Breakfast At Libraries

I don't know anyone at all outside my family who has read, or even heard of, Frogmorton by Susan Colling. My mum bought a hardback copy from a jumble sale when we were little. It was published in the mid-50s and has beautiful pen and ink pictures by EH Shepard, famous for producing the iconic illustrations for the Winnie-the-Pooh books and The Wind In The Willows.

I don't keep count of the number of times I've read a book, and there must be many contenders for the one I've read the most times. Of the books I've read as an adult, George Orwell's Keep The Aspidistra Flying would certainly be up there. In my teens, I read Dracula, The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman's Good Omens and Nineteen Eighty-Four more times than I care to remember. But the books I've read the most times were probably ones I read as a child, when I was a great re-reader, and there's one series in particularly that I've read so many times as a child and as an adult that it seems a worthy choice for this post, and that's CS Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia.

I hadn't started junior school when I started reading them from my brother's box set of the seven books, so I must have been about six or seven. That's quite young for them (The Magician's Nephew was a set text for my class at secondary school, and I was twelve by then) but I was precocious as a child when it came to books (actually, books were pretty much the only thing I was precocious about, as I was pretty hopeless socially and took about six months to learn to tie my own shoelaces).

I've read all seven of them many, many times over the past 32 years, and some of them (Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in particular) I've read many more times than that. I also had them as audiobooks when I was little, perfectly read by the inimitable Michael Hordern and accompanied by truly beautiful flute and harp music, and listened to them so many times that eventually the tapes scrunched up shortly before cassette players began to disappear from Dixon's, by which time I was in my 20s.

I am aware that they are a bit sexist and a bit racist; they were written in the 1950s, after all. I'm aware that they are Christian allegories, too. People who don't like them always like to point this out to me, as if I might not have noticed. But I couldn't give a toss. The Chronicles of Narnia are just brilliant. They are full of magic and mythology and battles and humour and incredibly memorable characters and they are stunning feats of imagination and narrative skill. They are classics of children's literature and classics of fantasy literature and I could never, ever be tired of reading them. I was captivated by them the very first time I read them, and I'm every bit as captivated by them today.

I love all independent bookshops. However, one of my favourite independent bookshop experiences was in Kirkwall, Orkney in 2007.

If you've ever been to Orkney - or hopefully even if you haven't, frankly - you'll be aware that the islands are very small, very remote and very sparsely populated. When we we decided to go, I hadn't known whether Kirkwall, Orkney's largest town (still smaller than the average village) would even have a bookshop, which meant I became slightly fretful when I realised we would be on holiday there when the final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, was released. Would I be able to get hold of a copy? If not, would I be able to manage not to hear any spoilers before I got back to the mainland? I'm a colossal Potter nerd, and I had serious concerns.

Fortunately all my fears were unfounded, because Kirkwall is home to the excellent Orcadian Bookshop. It's an excellent, friendly, well-stocked bookshop owned by the local newspaper, and has a great mix of books, including local fiction, folklore and history as well as more mainstream reads. And not only did it manage to get its shipment of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows over from the mainland in time for its launch day, it also held a midnight opening event, just like huge bookstore chains like Waterstones and Borders. When we were walking back to our hotel after a late meal, we saw a long queue of people - not all of whom were children - waiting excitedly for the doors to open on the dot of twelve, most of them dressed as witches and wizards and waving wands. I love the fact that an small, independent bookshop with a limited staff - and, let's face it, a captive audience; it's not like people would have had anywhere else to get their copy before the morning - still made an effort to open for a midnight launch, just to indulge people's excitement about a book. The anticipation on the faces of the kids in the queue said it all.

I didn't buy my copy at midnight but I did go in first thing in the morning. I can't remember if I paid full price for the hardcover book, or if they'd reduced the price to make it more competitive with the huge reductions being offered on Amazon, but even if they'd charged me double I wouldn't have dreamed of trying to buy the book elsewhere. 

There are so many book characters I'd like to be that picking just one for the purposes of this challenge is really quite tough. Cassandra Mortmain from I Capture The Castle, Hermione Granger from the Harry Potter series, Pippi Longstocking, the narrator of Roald Dahl's The Magic Finger who turns her hunting-and-shooting neighbours into terrified human-bird hybrids, His Dark Materials' Lyra Bellacqua, The Hitch-hikers' Guide to the Galaxy's Zaphod Beeblebrox, Huckleberry Finn and any number of protagonists from Golden Age detective fiction - who wouldn't want to be Lord Peter Wimsey or Albert Campion - are all strong contenders.

This is a tough one, because I have absolutely no idea of the sales figures of any of the books I read. Obviously I can make a reasonable guess that when I read something that's spent a year on the bestsellers list - your Harry Potters, your Gone Girls, your Girl With The Dragon Tattoos - it's a book that will have sold pretty damn well. Other than that, though, I wouldn't have a clue. It's not something I ever think about.

So, I'm simply going to choose a great book from a small press publisher: King Crow by Michael Stewart, published by Bluemoose. Now, I think I can safely say that this book must have sold a great deal more copies than most small press novels: Guardian readers voted it for it in 2011 to win the Guardian's 'Not The Booker' contest, for a start. It has a not inconsiderable 26 reviews on Amazon. But I would certainly imagine it's no Da Vinci Code in the sales stakes, and there's no justice in this. It's an incredibly gripping, clever, original novel with a rare authenticity to it that really makes it stand out from the crowd. I heartily recommend it.

I've reviewed King Crow before, so I won't go into more detail, but you can read my thoughts on it here.

There are actually loads of books I've never finished. I don't believe in wasting time on leisure activities that I don't enjoy, and I never want to see reading as a chore, so if I don't like a book, I will happily give up on it.

However, I think the book I spent longest on reading before I gave up was Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susannah Clarke. It's a hefty tome, about 800 pages, and I read about 700 pages of them before putting it down and completely forgetting I hadn't finished it. A couple of weeks later I remembered I'd never got the end, and realised I had absolutely no interest in how the story would conclude.

It's not that I didn't think it was a good book, exactly. I can absolutely see that it probably is. It's just that at no point did I feel excited by anything that was happening in it, and at no point did I really give a toss about what happened to any of the characters. I don't know why it left me so utterly cold, as on paper, it should right up my street, but I just couldn't feel any sort of investment in it.

I'm afraid I have no answer to this one. I can't remember not being able to read, and I can't remember not liking reading.

As a keen reader, I was generally undaunted by books assigned for English, always actually read them, and often got quite excited about them.

I bought a copy of The Vizard Mask by Diana Norman from the local independent bookshop in my home town in 1995. The bookshop isn't there any more, and the book seemed to go out of print quite soon too. In fact, I know only one other person who has read it (my mum, because I recommended it to her).

I know two things about Diana Norman. One, she's dead. Two, she was the wife of film critic and pickled onion magnate Barry Norman. Neither of those things have any bearing on The Vizard Mask though: the important thing about it is that it's ace.



Set during the Restoration, the story begins with Penitence Hurd arriving in England from America, where she has been brought up among a community of Puritan settlers. An orphaned young woman, rendered almost incapable of speech by a severe stutter, Penitence is searching for her aunt. Appalled by the immorality she finds on the streets of London, she's horrified to discover that her aunt presides over a large brothel - but Penitence has nowhere else to go, and stubbornly sets about making a niche for herself in an environment in which she's horribly out of place. Soon, she begins to rethink some of her own values, and when the Plague sweeps through the city, her life undergoes a fundamental and irreversible change.

The Vizard Mask is lively, vibrant, gripping and epic in scope and ambition - the timespan of the novel covers decades, every one of the many characters is rendered in vivid detail, and the political and social turmoil that accompanied the Restoration period is key to the narrative. The struggles of women to make their way in a society in which women were essentially either wives, whores or servants are revisited time and time again throughout the story, and the friendships of women are the most enduring and touching relationships in the novel. The Vizard Mask is also teeming with rich historical detail that makes it a thoroughly immersive read. It's a proper, rollicking, action-packed, rollercoaster ride of a book.

I genuinely haven't got a clue why this book wasn't a colossal bestseller; neither can I understand why it wasn't adapted into a lavishly expensive, occasionally explicit BBC drama along the lines of the TV adaptation of The Crimson Petal and the White. The fact that it's out of print (and has been for years) is quite simply insane, as it's been impossible to track down paperbacks for about 15 years.

But now: the good news. However much some of you might hate e-books, if there's one thing they're good for it's resurrected novels that are no longer in print. Happily, The Vizard Mask has recently become available for Kindle, and at only £2.99 too. Buy it, read it, love it.

Summer reads are traditionally fat, slightly trashy but immensely absorbing affairs suitable for reading on planes and beaches. Ideally, you want something that fits those categories but - and here's the tricky part - isn't also a tiresome pile of poorly-written shite.

To that end, my ideal summer read is the fabulous Peyton Place by Grace Metalious. It was a colossal seller in the 1950s, and also the subject of many a library banning and numerous angry letters to newspapers simply because it was deemed to be such a scandalous potboiler. In truth, there is nothing in it that would be considered beyond the pale in a novel today, but that's not to say it's devoid of shocks, even to today's readers - it does deal with some painful and uncomfortable issues, albeit ones which are more commonly discussed now than they were when Metalious was writing.



It's a long, immersive read, teeming with fascinating characters, all of whom have shameful secrets to hide as Metalious reveals the scandalous goings-on that lurk below the wholesome surface of an outwardly wholesome American town. It lifts the lid on small-town life in a way that was groundbreaking at the time, and even today, still feels almost guiltily voyeuristic at times, as if we're peeping through someone's curtains or reading their private letters.

Peyton Place is greatly underrated in my opinion, often unfairly dismissed as soapy rubbish, but if anything, its more Twin Peaks than soap opera. It's a long way from your average summer bonkbuster, not just in terms of plot and character but also the quality of Metalious' prose, which is exemplary. It's also incredibly evocative of its time, so if you're a 1950s fan, it's worth reading for that alone. As far as I'm concerned, Peyton Place is an ideal summer read, so open your mind to its reputation, order yourself a Long Island iced tea, stretch out on your sun-lounger and give it a go.

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James is very short - barely a novella - and one of the first books I studied for my degree. It now occurs to me that my overly intense enthusiasm for it probably made me look even more weird and nerdy than usual in the subsequent seminar, as I don't remember anyone else being even remotely excited about the book, and neither did they seem particularly interested in the endless possibilities for interpretation that are woven into the short narrative. I, however, couldn't stop wittering on about it. I probably waved my hands and pointed at people a lot as well. That was in 1995, and my enthusiasm hasn't waned. If I discover that someone has read it, I still get quite excited because it means I can browbeat them into a discussion about it.

In January 1999 I started my first 'proper' job on the same day as someone else, with whom I became good friends. A keen reader like me, she practically coerced me into buying The Secret History by Donna Tartt, a book of which I'd been aware but in which I hadn't been particularly interested in reading, because, she said, she 'needed to talk about it with someone.'

I've written at length about Cora Ravenwing by Gina Wilson before, so I won't repeat myself - but I absolutely believe this haunting children's novel deserves classic status. You can read my review here (although there are some potential spoilers).

At the start of my original blog post about Cora Ravenwing, I remark that it's almost certainly out of print - fortunately, two years after I wrote about the book, it was reissued by Faber under their Faber Finds imprint and is now available once again.

Kenneth J Harvey is an award-winning and internationally successful Canadian author, so I'm sure that in fact, large numbers of people have read The Town That Forgot How To Breathe - but I've never met one, and everyone to whom I've recommended it has stubbornly refused to do so. I find this deeply frustrating, because The Town That Forgot How To Breathe is a masterpiece of literary supernatural fiction, and in my experience works that successfully combine these genres are as rare as hen's teeth.

Joseph Blackwood and his young daughter Robin have returned to Bareneed, a tiny, isolated fishing town on Canada's Newfoundland coast where Joseph grew up, to spend the summer. It soon becomes clear that strange things are happening to Bareneed, primarily that its troubled inhabitants are being gradually overcome by a strange respiratory sickness during which the ability to breathe unconsciously is lost. At the same time, Robin is haunted by the ghost of the dead child of a neighbour, Joseph becomes afflicted by possession or psychosis or both, and the sea begins to offer up the mysteriously unrotted corpses from centuries-worth of drowning victims. Tidal waves are predicted, and strange sea creatures sighted.

If this sounds like a Lovecraftian, modern gothic horror novel, in many respects it is, but there is an awful lot more to the book than that. Bareneed has suffered an economic downturn after the closure of the historic cod fishing industry that has supported its people for hundreds of years, leaving the town and its inhabitants with little hope or purpose, and the disturbing, unnamed sickness that afflicts its residents can be read as a metaphor for the gradual suffocation of a community. The emotional lives of the people of Bareneed, many of whom we meet as the plot unfolds, are depicted with sensitivity and skill, and the ongoing conflict between the natural environment and its uneasy relationship with modern technology is also cleverly explored.

It's probably fair to say that The Town That Forgot How To Breathe lacks focus - it's a rambling and occasionally baffling novel with a number of seemingly disparate plot strands, but it's an exceptional, incredibly atmospheric and unsettling novel that bears repeated reading and multiple interpretations. Ever since I read it about ten years ago, I've been desperate to discuss it with someone - so if someone could just bloody read it and consent to talk about it with me at great length, I'd be really quite grateful.

It's Father's Day today, and today's BookADay topic is 'Favourite fictional father'. 

Dracula by Bram Stoker was my favourite book throughout my teens and it remains a very special book for me to this day.

I have always loved horror, and at the age of around 13 I started to watch Hammer horror films late at night on the television in my bedroom: at the time, it was the height of summer and my leg was in plaster, so I was kept awake well into the night by the heat, the itching and the miserable ache in my ankle. BBC1 happened to be showing a double bill of Hammer and Amicus films last thing at night before the National Anthem (no 24-hour rolling news in those days) and I became completely hooked. I immediately found a copy of Dracula and read it - several times, in fact. I think I actually carried it around with me in my school-bag for about two years, and I certainly gave a talk on it for my A-level English coursework when I was 17. I also wrote my undergraduate dissertation on the character of Dracula as an enduring cultural icon, and by that point I was 22, so clearly the book stayed with me for a very long time.

It's a book with many faults, but it is, in my opinion, a cracking good read, and surprisingly modern for a novel that we think of as quintessentially Victorian Gothic. There are references to typewriters, to Kodak cameras, to Bradshaw's Railway Guide. Count Dracula is a remarkably conversational, practical, human sort of character, which makes the revelation that he is in fact a shape-shifting undead blood-drinking predator all the more startling. And there are certain scenes that really do stand up to today's standards of creepiness (for my money, the moment where Harker catches Dracula crawling up the castle wall like a lizard is up there with the best).

If you haven't read it, do - there will be things in that you recognise at once from popular culture references and film, and yet there will be the other things that completely wrong-foot you.* Despite a million vampire novels that have appeared since, it's still the best.

*One of my favourite things about other people reading Dracula for the first time is their inevitable shock when they read that the Count has white hair and a moustache.

Lots of contenders here - anything by David Sedaris, Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, Good Omens by the fantasy genre dream team of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Jonathan Coe's The Dwarves of Death ... I could go on. But I've decided to choose one of the books that consistently makes me laugh out loud, the discovery of which I still remember as an absolute joy.

1066 And All That by Walter Carruthers Sellar and Robert Julian Yeatman was published in 1930, and yet (despite being a book about history) seems so completely contemporary and modern in its style of  humour that I can't help thinking it must have been far ahead of its time.

It's a book based on the principle that 'History is not what you thought. It is what you remember. All other history defeats itself.' It is, the introduction says, 'the only Memorable History of England, because all the History that you can remember is in this book, which is the result of years of research in golf-clubs, gun-rooms, green rooms etc. For instance, 2 out of the 4 Dates originally included were eliminated at the last moment, a research done at the Eton and Harrow match having revealed that they are not memorable.'

It's actually quite hard to describe 1066 And All That, but essentially it's a part-satirical, part-absurdist, part-self-deprecating, wildly erroneous account of the history of England up to the point at which 'America was clearly Top Nation, and history came to a .' It reads rather like a series of essays by confused secondary school pupils, full of random half-truths, ludicrous factual misunderstandings and repeated use of meaningfully capped up phrases like 'a Good King' and 'Top Nation'. At the end of each chapter are mock exam papers with questions like:

5. "Uneasy lies the head that wears the Throne."
a) Suggest remedies, or
b) Imitate the action of a Tiger.

and

10. Describe in excessive detail
a) The advantages of the Black Death
b) The fate of the Duke of Clarence
c) A Surfeit.

(NB Candidates should write on at least one side of the paper.)

I certainly think it helps to have some knowledge of history, particularly of studying history at school, to find this book truly funny, but I would urge anyone to read it anyway. When I bought a copy (I say bought; I have a guilty suspicion that I stole it from my school library - it's a 1950s edition) I remember bringing it home and reading huge chunks of it aloud to my brother, and both of us genuinely weeping with laughter. I can't imagine a time when 1066 And All That wouldn't seem funny to me. I know absolutely nothing at all about its authors, but my god, I'm grateful to them.

I’m struggling to think of a book that I pretend to have read. I don’t think I’ve pretended to have read a book since my university days, when I, and everyone else on my course, would sit nodding nervously in seminars and regurgitating points from the York Notes on whichever brick-sized Victorian novel we were meant to have finished that week.

I can’t really think of any other circumstance in which I’d want to pretend I’d read a book that I hadn’t. If I haven’t read something, I’m more than happy to say so. I don’t think there’s any book anyone should be ashamed never to have read.

I can, however, think of a book which I thought I’d read and would confidently have claimed to have done so had anyone asked, but later realised I hadn’t read it at all: Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

I can remember chunks of it very clearly, and I once wrote an undergraduate essay on its relationship with colonialism. To this day I can talk about it fairly articulately ...  and this was just what I was doing when someone asked me how it ended, and I realised I didn’t have a clue.

It seems I never got to the end of Robinson Crusoe, which is understandable really because it’s so damn boring. You think it will be a tale of great adventure, with Crusoe fighting for survival on his island and being attacked by cannibals, and teaching Man Friday to speak English in a way that’s actually slightly arrogant and a bit racist. But in fact, huge sections of the book are basically just espousing the Protestant work ethic of the day. It appears that, worn down by all the lengthy inventories of how many goats Crusoe has managed to raise and what repairs he’s done to his self-built stockade and how many turnips he’s grown (I may have misremembered that one, to be honest) I simply gave up.

I’ve no idea whether he’s rescued from the island, or by whom. And you know what? I honestly don’t care.

I like second-hand bookshops so much that I once made my boyfriend take me to Hay-on-Wye for my birthday so I could spend the whole day doing nothing but looking at old books. I expect I inherited my love of used books from my parents, who are no stranger to a second-hand book themselves. When I was a child, a lot – probably most – of my books were second-hand, either handed down from friends and family or bought second-hand from charity shops, school fetes and jumble sales. Not only did this make books a lot more affordable, but also meant that I got to read all sorts of interesting fiction that was probably long out of print by the time I even got my hands on it. I’m going to choose an example of one of those books in a later post this month, so for this post I’ve picked Princess Mary’s Gift Book.



I don’t know anything about the shop from which this book was bought, because it was actually bought by my parents when I was a child, but I was fascinated by it, and read the stories in it many times. The Princess Mary of the title was the eldest daughter of George V, and the book was produced and sold in 1917 to raise money for something called The Queen's Work For Women Fund during the First World War. I’ve no idea whether Mary had any input into the contents of the book or whether she simply lent her face and name to it as a sort of royal patron or sponsor, but I assume her involvement gave it some kudos because it includes work by some notably popular writers of the time, including JM Barrie, Baroness Orczy, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling and H Rider Haggard.

It’s essentially an anthology of short stories, poems and essays, the subject matter of which is, as you’d expect, all very uncontroversial – mostly whimsical humour, stirring, inspiring adventure tales or rather sweet little poems. I get the impression that they’d tried to include something for all the family, and I can imagine parts of it being read aloud in the drawing room after dinner. It’s all very British, and you get quite a sense of people’s belief in the Empire.


What I loved most about it, and still love to this day, are the illustrations. There are several colour plates in the book which are just beautiful. Apparently, a lot of copies of the book were actually cut up in later years so that the plates could be sold individually as prints, and while I can’t possibly endorse the hacking up of a lovely book, I can certainly see why they would be appealing.





The rest of the book actually seems quite cheaply produced in terms of paper stock and binding, which is wholly understandable given that it was printed as a charitable project and at a time when materials must have been in relatively short supply.

This is a book that’s very much of its time, and whenever I look at it, I get a very strong sense of the period in which it was produced, and what the book was trying to achieve. There are doubtless plenty of copies available on eBay and so on because it must have been produced in fairly large numbers, but when I was a child I always felt there was something really special about this book and I still get that same feeling when I look at it today.

There is one more thing I like about this book, which is that some illustrations of fairies that appear in were the ones that were copied by two little girls, Frances Griffith and Elsie Wright, when they created the famous Cottingley Fairies photographs, a hoax that fooled numerous 'experts' of the day including Arthur Conan Doyle himself.

I'm cheating with this one, because I've chosen not just one book, but the work of a particular author: Agatha Christie. Apart from the smell of Rothman's Superkings, a slice of bread pudding and a Bejam's choc ice, nothing reminds me more of my nan than Agatha Christie.

There are relatively few of these on my shelves, because if I buy a book that’s been adapted for film or TV I usually go out of my way not to buy the tie-in edition. I'm not sure why this is - probably misguided snobbery on my part.

I Capture The Castle  by Dodie Smith is one of my favourite books of all time. Everything about it is quite simply lovely. It’s beautifully written, with eccentric, deeply flawed but still somehow likeable characters. Despite being partly about first love, it’s never sentimental. It’s bittersweet, wry and funny, devoid of cliché and packed with charm.

Amazingly, I didn’t read it until I was an adult, despite it being a popular book with younger girls (and indeed, if you have a bright daughter aged around 12 or older, please do buy it for her). The copy I read first was this Virago paperback edition.



I think I just picked this copy up in Waterstones, or possibly Books Etc, either when I was a student or when I’d just started my first ‘proper’ job. As soon as I’d read it I lent it to my mum, knowing that she would love it, and she did, and I think my sister's read it as well. I'm constantly recommending it to people.

A few years later, my parents bought me this beautiful illustrated hardback copy from a second-hand bookseller. It's a Folio Society edition - I love the Folio Society.



I absolutely love it, and have read this copy at least three times. It’s so satisfying to hold, with exquisite pen-and-ink pictures and high-quality paper – plus, the style seems so in keeping with the period in which the book is set. This feels like the sort of book Cassandra Mortmain, who narrates the story, might have owned herself.

Despite owning the Folio Society edition, though, I can’t quite bring myself to get rid of the old paperback. I love the story so much that giving it away completely would seem all wrong – plus, it’s one of those books that I like to keep on hand just in case it’s ever vitally important that I lend it to someone.

A week ago we spent a day spring-cleaning and decluttering our house. During this exercise we actually got rid of quite a lot of books. It breaks my heart to give books away but we have a very small house and a great deal of books, and the shelves we had custom-built in which to accommodate them are already full to bursting. Plus, there were certainly books on the shelves that neither of us will ever read again, and we intend to give them to charity so at least someone else will benefit from them.

There is no one book that I 'always' give as a gift. I buy books as presents all the time, but the people I buy gifts for have varied tastes, and there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to books.

The last book I gave as a gift was this, which I sent to my sister up in Scotland a couple of weeks ago.

I realise it's ridiculous, but Debbie is her heroine and style icon and those paper dress-up dolls remind me of when we were kids, and I knew it would at least make her smile. There's a David Bowie edition available too, which is tempting.

Thirteen years ago I had a relatively brief on-off fling with a man who turned out to be a complete tit. 

I have many lovely books with blue covers but here's a particular favourite, Thursbitch by Alan Garner.

Those of you who are on Twitter may have noticed the #bookaday hashtag this month. Started by @boroughpress, it's a 30-day challenge to share a book a day. As you'll have noticed, I have far too much to say about books to keep to a 140-character tweet per day, so I've decided to use my blog for the challenge instead. Here's the first entry.