Joan Aiken : The Wolves of Willoughby Chase

My first acquaintance with this well-loved classic by Joan Aiken came many years ago after a short stint in London where our daughter spent six months in a London school. When she was leaving to return home to Australia her delightful headmistress, Miss Wellborn, gave her The Wolves of Willoughby Chase as a farewell gift. At eight years old our timid child could not face a tale where parents disappear and children are ill-treated by vicious usurpers, to say nothing of the wolves. The book disappeared (hopefully passed on to a more robust friend).

Jonathan Swift invented the computer

Messing About in #1962

Seeing that many of the bloggers I follow were taking part in the #1962 Club read of books published in that year (organised by Simon of stuckinabook.com and Karen of kaggsysbookishramblings.com) I decided to cast my eyes over a few books published in that year. See my short notes below.

Louise Gluck 1943-2023

Vladimir Nabokov Stories

I have always loved Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire where a rival takes over the manuscripts of a dead poet. Some say the poetry is pastiche, but I find it moving and exquisite.

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain

By the fake azure of the windowpane;

I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I

Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.

And from the inside, too, I’d duplicate

Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:

Uncurtaining the night, I’d let dark glass,

Hand all the furniture above the grass,

And how delightful when a fall of snow

Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so

As to make chair and bed exactly stand

Upon that snow, out in that crystal land.

Kamila Shamsie: Best Of Friends

Simply Messing About in Books

First some literary news. For those of you who don’t read The Guardian let me be the first to tell you Karl Ove Knausgaard has a new series of books. The Wolves of Eternity follows The Morning Star, and he has just finished the third in the series. All these books run to 800 pages, but instead of being about his family these books concern themselves with black metal and transhumanism, whatever that may mean. Will you be seeking them out?

Gareth Hinds

Margery Sharp : The Stone of Chastity

I eke out my Margery Sharp books. I don’t want to exhaust her writing too soon and she has only written twenty-two novels for adults. She writes witty social comedies, which always have something different about them. We have the artist Martha, with her relentless focus on her art and her tactless way of speaking, we have Cluny Brown sent to learn how to be a parlourmaid, but who has quite an effect on all who come in contact with her, and Ann Laventie in Rhododendron Pie, the only unpretentious member of a family where her father, brother and sister all see themselves as unconventional artists.