© Photo:Gerry Walden/gwpics.com 2016

It’s a weird feeling shifting from the role of press to the role of host for an evening. I spent a very good few hours at our latest event but coming home without photos and notes is a strange thing. I’m glad for our photographer and the writer from Southampton University who came to cover the event for us.

Our evening with Elizabeth Fremantle last Thursday was a roaring success. We commandeered the comfy chairs. The majority of seats were taken and more people turned up than we knew were coming; a wonderful surprise.

Elizabeth told us of her journey to publication, her background in fashion writing; her research methods – visit Hardwick Hall! – and all four books which we ended up discussing in reverse chronological order because we got talking about her latest book and it seemed to make more sense to me in that moment than jumping from subject to subject (the books all stand alone but there are links).

This time we recorded it. Fathers who own camcorders are very useful when you discover that your plan to use your DSLR isn’t going to work. You’ll find the video at the end of this post.

© Photo:Gerry Walden/gwpics.com 2016

Many, many thanks to Elizabeth and her friend, Glyn, who also joined us; Rachael from The Edge and Wessex Scene – read her pre-event piece here; and our photographer, Gerry Walden. Having finished it I’m feeling rather odd without promotion to do; I’ve started the planning for January.

Here’s the video, complete with my silly bumbling. I’ve cut the introduction a bit due to microphone issues.

This photo of 1479 marginalia was taken by Philobiblon.

This post is brought to you by a 360 degree reversal in the reading mode of its writer. If you follow me on Twitter you may have seen a tweet I posted a couple of weeks ago about my sudden and compelling urge to write in the book I was reading… by the next day I’d posted another tweet to say I’d gone and done it. I’ve since made notes in two books.

I say ‘sudden compelling urge’ because I have had sudden writing urges before but they’ve never been quite compelling enough for me to actually pick up a pencil – it’s got to be erasable – and change my stance. The strength of it was a bit silly really but then I suppose it was the opposite of how I usually feel.

Others write in books. Many of my classmates at school scrawled all over their poetry books. I did too because I had to but even back then, during the time I wasn’t reading for pleasure, I felt books were… sacred. Not to be sullied. Interestingly I have no problem with other people writing in their books; I believe it’s each to their own, but me and mine? No chance.

The reason I never wanted to was because I’m always worried that a re-read would be dominated by my past thoughts and whilst on the whole that’s no bad thing – interesting, almost, because you’d have definite comparisons there between then and now as opposed to having to remember what you thought – I can be easily distracted, that attention span thing, and I know that when I’ve come across underlined or highlighted text when going through photocopied book extracts while essay planning, I get stuck on those sections that the person before me deemed important. And I always think that while they may be important sections, they might not be in my specific context or – god forbid – I might end up taking a bit more from the source material or friend’s notes than I meant to.

A friend once photocopied a chapter of a book for me that our lecturer had photocopied for her. My friend was effectively presenting me with source material only she had. I felt uncomfortable anyway because I knew that if I used it I’d potentially be writing about things that previously only she could have, but her highlighting had me worried – I didn’t want her own planning to weave its way into mine. Like my reviewing process – read others’ reviews after I’ve written my own – I worried some of her work would creep into mine no matter how much I was aware of the possibility. Once you’ve crossed that border, even if you don’t actually use someone else’s work whether by accident or on purpose… just that worry that you will and the lengths you’ll go to to ensure you don’t can be exhausting and can negatively affect your own work.

Back to writing in books myself – I chose a pencil. I wrote in the whitespace. Emboldened, I progressed to underlining lines, sectioning paragraphs I liked, scribbling everywhere. Once I started I figured I’d write whenever I wanted. In a soft pencil. Very lightly.

Afterwards I was regretful. I’d crossed the line. I could erase the markings but knew it’d be difficult and anyway, it would scuff the pages. This feeling remained for a few hours. The next day, reading a new book, I came to a place where I knew I had to write everything or I wouldn’t be able to continue reading. I did it again.

Here’s the thing – these two books? Two of the shortlisted titles I’m reading as a shadow judge. I suppose it’s different; it certainly feels so. I feel a greater sense of needing to get it right, to remember all my thoughts, to understand the nuances of the texts.

And it’s just easier to have my thoughts – all of them – to hand. I like to make copious notes when reading. I use notebooks, and once I’ve written the review I tend to leave the rest of the notes behind where at some point, when the notebook’s used up, they’ll end up in the shredder. I rarely keep my notes, precisely because I don’t have a place to keep them. I’ve considered a commonplace book but the idea of trying to categorise multi-category notes is daunting. Some books I read are lucky; I store their notes on the computer. Others are lost forever if the thoughts don’t make it into my review, and that’s most of them because if I included them there would be “ah ha!” and “excellent!” and all sorts of other notes and copyright-infringing amounts of text that even I wouldn’t read.

Will I continue? I really don’t know. But I guess under the surface I am a writer in books, or, as I said on Twitter, I’m a Person Who Writes In Books. And I’m not sure if I’ll ever feel comfortable with that but then it’s a lot better than it could be.

I could be using a biro.

Do you write in books?

Important to note before we begin: I loved the book used in the photograph. I didn’t want to single out a book I’d hated so I chose a less awkward option. Unfortunately trying to get a good photograph of a book in context is difficult to achieve without showing the spine.

Bit of a light-hearted discussion today. I can’t say I’ve ever thrown a book across a room. I know it’s often used as a metaphor but you do see it in action sometimes, if mostly on television or written about in a way that suggests it truly happened. In a way it’s more interesting to discuss because it can be a metaphor. Because it is a physical reaction to a strong emotional reaction.

It’s a reaction related to the times people become exasperated by what they’re reading, a book they aren’t liking for whatever reason – they may well not mind if it gets damaged. This last thing said, it can just be an expression in the moment.

“The only thing worse than hate is indifference.” – Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall. It is better to have that ‘extreme’ reaction than feel apathetic. Throwing a book shows the reader has had a strong reaction; they’ve read the book attentively. They may be taking it to heart.

Does one feel guilt or relief? I know the reason I’d never do it is because I like to keep my books nice. I accept dog-earring happens, grudgingly. (Interestingly, despite the irritation I feel whenever a musician, though especially a non-musician, destroys musical instruments for a music video or so forth, I do not feel an irritation with people throwing books. Maybe it’s because it’s not so extreme. Maybe it’s because a book is far easier, cheaper, to replace. Maybe it’s because there are a plethora – a plethoric plethora? – of books compared to musical instruments in the world.) I can understand the knee-jerk reaction, it’s just not something I’ve real knowledge of.

Ebooks can’t be thrown – are Amazon and Kobo on to something? You can drop a device but if you don’t consider where you are – a sofa or sat against the wall on a hardwood floor? – there will be repercussions.

So I’d like to know whether you’ve ever thrown a book, which book it was, and what it was about it that made you do it? And if you haven’t, would you?

I wasn’t a fan of Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland in general, personally (Disney influence? Time period differences? I think there’s another post lurking here…) but something I really loved and appreciated was Lewis Carroll’s look at a particular skill within the art of conversation – knowing when a particular item of information may or may not be appropriate to any one setting and/or group of people. It’s like a mini crash course in how to be polite, written in a way that’s understandable when you’re younger, and, actually, when you’re older, too. (You just pick up on it sooner when you’re older.)

This crash course is included a little in the second chapter but is most remarked upon in the third chapter. By remarked upon I mean by Carroll – he does not address it directly, does not say anything equivalent to ‘now see here, children, why Alice shouldn’t have said this to the birds’ but it is quite obvious in a subtext sort of way.

The first case comes when Alice has cried her pool of tears and finds herself, now much smaller, swimming in the pool alongside a mouse. Here she starts by saying “Où est ma chatte?” which isn’t translated in the book, presumably because the target audience would be learning French, but which we can gather regards her cat. (The translation is ‘where is my cat?’ which is a bit of an odd thing to ask in such a situation anyway but we can forgive Carroll this literary device.)

What’s interesting here is that Alice realises the offence straight away, saying, when the mouse ‘gave a sudden leap out of the water, and seemed to quiver all over with fright’ (it knows French too?) “Oh, I beg your pardon!… I quite forgot you didn’t like cats.” Of course this has a second purpose in that it informs any non-French reader as to the subject of the French sentence – so perhaps my presumption of lessons is incorrect or Carroll is simply aware of the wider, highly varied audience – but the fact of inappropriate conversation and the act of causing offence, as well as how to deal with it swiftly, is accomplished here.

Why then, in chapter three, does Carroll return to inappropriate versus appropriate and leave Alice oblivious as to the effect cat-talk has on the birds (and the mouse who has remained in her presence after a brief run-down of why cat-talk is offensive)? It’s fair to say that Carroll might be thinking it’s a good subject to look at further, to cover in depth. And, having introduced it and stated why it’s a problem, Alice’s oblivious in chapter three might be easily spotted by the attentive reader who would have a chance to feel good, triumphant, at working out the problem themselves. I reckon it’s a bit of both and I have to say as aunt to a keen learner, I love the author for it. It’s a wonderful bookish interaction that has the potential to really engage a child.

Anyway, in chapter three, Alice tells the animals – the birds and mouse – how lovely her cat is and they all ruffle their fur and feathers and make to leave. Alice is confused by this because, to paraphrase, if they could only meet Dinah, the cat, she’s sure they’d love her. This time she completely misses that instinctual lasting conflict, as it were, between birds and cats. (Thinking about this, if we consider that in some cases the situation between cats and birds reverses so that the cat is the prey, we could, although it’s obvious Carroll is considering only the most usual situation of cats as the predators, say it’s just an overall conflict. Yes, I’m now in thinking too much mode…)

In this, the second instance of this lesson, Carroll keeps Alice repeating the general notion of Dinah’s loveliness, perhaps to make the lesson stand out and be stronger, and to illustrate the extreme obliviousness that might make a child laugh and note that Alice is so silly. If he told you about it that first time when Alice said beg pardon, here he’s not saying anything at all, has effectively left it all up to the reader to work out.

Interesting is the fact that in the first instance, of just the mouse, the animal returns a couple of times throughout the uncomfortable dialogue, whereas in the second instance of birds and mouse, everybody leaves. Perhaps this is a show of people giving a second chance but only so much, that people will indeed leave completely if you don’t cotton on to what you’re saying and don’t apologise; it’s also a device, the mouse teaching Alice whilst showing discomfort. And of course in that first instance, Alice redeems herself.

None of this is included in the Disney animation, which makes a lot of sense because really it’s quite dull as far as the more bizarre and fantastical parts of the story go and it’s likely the film-makers considered the lesson wouldn’t work so well on screen. It is very much a teaching moment than a good story moment (and quite a relief to get past when you’re an adult reading it for the first time!) but for its merit, it’s very much worth reading the book rather than defaulting to the film.

The teaching of inappropriate and appropriate conversation in the book was the biggest takeaway for me, partly perhaps because it’s something not well-known overall but mostly because it’s a section where Carroll’s plans and writing really shine, where you can see him really considering how he can provide a lesson and how to explain it to his target audience.

And let’s face it, we could all do with a reminder on occasion!

Have you read this book?

Do you ever feel you’re playing catch up, that there are so many books, particularly of the canon/very famous variety, that you have to read? And, if so, do you think you’ll ever lose the feeling of playing catch up or having not yet read the books deemed important because there are so many of them?

I do. Jack Kerouac. Sylvia Plath. Ray Bradbury. To name just a few; I don’t think I need to name the books themselves. You’ll know which I mean.

So many books out there – though there does seem a basic line between the ones that are ‘necessary’ to read and those not so necessary – the kind that you note are often referenced or used for context in conversational events, in articles, as examples that work brilliantly so long as you’ve read the book otherwise you’re often left even more confused. And then the other, perhaps biggest, problem – modern books steeped in the background or themes of a canonical work. I read Andrew Blackman’s On The Holloway Road a few years ago and I could tell it was excellent – that fact, if I may term it so, was obvious in general – but as a work that was based on Kerouac’s On The Road, I didn’t have the context to view it in those terms. Blackman’s book taught me much about Kerouac but I couldn’t shake the feeling that my experience of the Blackman should have been full of comparing, contrasting, in addition to the lesson I took away with me. I wonder how much I missed by not having read the source material.

There have been a few occasions like that. Writers like to extend the conversation about the canon, like to create new interpretations and spin-offs, and that is all great, but it will always leave a certain number of people with a distinct lack of context when they approach it. And we could argue that one should only approach such a book after having read the source material but there are so many books out there and so many references. Some books are packed with contexts from canonical works that to read all the referenced material first… you’d never get to the more modern book (and, indeed, having read the referenced works would an interpretation then seem trivial?) Others make use of works that may be heavily referenced but you know that the referenced book is not particularly well known or falls into a niche category. (This is why I included Bradbury above – his work is important but we wouldn’t necessarily utter it in the same breath as Dickens. Some would, others wouldn’t.)

It feels very good to have read a famous book. I’ve read all of Jane Austen’s books and, in big part because my school education was lacking and I had to play catch up here myself, I get a bookish sense of delight on many occasions her work is mentioned – because there was a time when I had no idea what people meant when they talked about her work. And now I do know about it and so I can laugh or agree – that ‘umm’ that sweeps over the audience – with those on stage or so forth. There’s an academic feeling to it, that I’ve read and studied and learned and now understand along with everyone else… or at least many people.

And this feeling, I believe, can occur no matter your prior education. For me it’s a mini triumph, for others a simple pleasure.

The interesting thing is that no matter your privilege – your education, the number of books in your home growing up, your parents’ view of literature – one thing is true across the board: we are all in a position where, if we deem the canon/famous books important, we are playing catch up. Everyone is and everyone will always be. Even if we only read important books we’d never read all of those we considered important unless we had a limited interpretation on what was important… and even then we’d end up missing contexts because of the importance placed on other books by others. The only thing we can do is prioritise. I prioritise in two ways. What am I interested in personally? Which books are referenced most often? Your priorities may differ.

And if we do somehow manage the impossible and read all the works? There will be little or no time to muse on interpretations or read unrelated books. Of unrelated books some people may not worry – it’s okay to eschew modern books for classics if that’s your thing – but interpretations can be fun and they extend your experience of the important book.

When I sat down to write this post I didn’t think I’d have much to say; the post was inspired by a simple line from my notes on Celia Imrie’s talk: “I feel I’m still catching up”. It turns out there’s a lot on the periphery.

I’ve asked a few questions in this post to which I’d love to hear your response; I will emphasise this one in case your time is limited: Do you think you’ll ever lose the feeling of playing catch up or having not yet read the books you deem important?