Lancaster Litfest - first impressions

I've taken a first peek at Lancaster Litfest's 2012 programme. It may just be that I've overdone the caffeine today, but now I'm all aflutter.

It's probably more years than I realise since my first experience of Lancaster Litfest. I heard Wendy Cope read at the Dukes Theatre. I'd never been to a poetry reading before and I wasn't sure what to expect. I felt sure that all female poets must wear scarves. I've even tried wearing a scarf myself, but I still couldn't make my lines scan.  Wendy Cope didn't wear a scarf, but she did look like my grandma and her poetry was warmly received. By the time I saw Carol Ann Duffy in 2010, I was hooked.

Last year our reading group went to hear Carol Birch talk about her Booker short-listed novel, the wonderful Jamrach's Menagerie.  I took my daughter to the discussion of young adult literature and wondered about drawing boundaries in teenage reading, before realizing that the boundaries had been crossed without my even realising.

My brief excursion into creative writing did go some small way to demystifying the art of writing. No longer did I view writers as gifted gods, far above Premiership footballers and Hollywood actors. These were people like you and me. Didn't they have days too when the ideas didn't come, or the words clumped together on the page like lumpy porridge? I was determined not to feel out of place amongst the 'literary types' in both the audience and on the stage.

So this year, in a spirit of adventure, I have put myself forward as a volunteer to promote Lancaster Litfest in the ether and anywhere else where people will listen. I have no idea what this will entail, but I'm hoping it will lead to some interesting experiences and blog posts too.

I've yet to study the Litfest brochure in all its details, but I've already circled the poet Gillian Clarke and Jo Baker, author of The Picture Book, reviewed in my last post. My daughter's eyes lit up at the mention of the  Gothic young adult fiction event, so that's another for the diary.

You can view the Lancaster Litfest brochure here. Let the reading begin!

The Picture Book - Jo Baker

Malta, 1915. William Hastings is on shore leave from HMS Goliath where he serves as a stoker, powering the ship's engines. He's always been faithful to his wife but this time, however, he's finding the wine and women hard to resist:

'He lifts his head and watches the whore. The pretty one. The one Sully had. The way she sits, elbow on the counter, cigarette lolling from her hand. She turns, catches someone's eyes. William glances along her eyeline, to see who she's looking at. It's one of the Scots. A young lad: he stares back at her slack-jawed, hungry; hands in his pockets. There's a rash of spots across his chin. The lad's pasty fingers will be grubbing around in his pockets for money; in a minute he'll be counting out the coins on his palm. William looks back to the woman. There are deep lines down from her nose towards the corners of her lips, and they deepen as she smiles.

 He wants her. He can't help wanting her.

But he can leave. Buy a postcard. See the city. Write.

She tilts her head. Runs a finger down one edge of her wrap, where it lies over the curve of her collarbones and dips down between her breasts. He tries to think of Amelia, how he'd imagined her before they were married, when she was the girl he was waiting for. But he just recalls the red lines pinched into her skin by stays. The way she turns her head away.

There's a grain of guilt; a gritty nub of it. That's all. He stubs out his cigarette.'   

The Picture Book tells the story of four generations of a family, from the WW1 Navy man of the opening chapters to his son Billy on the Normandy landing beaches. The story moves on to Billy's son, a university lecturer, before reaching the modern day and the academic's daughter, another Billie. Each generation shares the same name, and each one is shaped in some way by those who have gone before.

Rather than tracing every stage of the family history, Baker zooms in on defining moments in the life of each generation, their decisions and indecisions and their chance encounters. For the first William it is the visit to the prostitute and an unsent postcard. For his son it is riding a bicycle in his first job as a delivery boy.

The book is at its best, I think, in its description of the relationships between the family members - the bond between  the WW2 veteran and his artistic granddaughter, the passing closeness of step brother and sister during a hasty meeting over coffee. Baker has a fine eye for the everyday details that bring her scenes to life.

The Picture Book is Baker's fourth novel and is published by Portobello.

Life in a northern town

Reading the opening chapters of Gaskell's North and South, it struck me how few books I've read about life in a northern town.

So many of the books I've read, either classic or contemporary, are set in London or the Home Counties. Yet as a born and bred northern lass, I want to read more about the north. In North and South, Margaret's first impressions of Milton in Darkshire are inauspicious:

'For several miles before they reached Milton, they saw a deep lead-coloured cloud hanging over the horizon in the direction in which it lay. It was all the darker from contrast with the pale gray-blue of the wintry sky; for in Heston there had been the earliest signs of frost. Nearer to the town, the air had a faint taste and smell of smoke; perhaps, after all, more a loss of the fragrance of grass and herbage than any positive taste or smell. Quick they were whirled over long, straight, hopeless streets of regularly-built houses, all small and of brick. Here and there a great oblong many-windowed factory stood up, like a hen among her chickens, puffing out black 'unparliamentary' smoke, and sufficiently accounting for the cloud which Margaret had taken to foretell rain.'

Before I first visited Lancashire, I had an impression of grim landscapes dominated by 'dark satanic mills' and whilst there are undoubtedly many old textile mills here, most of the ones I know are on canal sides, their hard edges softened over time by trees and water. The mills didn't only shape the landscape but also the social structure of the region. Whereas in the North East of England, men's industries such as coal-mining, steelworks and shipbuilding dominated and a woman's place was in the home, in the North West women had more freedom and could work in the mills. This is a huge simplification of course, but you get the idea. I was always impressed by my friend's mother's ability to lip-read - a skill she'd learnt in her youth working in a textile mill.

So, back to books. I'm tempted to drop my Classics Club choice A Tale of Two Cities, in favour of Dickens' Hard Times. It's setting, Coketown, is said to be based on Preston, just half an hour down the motorway from here. I once worked for a textile company in Manchester and, even with the more modern looms, the noise and the atmosphere was something to behold.

I've added Pat Barker's first novel Union Street to my wish list. Following the impoverished lives of seven working class women in a northern town, I suspect it will be a compelling, if harrowing, read.

If all this northern doom and gloom gets too much for me, I can always return to the wonderfully funny Billy Liar. His disastrous turn at the local working men's club makes me chuckle every time I think of it.

Can you recommend any northern reads?

My favourite places

With a seventy hour working week ahead, I won't have much time for reading or blogging, so I thought I'd share a photo of one of my favourite places instead.

This is The Borough pub in Lancaster. The light's not so good for reading, but I've spent a few hours here catching up with my favourite bloggers and helping my husband with an occasional spelling in his crossword.

One day I'll have a library of my own, with armchairs just like these.

Well, a girl can dream, can't she?

The Classics Club

After a week of prevaricating, I was starting to feel like a character in a Nick Hornby novel. So here, at last, is my list of classic books.

I'm taking up the challenge of  The Classics Club and setting myself the target of reading fifty classic books over the next five years. Fifty books is quite enough for me, as I'll still be trying to keep up with contemporary fiction.  Most of the books here I've never read before, although I am revisiting a few old favourites such as the Camus I read at university more than twenty years ago.

I've interpreted the term 'classic' quite loosely, including what you might call 'modern classics' and also some genre fiction. I drew the line at Lord of the Rings, but can I learn to love science fiction, I wonder? We'll have to wait and see.

1. Asimov - Foundation
2. Austen - Persuasion
3. Beckett - Murphy
4. Burroughs - Naked Lunch
5. Camus - The Plague
6. Camus - The Outsider
7. Capote - Breakfast at Tiffany's
8. Carter - The Magic Toyshop
9. Chandler - The Big Sleep
10. Chopin - The Awakening
11. Dante - Inferno
12. di Lampedusa -The Leopard
13. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
14. Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities
15. Dineson - Out of Africa
16. du Maurier - My Cousin Rachel
17. Eliot - The Mill on the Floss
18. Faulkner - As I Lay Dying
19. Fitzgerald - Tender is the Night
20. Forster - Where Angels Fear To Tread
21. Gaskell - North and South
22. Gibbons - Cold Comfort Farm
23. Greene - Brighton Rock
24. Hamilton - Hangover Square
25. Hardy - The Return of the Native
26. Hugo - Les Miserables
27. Huxley - Brave New World
28. James - The Turn of the Screw
29. Joyce - Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
30. Lawrence - Women in Love
31. Mann - Death in Venice
32. Marlowe - Dr Faustus
33. Maupassant - Bel Ami
34. Mitford - Love in a Cold Climate
35. Ondaatje - The English Patient
36. Orwell - Animal Farm
37. Pasolini - The Ragazzi
38. Pasternak - Dr Zhivago
39. Salinger - Catcher in the Rye
40. Sartre - Nausea
41. Shute - A Town Like Alice
42. Sillitoe - Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
43. Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men
44. Thackeray - Vanity Fair
45. Voltaire - Candide
46. Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse 5
47. Waugh - A Handful of Dust
48. Wharton - The House of Mirth
49. Woolf - To the Lighthouse
50. Zola - L'Assommoir

I'm looking forward to my classics journey, and meeting other classics readers along the way.

Blessed Days of Anaesthesia - Stephanie J. Snow

I'm pleased to say my husband took a few hours off his maths revision (he's an Open University student too) to write this review:

An interwoven story of chemistry, medicine, philosophy and religion, Blessed Days of Anaesthesia charts the remarkable changing attitudes towards pain during the nineteenth century. As pioneers of ether and chloroform start to challenge the Victorian idea that pain is a God-given stimulant, battles rage about the ethics and morality of such meddling with human consciousness. The story ebbs and flows as anaesthesia has both successes and dramatic failures. While practitioners experiment recklessly on themselves, key players take centre stage: Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens and Charles Darwin all become involved, and Queen Victoria herself gives birth to Prince Leopold under the influence of chloroform. Meanwhile, dark stories are emerging from London’s back-streets of nefarious activities committed with the aid of chemical-soaked handkerchiefs, and The Crimean War brings along a whole new wave of human suffering. Blessed Days of Anaesthesia is nicely written and has the intriguing subplots and interesting characters that you would hope to find in an exciting novel.

Stop What You're Doing And Read This!

Have you ever read something and thought 'Yes, that's exactly how it is'? One of those rare moments when a writer captures one of your half-imagined thoughts, and articulates it so perfectly?

That's exactly how I felt reading Jeanette Winterson's essay 'A Bed. A Book. A Mountain.' in Stop What You're Doing And Read This! This book is a wonderful collection of essays about the benefits of reading. Winterson's piece, in particular, struck a chord.

She begins with an account of reading Nan Shepherd's The Cairngorms in bed - hence the title - and the capacity of books to transport you to different places.

To cross the threshold of a book is to make a journey in total time. I don't think of reading as leisure time or wasted time. The total time of a book is more like uptime than downtime, in the way that salmon swim upstream to get home.

We have lost all sense of home - whether it's the natural world, our only planet, or our bodies, now sites of anxiety and dissatisfaction, or our scrabble for property in vast alienated cities where few can afford safety, peace, quiet, even a garden.

How can a book get me home? It reminds me of where home is - by which I mean I am remapped by the book. My internal geography shifts, my values shift. I remember myself, my world, my body, who I am.

The remapping is sometimes overwhelming - the wow factor of those books that we know have changed our territory - but usually it is much more subtle, and more of a reorienting. I feel settled in myself. To put it another way, I am a settler in myself. I inhabit my own space.'

I've often thought of reading as a journey.  Books can take us to different times, countries or even fantasy worlds.  They allow us to experience wonderful - and sometimes awful - human situations, to become another person without of the pain of living it for ourselves. Winterson's argument goes further than this though. In the same way that travelling and staying with friends and family brings us back to ourselves and our own identity, so does reading. In learning about other people and other worlds, we learn about ourselves. It reminds us of who we are.

August reading

August is the busiest month, workwise at least, so since all work and no reading makes Jane a very dull girl, I'm making sure I've got some entertaining books lined up for the weeks ahead.

I've been meaning to read Lancaster author Jo Baker's The Picture Book since I saw her at last year's Litfest. I'm a hundred pages in and it's shaping up very nicely. It begins in a London picture house in 1914 and works its way through four generations. Above all, she tells a good story and there's a lot to be said for that.

My husband has just read Blessed Days of Anaesthesia: How anaesthetics changed the world, and tells me it is very interesting. I hadn't appreciated the ethical issues that surrounded the development of anaesthesia in Victorian times, so it's as much a social history as it is about medicine. Now he's finished grouting the bathroom I'm rather hoping he'll do a review for me.

I've pre-ordered Jeanette Winterson's new book The Daylight Gate about the Pendle witches. I do have a particular interest in the witches, since they were tried at Lancaster Castle and hanged less than a mile from here.  The book's due out mid-August so I'll talk more about that in a future post.

I'm also looking forward to the announcement of the line-up for Lancaster Litfest in October. I'm hoping it'll make for some interesting additions to my reading list.

All this and classics besides - I'd better get reading!

What next?

'Imagine Sisyphus happy,' my husband tells me when I've had a bad day at work. I'm not entirely sure if this is meant to cheer me up or not, since I only got through the first two pages of Camus' Myth of Sisyphus and I was still none the wiser.

That said, having pushed one rock to the top of the hill, I'm now looking for another.  Since the Open University has been my constant companion for the last six years, on days off and holidays, on Christmas Day and a beach in Barbados, I can't quite imagine life without assignment deadlines. In some senses though, I feel that I've outgrown the OU. Book blogging has opened up a whole new world of interests and opportunities. Poking around on the web today, I came across The Classics Club  and before I could help myself I was drawing up a list of fifty classic books and a blog post to match. But then, what about all the contemporary fiction I want to read?

Where do I begin?