MUPPET’S CHRISTMAS CAROL, I am not suited to literature. Or, more accurately, I’m not suited to literary fiction.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve read smart books, I’ve enjoyed smart books, and I think I’ve understood smart books (they’re about girls, right?), but the older I get, the less tolerance I have for capital-L Literature. There’s only so often I can cope with a story about ennui and aging and the sheer thinginess of life.

(This is obviously a broad, sweeping generalisation. Literary fiction can be about so much more than the weight of life, just like genre fiction doesn’t have to be devoid of heavy themes to be enjoyable.)

The book group I currently attend was formed (in part) because everyone was fed up of reading books about middle-aged professors who are consumed with ennui and therefore absolutely must start an affair with their nubile young secretaries. If you personally happen to like those sort of books, good on you, whatever floats your boat. But speaking for myself, there’s only so much of that I can take before I start wishing the author had written in a salty dragon or a car chase or something.

Anyway, in my 2020 quest to read the library, it occurs to me that I’m going to run into more Literary Fiction than I usually consume.

Which brings us nicely to THE BEHAVIOUR OF MOTHS.

From her lookout on the first floor, Ginny watches and waits for her younger sister to return to the crumbling mansion that was once their idyllic childhood home. Vivien has not set foot in the house since she left, forty-seven years ago; Ginny, the reclusive moth expert, has rarely ventured outside it.

But with Vivien's arrival, dark, unspoken secrets surface. Told in Ginny's unforgettable voice, this debut novel tells a disquieting story of two sisters and the ties that bind - sometimes a little too tightly.

Incidentally, you can tell I read too much YA, because I was completely caught off guard on page 1 by the protagonist being an old woman (I didn’t read the blurb before I started). When was the last time I read a book about proper grownups?? But apart from that, okay, we’ve got a crumbling gothic house (lovely), dark family secrets (even better), and an unexpected wealth of information about moths (perfect!). Honestly, the level of details about moths, pupal soup, parasites and larvae might put off some people. When the narrator starts cutting open chrysalises to examine the soupy goo inside, or when she finds a caterpillar that’s being eaten alive from the inside by the parasitic larvae of another creature... it’d probably be too much of an ick-factor for many readers.

But, predictably enough, the forensic details about moths were my favourite bits of the book. The rest of it was a bit... literary for me. There are flashbacks to Ginny’s childhood, involving trauma and death and alcoholism and neglect. There’s an insistence on skipping over explanations and salient plot-points: Ginny has a habit of tuning out anything she’s not interested in hearing about, which leaves the audience to fill in a lot of gaps. And then there’s some stuff that happens at the end, explained away with a bit of hand-waving about free will (or the lack of it), and then the book finishes.

It was okay. I liked the stuff about moths. But it does make me worry that I’m going to struggle with other Literary books this year...

So, onwards into the Bs! Our library has 19 full shelves of authors beginning with B, so I’ll need a random number generator to pick a shelf for me. Update on Friday.

Welcome to week 1 of my 2020 reading challenge, Reading the Library!

Here is a summary of what I intend to do this year, and why.

(TL;DR - I'm planning to read one book every two weeks off the General Fiction shelves in the library where I work, starting at A and working through the alphabet, in an attempt to fill in some shocking gaps in my reading education.)

This fortnight, A is for:

There are six shelves of authors beginning with A, and, in a completely arbitrary fashion which will probably become the hallmark of this challenge, I've gone for the very first shelf, right at the top.

One book in particular popped out at me:

So, book number one of this year's challenge is THE BEHAVIOUR OF MOTHS by Poppy Adams. I know nothing about this book, or this author, and I don't intend to look at the blurb before I start reading. Let's see how this works out.

Progress update next Friday!

There’s nothing like working in a library to make you realise the gaps in your education.

I started at the Mobile Family Library six months ago. It’s delightful. For my first week, there wasn’t a spare desk for me, so I had to work in the stacks, alongside 37,000 books, which was, as you can imagine, a terrible hardship.

One thing that became abundantly clear was how little I’d read. I like to think I read quite a lot, and quite widely, but here I found whole shelves of authors I’d never even heard of. A glance at the loan records showed how popular some of these authors are (anecdotally, the library used to have a copy of a Barbara Cartland novel that was loaned out over 300 times). So why haven’t I read them?

The obvious answer is a lack of time, I suppose. And, also, I am very comfortable in my comfort zone. I like reading the books I like reading. Who has time to expand their horizons when there’s so many wonderful books and authors that you’re already familiar with?

This year I turned 40, which is nice, but it brought with it a realisation that I will never read all the books I want to. Isn’t that dreadful? If there are 37,000 books in our stacks at the library, and if I could read a hundred a year, it would take... *counts on fingers* ... 370 years for me to read them all. And that’s just the books here in this one bit of the library, never mind the Family Library next door with its shelves full of YA and MG, or the Douglas Library downtown, or my own stupid house which is full to bursting with books I haven’t yet read.

If I’m fortunately enough to live to a hundred, and I keep up my reading pace, there are only 6,000 more books that I could realistically read in my lifetime.

That’s quite a sobering thought. How on earth can I narrow down which books to exclude?

I think it’s time to start being realistic about my reading habits. I should accept that I will never read Martin Amis, or Jeffrey Archer. I should come to terms with never ploughing through all of Nora Roberts’ back catalogue. I have been trying and failing to read Ulysses for twenty-five years – perhaps it’s time to give up on it?

With that in mind, I would like to announce my reading plan for 2020. I call it READING THE LIBRARY.

Here’s the deal. Every two weeks I will read one book from the fiction section of the library stack, going alphabetically by author name from A to Z. In this way I will (hopefully) read 26 books (one from each letter of the alphabet) in 2020, while leaving me plenty of space to read books from other sources as well. I will pick a shelf within each letter at random, and choose the book that interests me the most.

A selection of rules:

1. I must read one book off the chosen shelf every two weeks.
2. I will restrict myself to the “General Fiction” section of our library, which excludes Crime, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Large Print, and Non-Fiction. If I included those shelves as well, this project would fast become unworkable.
3. Shelving is arbitrary and sometimes books get moved around or issued to other borrowers. We are a library, you know.
4. I will show a preference for authors I haven’t read over authors I have read.
5. I will show a preference for female authors and/or authors of colour (sorry not sorry).
6. Every two weeks I will post a review or an update on this blog.
7. I reserve the right to refuse to read (or continue to read) a particular book or author for any reason at all, including extremely petty reasons.

Are these rules arbitrary and restrictive and probably unfair? You betcha. There will be books and authors who get missed out, through no fault of their own. I can’t read everything.

But, hopefully, this project will help me fill in some gaps.

Check back here in the first week of January, for a random book off the “A” shelves! Who will it be??

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