Intentions and reality: a 2010 blog review

I had intended to write about all of the books I’ve read over the last month or so to bring this blog up to date. I made a start on this when I wrote about Mike Gayle and 84 Charing Cross Road, but after that I lost my enthusiasm and didn’t see the point. Most of the books are by authors I already mentioned earlier in the year, such as Nick Hornby, Jasper Fforde, and Anne Tyler.

Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down is about a small group of people who are brought together by the only thing they have in common. They intended to kill themselves on New Years Eve. They run into each other on the roof a high rise building from where they have all independently decided to jump.

Each character tells their part of the story in their own words. Their vastly different backgrounds require Hornby to give each character their own distinct style of expression.

Other books have been with me almost from the start of this blog. They are non-fiction books I have picked up from time to time to read a chapter or two before turning back to another novel.

Chocolate and Zucchini is mostly a book of recipes – not exactly something to be read from cover to cover in a matter of days, but it is one I enjoyed a lot through my infrequent visits. Clotilde Dusoulier entertains and informs in her introductions to each recipe, revealing some of the personal history behind each dish and offering advice about various food related matters, like how to plan for a dinner party and how to create a balanced menu.

A Year of Slow Food by David and Gerda Foster is a book I had for a few years before I read it and it wasn’t one I wanted to rush when I had started reading. It’s the kind of non-fiction I enjoy, a personal account of country life and semi self-sufficiency. It describes the kind of lifestyle I’d like to follow – in fact the life I’d hoped to follow when I moved to a country town myself. His book is part diary, part recipe book – each section ends with a recipe using seasonal home produced ingredients, like vegetables, milk and honey.


The new authors I read during this period were Marele Day and Frances Eagar.

I’ve had The Life and Crimes of Harry Lavender for almost 20 years. I bought it from the author when she was a guest tutor during my University course. I finally got around to reading it this month.
Several years after meeting the author I was employed briefly by her publisher and saw her in a nearby coffee shop having lunch with one of the Directors.

Harry Lavender is a crime novel involving a private detective, touching on the organised crime scene in Sydney where Harry is a major crime boss. Some of the locations were vaguely familiar and it is easy to project certain old time crime figures onto the character of Harry. The book uses a lot of computer metaphors and some of its computer references are now a little dated, but it was still an entertaining book providing a reasonably literary approach to the genre.

Frances Eagar’s book Time Tangle is another that I’ve had for more than a couple of decades. It is a children’s book that tangles a little history with the modern world as a girl of the present crosses into a different time, meeting a boy close to her own age. She finds herself caught up in the religious persecutions of the Tudor ages. It seems that time travel books of various types have been a regular part of this year’s reading.

When I started this blog my hope was to find inspiration and encouragement to return to writing my own stories. Partly I hoped to find some ideas about what made successful stories work. What was in the stories I liked that appealed to me?

That part of this blog has been a failure. I’ve written no stories and I’ve merely found how incapable I’ve been in analysing someone’s writing to assess why it appeals or not. I merely know what I like without knowing why I liked it.

In the end I have only concluded that a readable story needs an interesting plot and characters I with whom I can identify. There’s nothing profound or inspiring in that conclusion.

While maintaining this blog has helped me to persevere with my reading instead of continually putting books aside only partly read, I found towards the end that I was getting too caught up in the numbers game being more interested in reading 50 then 55 or 60 books before the end of the year. As a result I avoided books that would take longer to read. Why read one book of 500 pages when I could read two of 250 pages in the same amount of time?

Well that could be all for this year. It is Christmas Eve tomorrow. After that I’ll be away from the internet until the New Year when I can start a new reading list. Until then I have just over a week to reach 70 books for 2010 – can I do it?

Mary Poppins

Perhaps most people would know of Mary Poppins through the Disney film starring Julie Andrews. I saw the film as a child during its original cinema release. It was notable for some memorable songs and for the worst cockney accent in cinematic history courtesy of Dick Van Dyke.

Those familiar with the film would recognise some of the stories in PL Travers’ book including Mary entering a chalk drawing to spend an afternoon in the countryside scene it depicted; an afternoon tea floating near the ceiling with an uncle afflicted with “laughing gas”, and the bird lady selling bread crumbs to “feed the birds, tuppence a bag”.

Travers’ book is a collection of short stories about the strange situations experienced by the Banks children after the arrival of a mysterious nanny literally blown in by the wind. The Mary Poppins of the book seems far more abrupt and lacking patience than the Julie Andrews character in the film, but she is still able to obtain the affection of the children in her care.

The most memorable part of the book for me was a chapter about the babies of the Banks family when they are still young enough to understand the languages of nature; holding conversations with the sunlight and with a visiting starling. Twins John and Barbara want to know why their parents and older brother and sister can not also understand what the birds and the weather are saying, and when told that the ability is lost with age they are adamant that THEY will never forget.

Most stories in the book cast the older Banks children, Jane and Michael, into unusual situations which afterwards they are never sure were real. Their nanny offers them no assurance of the reality of their experiences. If anything she insists the children’s claims are absurd –and yet there is sometimes a clue that makes them doubt her denials.


Mary Poppins is the first in a series of books that Travers wrote about the Banks family nanny. I have two of the others but have not yet read them. The second title, Mary Poppins Comes Back gives a clear indication about the ending of the first book where, as in the film, a change of wind direction leads to Mary’s sudden departure from the family. The departure reveals the affection the children have developed for their nanny despite her abrupt lack of patience. After their initial sadness the children’s spirits are lifted when they learn the meaning of the “au revoir” in Mary’s farewell note.

“Au revore dearie?” shrieked Mrs Brill from the next room. “Why, doesn’t it mean – let me see, I’m not up in these foreign tongues – doesn’t it mean ‘God bless you’? No. No., I’m wrong. I think, Miss Jane dear, it means ‘To Meet Again’.”

Jane and Michael looked at each other. Joy and understanding shone in their eyes. They knew what Mary Poppins meant.

Michael gave a long sigh of relief. “That’s all right,” he said shakily. “She always does what she says she will.”

My Fictional Autobiography (part 2): Mostly Fantasy

My later teens are nothing to be proud about. I refused to read the required novels for my English classes in High School (but passed my final exams anyway). And I read many books of questionable taste such as Stanley Morgan’s “Russ Tobin” series, commencing with The Sewing Machine Man (gratuitous sex), and Richard Allen’s “Skinhead” series (gratuitous violence).
Those books are best forgotten.

I also had my first real taste of horror fiction with William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist. It was the first time that a book genuinely scared me – something that the film failed to do, even though the book’s literary qualities are questionable and the film is considered a classic of the genre.

Some of the brighter spots in my reading diet came through my interest in fantasy and I rediscovered books by CS Lewis and Alan Garner. I had some memories of reading The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe years before, but I’d never moved on to the sequels. I’m not sure when I first came across Garner but his fiction seemed more grounded in “reality”. Lewis and Garner both portrayed a crossing over between real and magical worlds. Lewis took his child protagonists from their familiar circumstances and placed them in a world very different from their own, but Garner turned this around and showed the world of magic and myth crossing over to our world, bringing conflict here instead of isolating it in the relative safety of somewhere else. Garner also had less “jolly good show” about him than Lewis, portraying characters more familiar to me than those created by Lewis.

Obviously any serious follower of fantasy fiction can not avoid Tolkien and Lord of the Rings, but I have clearly not followed seriously enough because I've been unable to complete this revered trilogy. I’ve made multiple attempts, but have never made it to the end. It may seem irrelevant to others, but one hindrance to my progress has been chapter length. In my earlier attempts I found the chapters far too long to be tempted to read “just one more chapter” before I put the book down for the night. It’s amazing how much reading progress can be made through the “one more chapter” approach. When I read The Wizard of Oz as a child, I read the whole book in one sitting because I wanted to keep reading “one more chapter” before I was ready to put it down.

I recall very little fantasy fiction available for adults in the 1970s. That may be difficult to believe for anyone used to today’s abundance of fantasy titles. Almost everything I remember was written for children or ‘Young Adults”. The exceptions were Lord of the Rings and a couple of books inspired by it, like Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shannara. Some see Brooks as being the one who inspired the rise of Fantasy fiction as a viable adult genre, being the first to break through the fear of competing with Tolkien. (see http://www.terrybrooks.net/novels/sword.html)

For some reason those first attempts to aim fantasy at the adult reader didn’t appeal to me and my own reading of fantasy remained with the books written for children and teens. To Lewis and Garner I would add Susan Cooper (The Dark is Rising) and Lloyd Alexander (The Prydain Chronicles) as my favoured authors of that time. I even named my Collie, Bran, after a dog in one of Cooper’s books.
I know there were other books and other authors, but they haven’t stuck in my mind to the extent of those already named; and I’m sure that those I DO recall (Penelope Lively, George MacDonald, E Nesbit,) belong to a later part of my life in books.

My Fictional Autobiography (part 1): Childhood

In my early blogging days I wrote about the progression of my musical tastes through the different stages of my life. I have been thinking of doing the same with my literary tastes, but for some reason it doesn’t seem so easy.

One of the surprising things about considering the music in my life was how complete I was able to make the list. Of course I didn’t refer to every group, artist or recording that I liked over the years, but I was able to recall all of those who had an important influence on my tastes.

(See: Changing Tastes)

Applying the same approach to my relationship with books is much a more complicated process, but I’ll do what I can.

My mum taught me to read long before I started school. I have vague memories of two “Ladybird’ books, one about the alphabet and the other about farm animals, which must have played a part in my introduction to reading.

At school I remember “Janet and John” books that were used as a basic introduction to reading in class. Among the books available later were the “Thomas the Tank Engine” series and “Topsy & Tim” books.

A significant part of my reading journey began with a nose bleed that started on the way to school one day. I spent some time out of class with huge wads of cotton wool to soak up the blood. Eventually the school staff decided it would be better if I bled to death at home rather than on school premises and they contacted my mum who took me home.
I was very upset about missing class that day because I would miss the story broadcast via radio each week. As compensation my mum arranged my membership at the local library and selected a few books for me to read.

Apart from those few details I have no memory of specific books in those early years, but as my time in Primary school progressed I was a keen reader of the Bobbsey Twins, Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series. I also enjoyed Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books prior to the TV adaptations and Doctor Dolittle was a friend long before Rex Harrison played him in the original film.

Part of the problem in recalling the books of my early life is the fact that there were so many of them and their significance to this project is merely due to the fact that I can remember their titles or parts of their plot.
Dodie Smith’s “One Hundred and One Dalmatians” is memorable partly because of the animated Disney film and also because my family had a Dalmatian for a pet. And there are similar Disney links for “Emil and the Detectives” and “The Incredible Journey”.

In my final Primary years the class library had a series of novels about wildlife. Each book focused on a different animal, creating a storyline out of its natural day to day experiences. I don’t remember any details of author or title but I loved them at the time. Those stories inspired me to write my own contribution to the genre and I spent hours filling an exercise book with the improbable exploits of a wolf cub and his family. I must have included drawings to illustrate my story because I remember one of the wolf pack in a deadly fight with a herd of buffalo (though the image I recall looks more like a cow).

My early high school years brought on an obsession with James Bond and Modesty Blaise; books with content intended for readers much older than myself. Years later I wrote fan letters to Peter O’Donnell, the author of the Blaise books and was excited to receive a reply to each typed on special “Modesty Blaise” letter head. I regret not keeping them. They could have been a valuable part of my current autograph collection.

The most memorable short story I wrote in my teenage years was a James Bond tribute. After an accident my protagonist woke to find he was the “guest” of various Bond villains, and had been mistaken as Bond himself. While I regret not keeping the story, I recognise that my memory has perhaps given it qualities that I would find lacking if I had the chance to read it again. Sometimes memory might be a kinder literary critic than reality.