Sick :( and other bits

I have a chest infection.  It came on during Wednesday, I started coughing from way down in my lungs.  By Thursday I felt so bloody awful I went to the docs and was summarily prescribed Augmentin, paracetomol/codeine and rest.  Minimum four days rest.

This wouldn’t be so bad if I wasn’t in my last two weeks at the non-profit organisation I have been working in for the last 11.5 years.  Yes folks, I gave notice two weeks ago.  And my replacement has been appointed and starts on Monday.  And I have a million things to do between now (ie the day before yesterday, when I went on sick leave) and Monday.  This is all I need, quite honestly.

Still, I think the Augmentin is working and I WILL be back at work on Monday.  Meanwhile I have had two days with no computer at all, I curled up with Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers, an old favourite that I more or less know word for word.  I chose that one because I visited Oxford recently with someone who actually knows his way round. Have visited Oxford many times, but not with insider info before. It was interesting to reread Gaudy Night in the light of my new found knowledge.

I had my leaving do from said place of work the other night.  We went to Finc on Wakefield Street.  It was a good venue – great food, non-obtrusive waiting staff, good atmos.  I was given some NZ Art 🙂 three stunningly beautiful lead crystal waka.  I will need a place to put them where the light will pass through.  I love them because they’re beautiful, they’re uniquely NZ and they have connotations of travel, of heritage, of the sea and of the land.  And they are not life size.  That of course is important for future enjoyment thereof.

Am going back to bed now (sniff)

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Don’t you love second-hand bookshops?

We went to dinner tonight with some friends and we got there a bit early.  It was still within Wellington’s late-night shopping time so we spent a few minutes in a second-hand bookstore on Cuba Street.  I think the books are second-hand, not the store, but I digress.

I came away with The Last Cuckoo, a compilation of the very best letters to The Times since 1900. It was compiled in 1987 and is social history in the making. I love it.

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Contemporary fiction

The other day I was in need of a book so I dropped into Whitcoulls.  Not my normal preference, but I was in an area where that was what was available. And they sell lots of books so surely there was one that might suit me.

And I found what I keep finding at the moment, that any book I pick up to read the back of or flick through seems to be about a woman at home whose kids have grown and left or who doesn’t yet have kids and wonders if she wants them or whose kids are in their teens or in fact in any kind of setup with kids or stepkids, and she is wondering about the meaning of life so she gets a job or she starts an affair or she joins a gym or she does something to bring some change to her life, and then we read how she copes with that and what she gets out of it. Sooooo – I don’t know what. Drab? Boring? erm, Predictable? Why are there so many of these books following this basic formula?

Is it me? I know people are going to say I’m being unfair and really I love my life by Another Authoress is a seminal (ovular?) piece of modern literature that will be studied by PhD students for centuries to come, but I’ve read a few now that do not pass my test, which is, “will I read it again.” Why did I buy them in the first place? Good question, probably because I had it in my head that I absolutely had to have a book with me when I went on the bus/to get some lunch/to the airport or whatever.

I noted all this with my blogger’s eye on the day it happened, but didn’t jot it here thinking it was probably me just not able to spend proper time on browsing. Browsing is a skill. It’s demanding. Maybe that day I just wasn’t up to it.

But today Make Tea has talked about authors commenting on blogs that review them and their works, and by following links I found myself in several places within a very short time, all discussing different works from different authors that all appear to follow the basic plotline above.

So it’s not me on a bad day, it’s not Whitcoulls’ buyer only liking one sort of book, it’s not the cover-art triggering the “pick me up” response in me, it appears to be true. There’s a lot of this stuff about.

I know if I call it “post-feminist claptrap” I’ll upset people. I don’t know if it is anything to do with feminism, although I believe die-hards will say that everything is to do with feminism. Is it somehow symptomatic of western women’s inability to resolve this stay-at-home vs not-stay-at-home dilemma? The message seems to be that this is a hard question with no clear answer. Is that helpful?

I will add at this point that there are lots of books I did not pick up because they did not have the appropriate form factor. I want to be able to read the book holding it in one hand. It has to be sufficiently small that I can read it lying down. An awful lot of books have come out in a taller, wider format with large print. No thanks. Often they come out smaller later on so I’ll wait for that kthxbai.

Books are commissioned by publishers because they think they will sell, and then they package them in a way to appeal to their target. Clearly a few of these books achieved the sales objective with yours truly, except I obviously wasn’t the target. Am I the only reader of “normal” sized books that doesn’t want to read this stuff? Am I a square peg in a round hole, again? Are these books the opium of the masses?

Maybe I need to read more literature reviews to get an idea of who’s writing what these days. Maybe I’m just out of touch and looking in the wrong parts of the alphabet.

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Enduring Love

I’m a big fan of Ian McEwan AND Daniel Craig, so Enduring Love has been on my list of films to watch for a long time.  We got it out on DVD last night.

I enjoyed the film, Daniel Craig made a good Joe, I thought. The only thing nagging me was that the book lost me in the middle, I almost didn’t finish it. I think it went down a slow-moving complex path, but I can’t quite remember. I do recall thinking “these men are locked into this, and so am I. Yikes.” It was only Ian McEwan’s wonderful skill with language that kept me going. He is a joy to read, just his sentence structure, even if the text is a little, um, boring at times. Or maybe it was me. Anyway. The film’s plot was not really very complex, just a study of two men’s separate obsessions after a shared event. Actually Joe had several obsessions, one after the other, whereas Jed (Rhys Ifans) just had the one. He was very good too, by the way.

So the nagging feeling needed investigating. Decision: reread the book, quick, or check out IMDB. I did the latter of course, although I will do the former in the near future too. Other people are talking about how the film cut out a lot, so I was right. But the film stands up on its own the way it is, so I think it’s a success. I gave it a 7 at IMDB. I only give 8s or above if I definitely want to see the film again. 7 is for “I’ll watch it again if it’s on, it was a good film”

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Fishing again

well, not me, but…

On Wednesday this week we went to Auckland for the day, and on the flight back there was a high proportion of snuffles and coughs. I said to Podna “I bet I get a cold” and you know what they say about three days coming, three days with you and three days going? Well the three days coming is right. It arrived today 😦

Anyway on Friday I suggested to Podna he might want to make use of Queens Birthday weekend and go over to the Wairarapa or somewhere else interesting. He was very ho-hum about the idea – he always is about my ideas – but this morning when I asked what he was doing today he said “I thought you wanted to go to the Wairarapa?” Typical. Anyway he grudgingly admitted that he would really really really like to go so we went. By the time we got to the Rimutaka Hill Road I was starting to feel like death. But, you know, living with someone with depression ‘n all, you want to keep them doing things they’ve expressed an interest in doing, so I didn’t say much.

We went down to Ocean Beach first. It was too windy for me so I stayed in the car. “It’s not very windy,” Podna said, bent double so as not to get blown over. He stuck at it for a couple of hours and caught a couple of little wrasse, and then we moved round to Whangaimoana, where it was much quieter (should have gone there before probably).

We’d brought with us our gas grill, some duck fillets and cold salads from the deli counter, so I started cooking the dinner while he went off and fished some more. I still felt pretty awful but it was better being up doing something, especially as there was no wind to battle against. Within a few minutes he brought back a huge kahawai which pleased him greatly as he likes it for sashimi and it is also a good curry fish.  It was 63 cm and weighed 2.7 kg

Dinner was yummy and while I was clearing up Podna went off to finish fishing. I gave him half an hour as I felt terrible by then, and wanted to get home to a hot bath and bed, but it was a lovely evening – clear skies, big bright moon – so I thought it was a shame not to compromise. And just as I was dropping off to sleep he turned up with a large-ish spotty shark 🙂 which made him very happy indeed.

It was idyllic conditions there this evening and it’s a pity I didn’t feel well enough to participate, but I sat in the warm car reading my first ever Katherine Mansfield on my mobile phone. Yes I can read books/shortstories/novels on my mobile phone, yes I have never read any Katherine Mansfield before. And what did I start with? At the Bay, of course, what else?

I’ve been looking at a lot of lolcats recently, and am totally besotted with lolcode and want to use it 🙂 it’s obviously rubbing off as today, when I was walking around the Pak’n’Save with my Shop’n’Go device, I was saying to myself “im in ur supermarket, scannin’ ur foodz” and later when I was cooking it was “im at ur bbq, grillin’ ur dux”

So, off for my bath now, hope to limit the effect of this cold. It’s years since I’ve had one, so I’m really peeved. I blame Air New Zealand.

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Jane Austen Book Club

Haven’t posted for a while about books I’m reading.   Have just finished The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler.  It was an enjoyable light read.  I have only read one Jane Austen (Mansfield Park, did it for A-level, actually never read the whole thing, hated it) but also know the broad outline of Pride and Prejudice.  But as you’d expect, you don’t really need to know any Jane Austen to follow this book.

There wasn’t much to it, I guess, but it was a relaxing read. I did want to know what happened to the characters so the plot and characterisation worked. I don’t know if I’ll reread it, it’ll probably go on the “Next Bookfair” pile.

Right now I’m on my first NZ book that I’m likely to finish – Maurice Gee’s In My Father’s Den and yes I have seen the film. But I like the style of writing so I may well try other Maurice Gees. I can’t say he’s my first NZ author – I have also tried Imogen de la Bere’s The Welcoming Committee but I wasn’t able to get into it. I only bought it because I know her. Ha! I don’t really, but I met her very briefly in 1991 when I was visiting someone else at Lincoln University – I had no idea she was a writer, I don’t even know if she was, then. I have no recollection of how the conversation went but I ended up with her business card, which I still have and occasionally muse over whether to continue to keep it and why/why not. So when I saw her name on a book in the bookshop I just had to have it. Of course. Maybe after Father’s Den I’ll try it again.

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Borders

I dropped into the new Borders store on Lambton Quay today. Like others I have been looking forward to the opening. I only had a few minutes but thought I would take the opportunity.

The store was nicely fitted out – spacious, quality shelving etc. The arrangements of things were odd though. The fiction (arranged A-Z) seemed OK but the A shelves started on the back wall in the Paperchase section. ??? I just had a quick browse in the fiction and they seemed to have ten copies of several of the books, which isn’t exactly maximising their shelf space.

Then I went upstairs to have a canter through their history section. When I found it, it seemed to have only three bookcases, all looking at the twentieth century and beyond. Strange. All was OK though, as I found the next aisle was also history, with I think ten bookcases, but I seemed to be going through the store back-to-front; however, having come in via the big Lambton Quay entrance, that’s a bit odd.

But when I looked at the books, I realised the buyer doesn’t know or care much about history. There were 6 different editions of Machiavelli’s The Prince, with several copies of each. Do we really need six different editions? I mean really? Besides, this isn’t history, this is literature, possibly, or politics, or at a stretch it’s philosophy. Just because it was written 500 years ago doesn’t make it history. They also had La Morte d’Arthur (again several editions) plus some other Arthurian legends. Not history.

What medieval/early modern history they did have seemed to be all written by Alison Weir. Now Alison Weir is OK in her way, actually I don’t like her much, but she does deserve a place on the early modern England shelf. Or even two. But not this many. There are other historians. I would have been gladdened by a nice Horrocks or even a Wrightson or Sharpe. Christopher Hill has been pretty prolific, what about him? And not to mention any NZ historians of this period, there must be some, and they must have published something in paperback.

So combining this with the oddity of multiple copies of not many titles in the fiction section, it feels like the buyer buys books that look pretty or that line up evenly on the shelves.

A big disappointment. I thought Borders would be operated by people that like books and read them.

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The Constant Princess – Philippa Gregory

Eagle-eyed blogreaders will have noticed a reference to Katherine of Aragon the other day, and might have wondered where that came from. The answer is, I’ve been reading The Constant Princess by Philippa Gregory.

I’m not a huge fan of historical fiction and I must say I was put off the so-called “quality” end of the genre by Sharon Penman who had the brass nerve to sit in Middleham Castle writing her most famous work, The Sunne in Splendour (I have been shown the rock she sat upon) and then misrepresent the castle in a wildly inaccurate way. You’re going to ask me what she got wrong. I can’t remember and the only way I can find out is to reread the book, which I currently don’t feel like doing (can you tell?)

I don’t require historical accuracy in fiction, but I do if the author claims it is brilliantly researched and a close representation of the known facts. I enjoyed TSIS when I first read it about 20-25 years ago, but when I saw Middleham for myself about ten years later, and was shown the aforesaid rock, and then reread TSIS, I took against the acclaimed Penman in a big way. I could also point out that her representation of Simon de Montfort in Here be Dragons as a man who liked reading so always took his books with him on campaign was also laughable given that “books” were more than likely A2- or even A1-size in the thirteenth century and you’d be hard pressed keeping your page with the thumb of one hand while controlling your war charger with the other hand. Admittedly she didn’t quite claim he read them in quiet moments on the battlefield but even so. Anyway, that gave a snigger at the time and I haven’t reread HBD more than a couple of times, which in itself says much about how little I like the book. If I like a book I will read it at least once every three years, probably more often.

[Edited: of course it wasn’t Here be Dragons, it was Falls the Shadow, sorry about that]

Back to Gregory, I’ve read a few of hers and I enjoy them well enough (thinking about it I haven’t reread any though). She makes no claim that she is retelling history or indeed that she is filling gaps in the known facts in a truthful and fitting manner. She takes some groups of characters from history and writes stories about them, couching them in a setting that is broadly accurate. If you want to run off to Tudor England for a while, Philippa Gregory takes you there, provided you want to watch “Friends” during your visit and not the news bulletins on the royals and the politicians of the time.

But The Constant Princess left me feeling peeved. I enjoyed it right up to the end, when it fell very flat. She takes Katherine’s story (as she is writing it) through the marriage to Arthur, his death, the years waiting to marry Henry, that marriage, the pregnancy, birth and death of their son Henry, right up to the Battle of Flodden Field, then suddenly skips 16 years to the Papal Legation in 1529, and then stops right there. Just as it’s all about to start.

It might be my own fault. I had the great privilege to study Henry VIII 13 years ago under his main biographer of the 20th century, Jack Scarisbrick. I consider myself honoured and fortunate to have had that chance, and I must say he was fantastic to learn under although very exacting and demanding. And he made me realise who Katherine of Aragon was. (Gregory does this bit OK, by the way, which was why I was enjoying the book so much.) It sounds stupid to say it like this, but she was the Infanta Katherine of Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, the greatest monarchs Spain has ever had, certainly the most powerful monarchs in Europe of their time, and Katherine grew up with them at the height of their power. She was aunt to Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, another magnate. She was a woman of power in her own right, long before she married Arthur, let alone Henry (which is why Henry VII wanted her for Arthur) and Henry’s big mistake in the whole divorce/annulment fiasco was that he assumed Katherine would just do as she was told, and she wouldn’t and didn’t. Even the Pope told Henry to stop making such a public fuss because he was not going to get agreement from her or anyone else about the status of the marriage – the Pope’s suggestion being to force her into a convent and then quietly request an annulment after that. My reading is that Henry could not persuade Katherine to do that, or didn’t know how to set about trying. Wolsey had a go but even he gave up. Besides Henry wanted everyone to acknowledge how right he was, which the convent method wouldn’t have satisfied.

I guess I wanted the book to talk about the divorce at least a little bit. We got one page.

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Alistair Cooke

For my birthday one of the things my partner chose from my list to get for me was a compilation of Alistair Cooke’s Letters from America. It’s a regular paperback size, regular paperback price and in these days where we are all colonised by the USA, should be required reading for all adults.

In case you don’t know, he was born in England in 1906 into a “working class” family, was educated at Cambridge, Yale and Harvard and spent most of his adult working life living in New York – he took out American citizenship in 1941. His Letters from America were so highly regarded that he won various prizes and awards from both sides of the pond. I occasionally heard his broadcasts on the radio which is why I wanted this compilation. It is, after all, an excellent example of what a blog can be, a commentary on the world around you, building up over time. And what an excellent choice I made. I have only just started reading and the very first letter of the collection, written in 1946, says this:

“Americans are not particularly good at sensing the real elements of another people’s culture. It helps them to approach foreigners with carefree warmth and an animated lack of misgiving. It also makes them, on the whole, poor administrators on foreign soil. They find it almost impossible to believe that poorer peoples, far from the Statue of Liberty, should not want in their heart of hearts to become Americans. If it should happen that America, in its new period of world power, comes to do what every other world power has done: if Americans should have to govern large numbers of foreigners, you must expect that Americans will be well hated before they are admired for themselves.”

He could have written that yesterday.

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How dashing

So my alma mater and erstwhile employer has been part of a study to establish why Agatha Christie’s books are so popular. Apparently it’s because she uses dashes a lot – this excites me very much because so do I. Like that. I expect that means I will enjoy fame and popularity too. Yay.

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lions, witches, wardrobes

Just come back from the late night showing of Narnia: TLTW&TW

I was a big fan of the books as a child and teenager, indeed I did my A-level English project on them at age 18. I haven’t read them in years, and would like to just to refresh my memory but they are buried in a box somewhere in store 😦

I enjoyed the film. People have mentioned stuff being cut to fit the film length but everything I remember in the book was there. Some of the scenes were very well done. Tilda Swinton as the Witch was excellent, scarier than the Witch in the book (I found the Witch in The Magician’s Nephew was more frightening, far less in control) – her grand gestures were ok but her silent looks, particularly at Edmund, were just chilling.

I don’t remember quite so much fuss about the battle and I also don’t remember so many different animals and other creatures. I did like the representation of the talking trees. In Lord of the Rings the trees walked and talked from their trunks, and my memory tells me the treetrunks talked in Narnia too. However the way it was blended with the Dryads in this film was nice and captured the spirit of it very well.

I didn’t think Susan was quite so much of a wet blanket in the book but she got better towards the end of the film. I was also ready to punch Peter after the first 10 minutes. Lucy was a bit younger than I thought, but she is supposed to be young enough to still be imagining friends etc, so that was probably about right.

Liam Neeson’s voice was fitting. Mind you I’m always ready to look at or listen to Liam Neeson no matter what the circumstances. The grace of Aslan didn’t quite come across visually and he never called Lucy “dear heart” – they changed it to “dear child” I think – which took the edge of the oldworldliness he has. But Liam’s voice had the right amount of gravitas.

I think anyone who enjoyed the book should see the film but if you haven’t read the book, probably reading it first is a good idea. The film is a faithful representation of the book with some nice interpretative touches.

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