There have been some phenomenal literature-related articles recently, but perhaps the most intriguing find for me was a post on Medium, published two years ago. It’s under Miscellaneous – Jenny Odell’s speech transcript on how to do nothing. Given its original format, it’s a very long read, but utterly worth it. I also highly recommend the article about narrating audiobooks; it’s fascinating.

Author Specific

‘I knew Christopher Robin – the real Christopher Robin’
Sylvia Plath didn’t want her mother to know she’d written The Bell Jar
Interview with Philip Pullman ahead of The Secret Commonwealth
The journey that changed Geoffrey Chaucer’s life
How The Guardian became the first newspaper in Britain to use the F-word
The trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Book Specific

The politically radical family that inspired Little Women
Considering the secret of Northanger Abbey
Teaching Jane Eyre: a teacher’s perspective
An appreciation of Claire Fraser (unfortunately this link has since been made inaccessible for readers in the EU)
On the magical landscapes of Anne of Green Gables
Olivia Laing on Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, 80 years on

Writing

What is the difference between a preface, a foreword, and an introduction?
Maybe the secret to writing is not writing (on taking breaks)
Can language be understood as a spiritual medium?
When being a disabled writer means being an educator

Libraries & Bookstores

A photo appreciation of libraries
Saying goodbye to my beloved bookstore
On opening Ghana’s first subscription-model library

Misc. Literature

Authors and translators on their unique relationship
500 year old library catalogue reveals books lost to time
Why narrating an audiobook is a lot harder than you think
Picturing writerly demographics in the Norton Anthology of American Literature
2019 is the first year in 20 years that copyrighted works are entering the public domain (includes list and contextual information)
How to visit the graves of 75 famous writers
The curse of reading and forgetting

Other Links

(Reddit thread of the happiest facts people know)
What the blue hour is and how you can use it for photography
A disabled life in a superhero universe
Soft foods helped humans form ‘F’ and ‘V’ sounds
The crew of the Mary Rose may have included sailors of African heritage
The people who wear historical dress every day
Southampton’s medieval vaults
An unpublished essay by Judy Garland written to promote The Wizard of Oz
How to do nothing (long read)

The other day I was looking through my site statistics as I sometimes do, and noted a plethora of searches to do with the aforementioned book. They were specifically to do with Alice’s age. I won’t list them because if Google happens to see value in this post it might start sending the searchers here and my writing today isn’t about answering the question (though I will answer the question later because I’ll need to).

Instead I want to explore that plethora itself. You’ll often see similar search phrases that result in the one answer; everyone words things differently. It was the sheer number of differences that struck me, the differences suggesting that the motives behind the questioned differed too. I wondered why people were asking. (There was also a bit of ‘why now?’ in there – I wrote about the reading age for the book almost a year ago and it’s only recently that numbers have swelled.)

Alice’s age is provided by Carroll in the sequel, Through The Looking-Glass – seven years old. Whilst not given in the first book, we can assume she was six or seven then because the first takes place a few months before the second, May and November respectively. So we’ve an easy answer to the question of why people are asking – the age isn’t provided in the first book and it’s safe to assume that a good number of people don’t get to the second. The question also means that it’s more likely people haven’t read either book and are perhaps looking to ascertain how appropriate it would be for their own child to read. It tends¹ to be the case, after all, that in children’s literature, the character’s ages match the intended audience. One of the phrases in my stats was specifically requesting an Alice book ‘for kids’ – clearly this person (a parent?) had misgivings about the story, and I don’t blame them – after reading it myself a few years ago I decided not to buy a copy for my nephew until he was a little older than Alice herself.

(I’ll note here that there were a few searches in the same vein as our main question for Through The Looking-Glass. This could be a different, shorter, post but I think it’s best summed up as wanting to make sure the story doesn’t move too far ahead from the first as to mean that a child – likely deemed old enough for Alice by whatever metric – would have to mature in order to continue. It’s safe to assume that Carroll was looking for or was asked to provide more of the same, hence the short time frame between them.)

This leads us neatly onto the topic of context – are people asking in order to understand the Victorian context of this 1865 book? In my post about the target audience for the book, I wrote about the way the book was clearly written for children but how cultural change means that in our modern world it’s pretty violent and a bit too strange. Certainly Alice is a mix of very mature and not so, which reflects both her age and environment and suits her character’s role in the didactic book. It is interesting to look at the novel in the context of its time, to compare it to others – few have stood the passing of the centuries like Carroll’s – and see where morals and values as well as views about childhood come into play.

In this way I wonder if the secondary meaning behind asking about Alice’s age is relevant here – how old is the book that bears her name?

And on that note, therefore, somewhat, what is the reading level of the book? Does the appropriate age group of a modern child match the target reading level? When I gave it to my nephew, via grandma, I said it might be best read together; he’s a good reader but he necessarily lacks a Victorian child’s mindset. One searcher wanted to know if the book could be read by five-year-olds.

Lastly, looking at different interpretations of phrases, I think it’s possible some searchers are looking to study the content’s appropriateness in terms of Alice’s age, maybe also in terms of her social context. How appropriate is it for a child of seven to be dreaming of heads being cut off and what would her environment have been like? The law was different back then, and as we know from the information available about the progression of early children’s literature, childhood had until recently been viewed very differently to the way we view it now; the idea of childhood began in the 1600s.

I don’t think there are any conclusions to be made here; this post must remain exploratory. But certainly, wondering about the background behind these searches was interesting in a way wondering the same about other searches was not – I gave pondering other search subjects a try in order to ascertain the worth of this post.

When did you last ask ‘why’ of something in literature and what did you discover?

Footnotes

¹ I say tends because we very much have to exclude Lyra and Will. On that note it’s interesting that the sales information for The Secret Commonwealth notes that it is for adults. Despite Lyra’s older age, it’s naturally going to be mistaken sometimes for a children’s book.

I’ve made a breakthrough in my reading – I read more than I have been recently. Part of it was intention, making more time for it, part was picking a good mix of books, and part of it was finally getting it into my head that my rabbits are perfectly happy for me to sit and read around them rather than actively paying them attention. My cats were never like that; there has been a learning curve.

Towards the end of the month, I found comfort in easy reading – the Eloisa James made it to this month’s list and I’ve three other books on the go, including Mrs Dalloway; now on my fourth attempt, I’m getting through it. I’m happy that the numbers are higher and it’s made a long week more positive. I spent the last evening of the month watching Enchanted April, the 1992 adaptation of Elizabeth Von Arnim’s book, and highly recommend it.

All books are works of fiction.

The Books

Eloisa James: A Kiss At Midnight – A Cinderella retelling, in a fantasy early 1800s, a young woman agrees to pretend to be her half-sister in order to gain a relative’s approval for a marriage; the relative is a prince. A fun historical romance retelling, with just a couple of devices to better align it to the original.

Maggie O’Farrell: This Must Be The Place – An American in Ireland struggles with his history, which includes two families and a dependence on alcohol; the various members of his families struggle with their own lives and pasts, including his second wife, a famous actress two decades before who ran away to Ireland in order to escape the life she hadn’t wanted. Difficult to follow at times but the literary elements are very compelling.

Nick Alexander: You Then, Me Now – Becky has been trying all her life to get her mother, Laura, to tell her about her father. She manages to get her mother to holiday with her where the romance started; Laura has always found the idea of telling her daughter the truth difficult due to the trauma associated with that time. The only thing that doesn’t work is the resolution which is contrived; this is a very good book in general with superb characterisation and theme work.

Sally Rooney: Conversations With Friends – Two lovers-turned-friends meet an affluent couple and become embroiled in their chaotic marriage. The story itself is average but as this book isn’t so much about story as it is everything else that makes up a novel, the whole is really rather good.

I enjoyed all four books immensely for different reasons. The James: an easy read and a very good book of its genre; O’Farrell: the use of literary styles and the playing with linguistics; Alexander: the way it went about depicting the impacts of emotional abuse on a young person, later resulting in sexual abuse; Rooney: the methods used to show feelings and the effects of depression.

Quotation Report

In Conversations With Friends, the narrator ponders the idea of kindness, whether it’s more about being nice in the face of conflict, and whether she only wonders whether she’s kind because she’s a woman. Whilst in This Must Be The Place, a teenager, new to the age group, discovers one of the changes that come with moving away from childhood, that lack of total oneness of self and the innocence of a child in regards to the rest of the world and life.

My immediate plan is to finish Mrs Dalloway which shouldn’t take too long given its relatively short length and my progress. I then plan to move on to a book that arrived in the post, and follow that with whatever takes my fancy.

Did you watch any adaptations this month?

How do short stories and novels compare to you?

It makes sense to first consider the question of whether or not you like short stories. And, if you do like them, what are the similarities and differences that you appreciate between them?

I enjoy short stories. I like the way the need to be succinct often results in a better, tighter, story and writing in general. But I’m undecided as to the way it can take you (me, in this case) longer to ascertain background contexts, moods and so on – the details novels have time to sprinkle over numerous pages – due to that need for everything to be concise. It takes more time, literally, in terms of mental energy, to ‘learn’ everything you need to understand in order to appreciate a short story; even though you learn throughout a novel, it’s slower. In a short story you learn more, often right up to the end, in a way you don’t when reading a novel, and the whole way through the short story the learning is both prominent and very obvious – there are more ‘aha!’ moments. A novel needs a certain amount of focus. A short story needs more and if you’re reading a collection this focus needs reigning in over and over again, starting from the start again and again – supposing the stories are short enough that you read more than one in a sitting. The foresight of knowing I’ll have to refocus forms a small part of why I don’t read many collections.

How do writer’s novels compare to their short stories? I tend to find myself looking forward to a novel after a writer debuts with a collection I’ve enjoyed; I look forward in a chronologically backwards manner to stories of writer’s whose novel I’ve read first. I’m thinking here of Maile Meloy – I started with her novella; her first publication was a collection, then she released the novella and its sequel, and returned with another collection. I read her first collection last. Likewise, though looking forward this time, I was hopeful that Jessie Greengrass would publish a novel after her collection: she did; Orlando Ortega-Medina did too, recently, following his excellent collection.

Do we expect writers to move on to novels? Is a novel more ‘real’ in terms of literature?

And what about collections of stories on one theme or stories that are linked in other ways? I’m thinking here of Helen Oyeyemi’s What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours; when looking at the collections on my shelves I almost missed this one because the characters and themes are close enough to make you think, once the text is no longer fresh in your mind, that the collection is actually a novel.

How do short stories and novels compare to you?

I recently set aside a few hours to go through every post on the blog that contained a book title, checking links. It’s the sort of blog maintenance job that takes time even if you’ve done it before; regardless of the fact there will be new links to check in terms of time always moving forward, you inevitably miss links – I fully expect to find a couple of ‘old’ links next time I do it. These are the mulling-it-over results:

I found myself a bit embarrassed by some posts, the lack of experience I had at the time showing through. In addition to general content, I’d spelt a number of titles wrong.

It made me nostalgic, especially about the books I read before I started blogging, books I wish I had reviewed. It would be impossible to review them now; I may have to go back to a few that I know would make good discussions.

Despite trying my best not to repeat topics – at most I’ll write spin offs or follow-ups – I saw that I had repeated once or twice, though there was more content in the later repetitions. It’s one of the issues with headings – if you go through your posts to check whether you’ve covered a topic you won’t always find a clear answer because you may have worded it differently in the past.

I’ve written about Persuasion a fair amount but have never reviewed it. I didn’t enjoy it much either of the two times I read it but I’m not sure why I didn’t review it.

If you’re a blogger and have been for at least a few years I recommend going back to your own older posts. The potential embarrassment is worth it for the feelgood factor of learning it provides.

I would love to hear your own experiences of going back over things you’ve written, or similar – it doesn’t have to be writing – if there’s one thing that’s evident it’s that hearing about lessons others have learned can help the next person learn quicker.