Chastleton House (It Even Has a Bookshop)

I’ve been off my blogging game ever since we got back from America, but I hope to remedy that soon. I have a blog post planned for every day of the coming week, including some reviews, my monthly Library Checkout, a few recommendations for July releases, and a look back at the best books from the first half of the year.

Today I’m easing myself back into blogging with a mini profile of the National Trust historic manor we visited yesterday, Chastleton House in Oxfordshire (but it’s nearer the Gloucestershire border – very much Cotswolds country).

Photo by Chris Foster.

My brother-in-law sent us a voucher for free entry into any NT property, but my eye was drawn to this one in particular because I saw that there’s a secondhand bookshop in the stables. Compared to other historic houses, this one feels a lot less fusty. It’s been preserved as it was when the NT acquired it in 1991, so instead of reconstructed seventeenth-century rooms you get them as they were last used by later tenants. There are cracks in the plasterwork, cobwebs in the corners, and lots of stuff everywhere. But as a result, it seems less like part of the corporate fold; even the “Do Not Touch” signs are handwritten.

Photo by Chris Foster.

Photo by Chris Foster.

Chastleton has a literary claim to fame of which I was unaware before our visit: it was a filming location for the 2015 BBC adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. (Never mind that it was built in 1607–12, well after the Tudor history that novel is meant to portray.) Another interesting historical nugget: this is where the rules of croquet were codified in the 1860s, and there are still croquet lawns there today. Our visit happened to coincide with a special lawn games weekend, so we learned how to play croquet properly and my husband proceeded to trounce me.

Photo by Chris Foster.

Of course, I availed myself of a few bargain books from the secondhand stall.

We also had tea and cake from a charity sale in the next-door churchyard. After dinner back home, in the evening we decided to walk 10 minutes down the road to our local event space for a folk concert featuring The Willows, with Gareth Lee and Annie Baylis supporting. We’ve been to three gigs at this former village hall so far this year; with tickets just £10 each and the venue so close, why not?! Each time we have heard absolutely excellent live folk music, with tinges of everything from Americana to electronica.

The Willows in performance. Photo by Chris Foster.

All together, a smashing day out.

How People Found My Blog Recently

I’m always interested to find out how people who aren’t regular followers catch wind of my blog. The web searches documented in my WordPress statistics are often bizarre, but do point to what have been some of my most enduringly popular posts: reviews of The First Bad Man, The Girl Who Slept with God, and The Essex Serpent; and write-ups of events with Diana Athill and Michel Faber. I also get a fair number of searches for Ann Kidd Taylor, whose two books I’ve featured at different points.

Here are some of the more interesting results from the last six months or so. My favorite search of all may well be “underwhelmed by ferrante”! (Spelling and punctuation are unedited throughout.)

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October 19: the undiscovered islands malachy tallack, the first bad man, ann kidd taylor wedding

October 21: prose/poetry about autumn

November 2: ann kidd taylor, irmina barbara yelin, the first bad man summary, diana athill on molly keane

November 6: michel faber poems, essex serpent as byatt, book summary of the girl who slept with gid byval brelinski

November 17: book cycle, james lasdun, novel the girl who slept with god

November 25: john bradshaw the lion in the living room, bibliotherapy open courses the school of life, barbara yelin irmina, 2016 best prose poem extracts

December 5: seal morning, paul evans field notes from the edge, at the existentialist café: freedom, being, and apricot cocktails with jean-paul sartre, simone de beauvoir, albert camus, marti, read how many books at once

December 23: midwinter novel melrose, underwhelmed by ferrante

January 6: charlotte bronte handwriting, hundred year old man and john irving

January 12: memorable prose on looking forward, felicity Trotman

January 24: patient memoirs, poirot graphic novel, first bad man review, he came beck why? love poems

January 26: reading discussion essex serpent, elena ferrante my brilliant friend dislike

February 3: what are chimamanda’s novels transkated to films, ann kidd taylor, shannon leone fowler, i read war and peace and liked it

February 15: “how to make a french family” “review”, book that literally changed my life, the essex serpent summary

March 13: my darling detective howard norman, the essex serpent book club questions, the first bad man summary

March 22: the doll’s alphabet, joslin linder genetic disorders

March 31: detor, louisa young michel faber

May 7: the essex serpent plot, rebecca foster writer, book about cats, gauguin the other world dori fabrizio

Personal Inscriptions, Etc. in Books

A couple of months ago we finally rescued the last boxes (we think) of our possessions out of my in-laws’ attic and storage cupboard…only five years after we moved out! As I was sorting through a box of my husband’s childhood books, I found a couple that he had won through school prizes – both of which seem to prefigure his love of British wildlife, and badgers in particular.

We also found another book he accidentally inherited from his school when the library burned down – along with the Gerald Durrell memoir and a paperback copy of Animal Farm, that makes three books that never made it back to the school even after they rebuilt. Oops!

I gave some thought to the other personal inscriptions in our book collection. Although we don’t have all that many examples in total, my mother (whom I generally call “Marm”) is the queen of inscriptions: you can count on her to write the date, the occasion, and a heartfelt message inside the front cover of any book she gives as a gift. It’s terribly sweet.

I got the Betty Crocker cookbook as a birthday present just as I was setting off for my Master’s year in Leeds – the first time I ever had to cook for myself. Over the last 11.5 years it’s gotten a lot of use, as the missing fragments of the ring binder show.

Another cookbook with some sentimental value to us is Delia Smith’s Complete Illustrated Cookery Course – a classic of English cuisine that we got as a wedding present. It’s extra special as the giver, my husband’s Auntie Joan (not actually an aunt, but a first cousin once removed or something like that), passed away earlier this year.

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Do you like writing and/or receiving personal inscriptions in books?

Two Years and Counting

As of today I’ve been blogging for exactly two years.

By Joey Gannon from Pittsburgh, PA (Candles) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons.

This is my 219th post – which I thought was pretty good going until I ‘met’ (via an online group) another blogger who had posted over 770 times in her first two years! She explained that the blog is a full-time gig for her. Still, it left me second-guessing my own achievement.

If I were to play the bibliotherapist and prescribe myself just one book from my Kindle backlog for today, it would be this one:

I am terrible about comparing myself to others on social media: number of likes, number of followers, level of engagement, etc. I so often think that other bloggers are involved in interesting projects or leading the way on various initiatives, whereas I’m just plodding along. It’s hard to ignore the quantitative indicators and just be content doing what I do.

Still, ideas keep coming, so I’ll roll with it.

Thank you to everyone who takes time out for my blog.

Marginalia, Bookmarks, Etc. Found in Books

In two of the books I currently have on the go, items found in books are a key element. First there’s Swimming Lessons in Claire Fuller, in which one strand of the narrative is told via a series of letters Ingrid hid in various thematically relevant books from her husband’s overflowing collection before she disappeared 12 years ago.

I’ve also been skimming Reading Allowed, novelist Chris Paling’s book of mildly amusing anecdotes from his time working in a public library. As little interludes he records the items he’s found being used as bookmarks in library volumes: a postcard, a shopping list, a meal plan, a CV, and so on.

In my years working in bookshops and libraries I found lots of proper bookmarks left behind in books; this photo shows the ones I’ve kept (others I’ve given away, recycled or donated to the library basket).

This doesn’t account for all the train tickets, receipts, newspaper clippings, etc. that were serving as makeshift bookmarks. The strangest thing I think I ever found in a book was an old-fashioned faux pearl-topped hatpin marking a place in a copy of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s collected poems.

And then there are the written messages I’ve found in books: other people’s bookplates (I especially like the one that appears in the front of each volume of my 1919 Chapman & Hall set of the complete works of Dickens – such an enviable reward for good attendance!);

a heartfelt message of friendship in the copy of May Sarton’s The Fur Person I got free from Book Thing of Baltimore;

a young lady’s thoughts strewn across the selected poems of Ted Hughes;

and a dead-simple recipe for a tropical fruit drink pencilled on the back cover of Patricia Volk’s memoir, Stuffed.

For me, the random objects and messages you might find are all part of the fun of buying secondhand books.

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What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever found in a secondhand book?

In the Past Week…

It truly felt like spring was on the way. Temperatures were in the mid-fifties (I’ve never really gotten to grips with Centigrade) and the daffodils in our back garden were trying their best to join the snowdrops decorating the churchyard in town. I started reading this pair of books to look to the seasons ahead instead of dreading that winter might return in earnest:

Some lovely things have happened in the past week.

• I’ve delighted from afar as my sister, a widow for just over two years, precipitously falls in love with a pastor she met through a dating website.

• I had my second yoga class and, after the one other participant had to leave early, got what was essentially a private lesson. Many of the poses feel right at the edge of what my flexibility and balance will allow, which is surely a sign that the exercise is doing me good.

• (This one’s not so much lovely as annoying yet amusing.) The cat, already a connoisseur of cereal milk, discovered the illicit pleasure of melted butter in a dish we unthinkingly left on the counter, and now will not rest in his search for it. This is bad news as he’s already quite the butterball. He’s also ramped up his efforts to access all of the house’s secret spaces, including the airing cupboard, the under-stairs cupboard, and the crawlspace under the bath. [Stay tuned for tomorrow’s mini-reviews of yet more cat books, including one about some very mischievous Siamese cats.]

• On Friday I got an e-mail out of the blue asking me to review a book for the Times Literary Supplement. It was October 2015 when I first wrote for them, but that ended poorly: they said they’d run out space in the magazine for my review and paid me a “kill fee” instead, but it made me doubt myself – was that code for them not thinking my writing was good enough to publish? So hearing back from them five months after I’d last gotten in touch asking for work was a great surprise. And I get to read History of Wolves, which I’ve heard marvelous things about.

• We went to a brilliant gig by folk artists Phillip Henry and Hannah Martin in a hole-in-the-wall venue 10 minutes from our house. It was doubtless the first time I’d seen beatboxing and a classical Indian sitar/guitar used in folk music, and Henry’s harmonica skills were literally unbelievable. You had to have been there. I was impressed anew at how folk, arising as it does from liberal working-class traditions, is unafraid to tackle social issues. They had songs about his cotton mill-working grandfather, the war in Syria, immigration, and a detention center in the Midlands. My favorite, though, was “Landlocked,” about a real woman from the eighteenth century who went to sea with her naval husband but ended up right back where she started: selling fish at Exmouth harbor. I loved Martin’s deep, rich voice and the complex interplay of guitar, banjo, pedal steel and fiddle in many of their songs.

• With one of our leftover jars of homemade mincemeat we made a decadent mincemeat cheesecake from this Nigel Slater recipe. What with the shortbread crust and crumbs and the orange zest in the topping, it was very much like having mince pies – but also cheesecake. Yum.

• This morning we attended a service led by a former archbishop. We knew that George Carey was a parishioner at the Berkshire church we’ve been frequenting since December, but hadn’t seen him at the pulpit yet. He’s one of various retired and lay clergy who have been filling in while the church seeks to appoint a new vicar. Carey gave a damn fine sermon (I guess he’s had plenty of practice) on the enormous topic of why bad things happen to good people, refuting the prosperity gospel and telling the tragically fascinating story behind the hymn “It Is Well with My Soul.”

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And, of course, I’ve been reading some brilliant books. This week’s ongoing reading has included three terrific novels: Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfař, and Narcissism for Beginners by Martine McDonagh.

How was your week – in terms of reading and otherwise?

A Book for Every Occasion?

Yesterday I signed up for a six-week yoga course at the local wellbeing center. This is something I’ve been meaning to do for at least two years. Now that I’ve finally made myself commit to it, of course I’m thinking twice: going out on a Tuesday evening in the cold, dark and quite possibly wet – what was I thinking?! What will I wear? Will I have to talk to other people? Will they be nice? Will they be better than me? It’s like high school all over again.

So, naturally, last night I started reading this:

This was a Christmas gift from my wish list. With an appropriate bookmark I found at the library where I worked in London.

It’s actually a book of disparate travel essays, with the first about a stay in Louisiana that coincided with Mardi Gras in the early 1990s. But Geoff Dyer is one of those amazingly talented authors I’d read on pretty much any topic. I’ll probably skip ahead to the title essay and then make my way through the rest of the book.

Alas, I don’t think there’s a specific book that can console me for failing to get tickets to see John Mayer in London in May and wasting several hours of this morning in the stressful attempt, followed by much disappointed lethargy. (We were similarly unsuccessful with U2 recently, but did manage to secure seats to see Sigur Rós play London in September.)

When’s the last time you found a surprisingly relevant book on your shelf?

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Postscript: The next day John Mayer announced a second London show, and this time we got tickets 🙂