Owner: Eloise by the Book Piles URL:http://eloisebythebookpiles.blogspot.com/ Join Date: Fri, 08 Feb 2008 13:06:55 -0600 Rating:0 Site Description: A blog mainly about books, reading and writing with an emphasis on pre-1950s literature and an obsession with ghost stories. Site statistics:Click here
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott 2008-03-07 23:49:00 'One of the things that happens when you give yourself permission to start writing is that you start thinking like a writer. You start seeing everything as material. Sometimes you'll sit down or go walking and your thoughts will be on one aspect of your work, or one idea you have for a small scene, or a general portrait of the characters you are working with, or you'll just be completely blocked and hopeless and wondering why you shouldn't just go into the kitchen and have a nice glass of warm gin straight out of the cat dish. And then, unbidden, seemingly out of nowhere, a thought or image arrives. Some will float into your head like goldfish, lovely, bright orange, and weightless, and you follow them like a child looking at an aquarium that was thought to be without fish. Others will ste
Getting your priorities right 2008-03-06 11:28:00 I am beginning to have some sympathy for those young celebrities with drug problems criticised this week by the UN, as I have been self-medicating the past couple of weeks to deal with the stress of living up to expectations on the project at work, although I must quickly make it clear that my drugs of choice have been the odd glass of wine and vast quantities of chocolate.Yesterday afternoon things finally clicked into place in my head and I got my priorities
straight. What did it was a conversation where somebody mentioned that he had just read a book on business metaphors. At that point something inside me said 'Whoa, do you want to end up like him? Using your precious free time to read books on business metaphors?' I felt like shaking the man and saying, 'I've just read The Count of Mo
Outmoded Authors Round-up 2008-03-04 03:56:00 The Outmoded Authors Challenge ended at the end of February but the good news is that it will be running again later this year. I enjoyed it greatly, as it pushed me to authors that I knew of but never picked up; many thanks to Imani for running the challenge. Next time I think I'd like to try some completely new authors and I already have a couple of books from authors I knew nothing about before on the basis of other people's reviews for the challenge.This was the first reading challenge I had ever joined and I was a little too ambitious with the list I picked; as a result I didn't complete them all, but you know what? It doesn't matter. And that's something, coming from ultra-perfectionist me! The challenge was a great success as far as I was concerned because I read some books I wouldn
Earthquake! 2008-03-02 02:39:00 This was the week of the earthquake, and little else has been talked about. It was quite a strange experience, being woken by the bed being shaken. We went through the same thought-processes as everyone else we've talked to: one of us was having a seizure, no; then someone has kicked the front door in - no, as the cat was sat quietly at the bottom of the stairs looking up and wondering what on earth we had done to make the house shake. I think I eventually decided it must have been a big lorry going by, and went back to sleep; the thought that it was an earthquake never crossed my mind.It's another sign of how lucky we are in this country; we really don't get extremes of anything. That was the biggest earthquake I've ever experienced simply because I was aware it was happening. In Rotherha Read more:Earthquake
A Rebours (Against Nature) by J K Huysmans 2008-02-29 12:26:00 In at the last gasp of February (good job it's a leap year!), one last Outmoded Authors read and my February My Year of Reading Dangerously book, A Rebours by Huysmans (Penguin Classics ISBN:0-140-44763-6).I wrote the other day about why I picked this for the latter challenge, because of the profoundly depressing effect that I found La Bas by Huysmans had on me; it really made me not want to read any more by him. The description of this book - a book with basically one character locking himself away from the world and giving in to all his obsessions - led me to expect it to have the same effect. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it did not.In fact I grew very fond of Des Esseintes, the main character, despite being firmly convinced that if he were a person stood in front of me I woul
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury 2008-02-26 03:25:00 'For the tents were lemon like the sun, brass like wheat fields a few weeks ago. Flags and banners bright as blue-birds snapped above lion-colored canvas. From booths painted cotton-candy colors, fine Saturday smells of bacon and eggs, hot dogs and pancakes swam the wind. Everywhere ran boys. Everywhere, sleepy fathers followed."It's just a plain old carnival," said Will."Like heck," said Jim. "We weren't blind last night. Come on!"'This book (my copy published by Avon Fiction, ISBN: 978-0-380-72940-1) is, quite simply, one of the most perfect books I have ever read. I had preconceptions about Bradbury
's work, I thought that he wrote rather dry science fiction, based purely on the title of The Martian Chronicles. I was wrong.This book gripped me so that it hurt to put it down, but it was b Read more:Ray Bradbury
, Wicked
Coraline Teaser 2008-02-24 04:23:00 Just a quick post to say there's going to be a film of Coraline which I wrote about a little while ago (you probably already know this, I'm very slow to catch up on these things) and Neil Gaiman has posted a teaser trailer on his blog. It looks beautiful and eerie, which is just about right I'd say. Read more:Teaser
The Des Esseintes way of life 2008-02-23 12:00:00 I've been an extraordinarily bad blogger this week, not only not blogging but not visiting other blogs which makes me feel very disconnected. I keep missing out on what people are doing and only catching up well after the event when it is too late to leave a comment. I hate that.I can only blame work really, it has completely drained me this week; I have come home every evening, collapsed in an armchair and, surprisingly, read voraciously. But the thought of going near the computer was too much.The upshot is I have an ever-increasing pile of books to write about (I have to write about them or I'll forget them and I am fed up of forgetting books). The pile includes Huysmans' A Rebours which I picked up again and adored, much to my surprise. The character of Des Esseintes became a comforting
The Duchess's Diary by Robin Chapman 2008-02-19 03:57:00 'Nothing can stop people talking about this hideous book, about how widely it sells, about how many languages it's already been translated into, I'm a laughing stock in French, German, Italian, English, Chinese even, if the author's dedication is to be believed though he may be joking you never know with him he uses irony like a gelder's knife. My only consolation, and it's none at all really, is that he has made no profit from it. I hear he had to sell the copyright to the printers in order to finance the writing of the last chapters; he was hopeless with money, he said, good, I hope he dies in poverty as I'm sure I shall now.'I don't know why I suddenly picked this book up; it has lain neglected on the shelf for going on for twenty years, a victim to my prejudice against modern novels, b Read more:Chapman
, Diary
, Duchess
, Robin
New books and the negative blogging row 2008-02-17 09:17:00 I bought a couple of new books yesterday - both by authors still alive, which is not like me at all. Having to go into town on a Saturday afternoon is my idea of Hell on Earth, but the cat food was running low, and the little lordship's needs come first. To make it less of a chore I stopped at the remainder book stall on the market and looked around. I couldn't find anything in the history books, then I found myself in front of a row of mis-lits, so I hurried away before I inadvertently read any of the by-lines and was traumatised. Settling in front of the horror section I picked up Arabat by Clive Barker. I have a much loved DVD of Hellraiser, and adore Pinhead (who doesn't?) but have never read any of Barker's books and didn't expect to ever want to. However, I read a review of Cath's on
What a week 2008-02-16 04:23:00 I've had one of those weeks at work where I feel that my brain is a little burnt out mess stuck to the inside of my skull. I've been asked to be involved in an important project with a ridiculously short timescale. It's very flattering to have been asked but also extremely daunting and, being a perfectionist, I am now super-stressed at the thought of not living up to expectations. This and the pressure of having to come to grips with an entirely new area of work in a very short timescale on top of my proper job have made me less than pleasant to live with this week.It has also meant that my head is so fuzzy that reading anything even vaguely heavy is out of the question. I had begun A Rebours by J K Huysmans (I know there should be an accent there, but I'm too tired to work out how to put
The death of the book 2008-02-14 12:10:00 This is an interesting column in today's Times about the death
of the book. I know it's been discussed a lot since the Kindle came out (this is in the business section, it obviously took a while for them to catch up with the book pages) but this really made me think: could I survive without physical paper books? The answer is no, I don't think I could. At the very least I would certainly be a far less happy person than I am now. Books are not just words, they are objects that surround me every day and act as part-furniture, part-family. Their presence comforts me in a way that a list of files on a computer never could.There is something infinitely satisfying about finishing a book and sliding it into its place on the shelf, knowing that next time I look at it I know it as an old friend. Bu
Freedom from clutter 2008-02-13 04:08:00 I had an amazing experience yesterday; I was working from home and was able to use my desk! Not such a big deal you may think, but this time last week you couldn't have seen the wood for the piles of papers and rubbish on top of it.As J's computer is in its death throes he had been using mine and complaining about the state of my desk, telling me I will develop RSI from all the twisting I had to do to fit in amongst the rubbish. So a couple of days ago while I was making dinner, he cleared it. He then lectured me about what a pig I am (bit of a cheek really, as he is untidy too, although I can't post a picture of my beautiful desk as I have lost the camera battery charger - it is in a pile of stuff somewhere, I'm sure).I must admit that it is a big improvement and it was great to have the Read more:clutter
, Freedom
Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters 2008-02-11 11:31:00 This book (edited by Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower and Charles Foley, and published by Harper Press ISBN: 978-0-00-724759-2) contains letters written by Conan
Doyle to, for the most part, his mother from when he was a small child away at school until shortly before his death. It does exactly as the title suggests, it lays his life out in front of you and, as a result, I feel that I know the writer intimately. And that word is very important, as these are intimate letters. These are not grandstanding letters written for publication in newspapers to express some important point about the events of the times, although Conan Doyle had strong views about a number of things and was not shy about expressing them publicly, at one point leading to a bit of a telling off from the army. These lett Read more:Arthur
, Letters
My Breton Obsession 2008-02-09 06:46:00 I've just seen this article about the Surrealist Manifesto in The Guardian book pages, while catching up on my Bloglines subscriptions as my blogroll appears to be down - temporarily I hope.I developed a minor obsession with André Breton
at University while writing a paper on Modernism and it has continued ever since. In this paper I concentrated on the Surrealists, of whom I found Breton to be undoubtedly the most interesting and intellectual. A couple of years ago while in Paris we visited the Pompidou Centre where there was a Dada exhibition and although the endless succession of ready-made artworks became just a little tedious after a while (although it was great to see Duchamp's Fountain, just before some maniac hit it with a hammer) when I found the little section at the back displa Read more:Obsession
Thank you, Anne Lamott 2008-02-08 11:32:00 Yesterday was a serendipitous day. I don't often talk about my work as it is not really connected to the part of my life that I write about in this blog, other than keeping me away from my books for hours everyday. However, yesterday I went to a workshop about, among other things, critical and reflective thinking (I'm not an academic but work in an academic institution and am engaged in some research into student engagement and learning). The evening before, while scrolling down my blog to get to my blogroll and go visiting, the title of Anne Lamott's book Bird by Bird caught my eye and I remembered that I was half-way through it. This book on writing was great but I found it a bit too intense to read all at once, so I broke off to read a novel, accidently knocked it down the side of the a Read more:Thank
Bartleby by Herman Melville 2008-02-06 11:28:00 This longish short story was included in the volume with Benito Cereno (Dover ISBN:0-486-26473-4) and I thought I'd read it before I put the book back on the shelf with a gap of perhaps many years before it was picked up again, and I am glad I did.It is a curious story. It is told in first person by an attorney who hires a group of scriveners, men who copy out the legal documents he draws up, a vital task in this age before photocopiers and printers.He has a team of two scriveners and a messenger. Turkey, an Englishman, is an exemplary employee in the morning but after lunch (and perhaps a touch of the bottle) becomes slightly sloppier with his work and definitely more obstreporous, both with the office furniture and anyone who upsets him. Then there is Nippers, a serious young man who is Read more:Herman
A Question about O. Douglas 2008-02-05 11:21:00 I wrote a post about O. Douglas
some time ago. This is the pen name of Anna Masterton Buchan, sister of John Buchan the famous author of novels like The Thirty-nine Steps. I have great affection for her books such as The Setons and The Day of Small Things, which have not survived the test of time as well as her brother's and are sadly out of print, and the post has received a few comments from like-minded people.There is a scarcity of information about this writer on the internet and as one of the few people to have written about her I have been contacted by a lady with a query. My correspondent used to live in Exeter in the 1940s and knew an elderly lady named Miss Buchan. She would chat to this lady and one day Miss Buchan mentioned that she was the sister of John Buchan. My corresponden Read more:Question
A Snowy Saturday 2008-02-03 08:36:00 It was a bright and beautiful day yesterday, with a sprinkling of snow on the garden which always makes it look pretty. It was quite cold though, so we spent a lazy Saturday
indoors feeling snug and warm, admiring the snow from the safety of the kitchen window. It's not exactly blizzard conditions, however; J and I were quite shocked by the insensitivity of the BBC News 24 service yesterday, which showed pictures of the terrible effects of the snow in China and then went straight into a segment of viewers' pictures of the UK's 'extreme weather' as they called it. This consisted of a series of very pretty pictures of the countryside in, at most, a couple of inches of snow; we have a very strange idea of the definition of 'extreme' in this country.My wisdom teeth are making one of their inte Read more:Snowy
Seafaring Challenge Round-up 2008-02-01 06:43:00 The Seafaring Challenge
finished yesterday and it was a lot of fun. Many thanks to I Heart Paperbacks for organising it.I read four books and made Admiral, I am pleased to say, although it feels like a little bit of a cheat as Benito Cereno was only about seventy pages long.I've always had a soft spot for swashbucklers but had never really indulged it that much in novels. Now I will be actively hunting them out as the perfect escapism. Captain Blood was my favourite book of the challenge, just great fun from start to finish. I also enjoyed the Horatio Hornblower book and will be keeping an eye out for the other books in that series.The subject matter of Benito Cereno made it an uncomfortable book for this century, as I wrote a couple of days ago, and Trawler left me feeling quite sad. So i
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D H Lawrence 2008-01-30 11:09:00 This book, which I read initially for the Outmoded Authors Challenge but then added to My Year of Reading Dangerously as my January book, was one that, as I have mentioned before, I really did not want to read.Now I have finished it, am I glad that I read it? I think so. Will I be reading any more D H Lawrence
in a hurry? I don't think so.I have very different feelings about various aspects of this book, so I'll deal with them separately. The story.I rather enjoyed this. It is melancholy, a story of how people can end up in situations where they feel trapped and unfitted for the world they are in. There is the literal unfitness of Clifford, the crippled husband of Constance, unhappy, unfulfilled, flitting between jealousy of his wife and acceptance that she should be with other men. T
Benito Cereno by Herman Melville 2008-01-28 13:21:00 This is a difficult book. It is not the language, it is beautifully written. I love Melville's writing; Moby Dick is one of my favourite books, a joy of a read. This book is difficult because of the subject matter.WARNING: I can't talk about the story and my reservations about it without talking about the whole story, so THERE WILL BE SPOILERS! Don't say I didn't tell you. On the surface this is a rollicking adventure of intrepid men fighting against a determined force of evil, but it is the form in which this oppressive evil is framed that is the difficulty of the novella. Captain Amasa Delano of a sealer spots a ship in distress and goes to help it, meeting the listless Captain Benito Cereno and crew much cut down, he claims, by disease and storms. The good American Captain attempts Read more:Herman
No title 2008-01-26 12:18:00 I realise that I never said below which were the lines of the poem that I found so familiar when quoted in Civilization; it is these:'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Ozymandias 2008-01-26 10:58:00 I should be writing about Benito Cereno this weekend but am finding it difficult. So instead more Shelley, possibly my favourite poet.J suddenly quoted these lines at me earlier today saying I had wanted to know where they were from. I had no idea what he was talking about but apparently one day, many moons ago, while he was playing a computer game called Civilization these lines had been quoted by Leonard Nimoy and I had said they were familiar but couldn't think where they were from.So today I have been informed by my husband that they are by Shelley - he is reading a book about heroes, or something similar, and the lines are quoted.I have dug out the full poem and here it is, Ozymandias. I love it; as a person who thinks in words more than images, verses like this take me to the distant
Presents and the young Arthur 2008-01-24 11:21:00 A small haul from my birthday - courtesy of my husband and brother.The DVDs are: the third series of Are you Being Served? from J; he got me the first two for Christmas, I love it, Mrs Slocombe is one of my heroes. And there's The Princess Bride, a favourite film, although when I quote from it at work no one knows what I'm talking about, inconceivable! And seasons 6 and 7 of Columbo which is as far as I want to go on DVD; the eighties' Columbos are just not the same. My main present from J will be a selection of organic plants from the Ethical Superstore, an online shop that has some great organic and eco-friendly stuff - we got our eco-kettle from there.Books-wise, in addition to Mrs Lirriper, I got a guide to the superstitions of the British Isles from J, and a book of gardening quotatio Read more:Arthur
, Presents
, young
Trying new things 2008-03-12 07:18:00 Last night was a night for new things
. I went to the library, not a new thing as I've been going to that library for over twenty-five years, although it is a rarity for me to borrow a book these days. As a teenager it was exploring the books there that formed my reading tastes as I discovered writers like Chekhov and Kerouac in my mid-teens. These days I have that collector's impulse that means I need to own books and have so many volumes waiting to be read that the addition of library books seems unnecessary.However, as part of the My Year of Reading Dangerously Challenge I decided to read along with the March book of Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood. I have never had a desire to read Atwood and, although willing to try, do not have enough faith that I will be converted to want to buy it, so
The Open Library 2008-03-10 11:21:00 Thanks to So Many Books for pointing out this site - The Open Library
which is just being developed.The site has the wonderful aim of digitizing libraries' collections from around the world, and reproducing them on screen so that they look just like the library books for free - which is pretty amazing in itself. There are only a few on the site at the moment but they look great, obscure Victorian texts in the main which is just my cup of tea, and I am looking forward to seeing the site develop.However, what makes this venture truly exciting for me, as someone who, as I wrote the other day, will never prefer e-books to the real thing, is that one of the partners in this venture is the print-on-demand firm Lulu.com. The idea is that any book in the collection that you like and would like to
The problem with piles of books 2008-03-09 03:14:00 The problem with piles
of books, rather than adequate shelving where every book has its place, is that you inevitably want to read the book that is sat at the bottom of the pile. I have been greatly enjoying The Hanging Court this week, but yesterday morning wanted to read something else. Gazing around the bookshelves and piles my reading desires started to take form.I have (shamefully) a copy of Alaistair Campbell's diary to read (I bought it for my father for Christmas knowing he would want to read it but would not be able to bring himself to buy it, and also knowing that I wanted to read it but could not bring myself to buy it for myself - buying it for someone else and then borrowing it somehow seemed okay, isn't it strange how we justify things to ourselves?) but this wouldn't do, it
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club 2008-03-14 12:22:00 The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L Sayers (BBC Audio ISBN: 978-1-846-071485), starring Ian Carmichael as Lord Peter Wimsey and Peter Jones as Bunter.As a rather gruesome child, I read nothing but murder mysteries between the ages of ten and thirteen. I remember regular panic attacks at the thought that Agatha Christie only wrote about seventy books and what was I going to do when I had read them all? Luckily the horrible situation never arose as my tastes changed before I got there, but when I look back I'm surprised that, to forestall this, I never read anything by Dorothy L Sayers.Nowadays I tend to enjoy murder mysteries only in TV adaptations such as Morse or Midsomer Murders; Sherlock Holmes and Edgar Allan Poe's Dupin are the only detectives I have read in the past
More book buying 2008-03-17 12:36:00 I am incorrigible and there is no way I will get the TBR number down this year. This nice pile of old books are my latest acquisitions.On Friday I visited a charity shop; it was quite sad looking at the shelves, as a house must have been cleared of a person who had enjoyed books on Christian subjects there were so many similarly themed books there, especially on something called the Oxford Movement which means nothing to me I'm afraid. I thought a three volume autobiography of Bishop Hensley Henson looked very interesting as a social history of the late 19th century / first half of the twentieth century, as he himself says in the Foreword, even with little knowledge of the developments in the Anglican church at the time. He has modestly entitled it Retrospect of an Unimportant Life; I wond
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