Tuxedomania

The trailer persuades me that I must get this book! (Links courtesy of my mother.)

Closing tabs

Benjamen Walker's theory of everything.

Hua Hsu on the rise of suburban Chinatowns.

Nice piece at the FT on the Hunterian Museum, an important location in my first novel.

Ode to a Shipping Label.

Mr. Men as social critique.

Last but not least, inside the London Pet Show.

Corked

How cork is made, via GeekPress. (Inevitably reminded me of this.)

Closing tabs

The internet does not seem to have been bountifully full of the particular kind of thing I like to link to this weekend, but here are a few decent ones:

A nice obituary for the author of My Side of the Mountain, a particular favorite of mine in childhood.

"I've collected 10 million buttons."  (FT site registration required.)

"The obvious thing was to have jelly on the glass plate."  (Via Jane.)

I think I'm almost ready to get back to work (I'd better be, as this essay is not going to write itself!).  This week mostly I've just been exercising massively and reading novels: a quite reasonable Swedish thriller called Three Seconds; a book much-awaited by me, Garth Nix's A Confusion of Princes, which does not quite touch the sublimity of his Abhorsen books but which happily made me want to reread Diana Wynne Jones's Deep Secret, which is unfortunately not available for Kindle; Liza Marklund's Red Wolf and Last Will, which I liked very much but due to carelessness read in the wrong order; and Helene Tursten's tediously-titled-in-translation Detective Inspector Huss.  I will definitely read the rest of Tursten's series, as I thought this one was quite good, but the only thing I really have to note about it is that the detectives are constantly eating pizza, open-faced sandwiches and Lucia buns, which made me hungry!

Good bedfellows

Michael Sims on E. B. White's talking animals. (Via The Rumpus.)

A queen of light reading

I was sorry to see just now that Eva Ibbotson has died; I really love her books, especially her earlier historical romances. Michelle Pauli had recently interviewed her for the Guardian; their conversation included this exchange, which made me laugh:

A degree and postgraduate study in physiology at Cambridge University, inspired by a mistaken desire to follow in her father's footsteps, proved to be a "complete disaster" – except for a meeting with the man she would spend the next 49 years of her life with, an ecologist called Alan Ibbotson.

"You've no idea what it was like in the labs those days! Blood spurting everywhere! I had these enormous rabbits and I had to take their temperature and they didn't like it. Who would? I spent my whole year at Cambridge with my hair stuck up with blood and scratch marks on my wrists," exclaims Ibbotson. "Then, fortunately, in a very unmodern and unfeminist way, Alan said he thought he'd better marry me and take me away from science. I have to say I was incredibly relieved."

Miscellany redux

I was lucky enough the other night to read two books of utter captivating charm. Both are strongly recommended!

They came in a box from Amazon, ordered by me (unlike many of the books which come my way from publicists and publishers - some of these are delightful too, but some of them are not at all what I would ever read...).

I had an Amazon hiatus earlier this year, in an attempt to adopt habits of frugality (John Waters: "Being rich is not about how much money you have or how many homes you own; it's the freedom to buy any book you want without looking at the price and wondering if you can afford it" [!]), but it did not really stick, I am trying to get a higher proportion of things from the library but there are occasional brand-new books that I really cannot get from the university library system and that I must have....

In this case, it was Diana Wynne Jones's latest book, Enchanted Glass, which is so very much exactly the sort of book I most like to read that I was almost ready to weep when I finished it - but fortunately what awaited was Elif Batuman's extraordinarily appealing The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them.

The Samarkand essays are particularly moving and funny (the descriptions of her two teachers there are especially well-written), but really there is something on almost every page that made me laugh out loud - a thoughtful and moving and hilariously amusing book that for reasons I cannot quite explain (something about the diction and also the argument about the relationship between life and literature?) reminded me of my favorite novel of all time, Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows.

I am in a sense the perfect audience for this book - I too was bit by the Russia bug long ago, only in my case the thing I found enchanting in elementary Russian language classes was the nature and range of the answers one is allowed to give to the question "How are you doing?" (Kak dela?) The cheeriest permissible is "Not bad," but really all the words in the textbook range from "Pretty awful" to "Absolutely ghastly"! (I paraphrase.) Elif's book is really a delight from start to finish - it will definitely go on my notional and/or actual best-of list at the end of the year.

Ginger beer and picnics

At the Telegraph, Melanie McDonagh considers a forthcoming BBC drama-documentary on Enid Blyton, who will be played by Helena Bonham Carter.

(Link courtesy of my father, who also notes of his Kirkcaldy childhood: "I still remember parents' friend Jim Brindle, the County Librarian, passionately refusing to give her shelf-room. Fortunately Miss Luke, the Burgh Librarian, ran her own independent show!")

Transported

From Laura Miller, The Magician’s Book:

Do the children who prefer books set in the real, ordinary, workaday world ever read as obsessively as those who would much rather be transported into other worlds entirely? Once I began to confer with other people who had loved the Chronicles as children, I kept hearing stories, like my own, of countless, intoxicated rereadings. “I would read other books, of course,” wrote the novelist Neil Gaiman, “but in my heart I knew that I read them only because there wasn’t an infinite number of Narnia books.”

NB for particular detail piece see discussion on p. 265 of C.S. Lewis on the modest detail in medieval literature (Friar John, in Chaucer’s Sumoner’s Tale, pausing to ‘droof awey the cat’ before sitting down on bench).

Miscellanies

The light reading round-up for the last few weeks of September...

I am less interested in cycling than I am in the other components of triathlon, but I must say that Joe Parkin's A Dog in a Hat: An American Bike Racer's Story of Mud, Drugs, Blood, Betrayal, and Beauty in Belgium is quite excellent. The subtitle does the book a slight disservice - the main title captures its off-beat charm much better. It really is a very well-written and enjoyable book, I whole-heartedly recommend it.

John Jerome's Staying With It: Becoming an Athlete is less about swimming than it's about the quest to fend off the onset of middle age by embracing the magic of the training effect. Parts are wonderful, parts are a little too meditative and metaphysical for me - I do recommend it, but I found myself slightly wishing it had been more of a mash-up with the other swimming-related book I read recently, Hodding Carter's Off the Deep End. Jerome's book is the deeper and more memorable of the two - Carter's reads slightly as though it has been pasted together from magazine articles, and the persona he adopts (or maybe he's just like this!) is incredibly annoying. Even just as a reader, I was irked by his self-defeating decisions about his training and racing! But parts of it are very funny and vividly written - his subtitle is "The Probably Insane Idea That I Could Swim My Way Through a Midlife Crisis - And Qualify for the Olympics," and it is a fair enough description of the project and the book. Interesting stuff - keep the swim lit recs coming, please....

Miscellaneous young-adult (middle-grade?) books by authors I like but who are perhaps in this case not at their best, though I will honestly read any book by any of these three with delight: Eva Ibbotson's The Dragonfly Pool (appealing, but a thinner reimagining of a story very similar to the one told more richly in her adult novel A Song for Summer); Diana Wynne Jones, A House of Many Ways (DWJ is in my book an absolute genius, but she writes so many books that some of them are inevitably, to use the same terminology, fuller and more richly imagined than others, and this is one of the minor ones); Robin McKinley's Chalice (I enjoyed it, but it feels more like one of her long stories or novellas than like Sunshine, a novel that I have reread about five times because it so much corresponded to my notion of the ideal book to read).

Elevenses

At the Guardian, Jane Brocket's list of the top ten feasts in classic English children's literature...