A Book for Every Occasion?
Yesterday I signed up for a six-week yoga course at the local wellbeing center. This is something I’ve been meaning to do for at least two years. Now that I’ve finally made myself commit to it, of course I’m thinking twice: going out on a Tuesday evening in the cold, dark and quite possibly wet – what was I thinking?! What will I wear? Will I have to talk to other people? Will they be nice? Will they be better than me? It’s like high school all over again.
So, naturally, last night I started reading this:
This was a Christmas gift from my wish list. With an appropriate bookmark I found at the library where I worked in London.
It’s actually a book of disparate travel essays, with the first about a stay in Louisiana that coincided with Mardi Gras in the early 1990s. But Geoff Dyer is one of those amazingly talented authors I’d read on pretty much any topic. I’ll probably skip ahead to the title essay and then make my way through the rest of the book.
Alas, I don’t think there’s a specific book that can console me for failing to get tickets to see John Mayer in London in May and wasting several hours of this morning in the stressful attempt, followed by much disappointed lethargy. (We were similarly unsuccessful with U2 recently, but did manage to secure seats to see Sigur Rós play London in September.)
When’s the last time you found a surprisingly relevant book on your shelf?
Postscript: The next day John Mayer announced a second London show, and this time we got tickets 🙂
Seeking Advice about Instagram
I recently signed up to Instagram – bookishbeck, as always, if you want to connect – but haven’t been very active on the site yet. (My sister coerced me into joining, mostly so I could follow itsdougthepug.) The main issue is that I don’t have a smartphone, so rather than using the app version I have to go via a program called Gramblr and can’t access all the usual features. A lot of the time it can seem like too much of a faff to post pictures on there.
However, I want to give the site a proper go so would like to get advice on how I can best use it as a book blogger. I know it can be a good way to connect with publishers by posting photos of review copies they’ve sent you and linking to your reviews, etc. I’ve already followed a bunch of publishers, but I know there’s more I could and should be doing.
So I’ll turn it over to you: those of you who use Instagram (primarily for bookish reasons rather than personal photos, though that’s cool too), what accounts should I be following? What’s your strategy when posting book photos? How can I use hashtags and captions to my advantage? Do you use Instagram in pretty much the same way as you do Twitter, or are there subtle differences I should be aware of?
Thanks in advance for any tips!
Shirts, Totes & Other Bookish Paraphernalia
I’m a big fan of book-related paraphernalia. Even after I succumbed to e-readers in 2013, I’ve kept on hoarding bookmarks and love finding suitable pairings for my print books – a nature-related marker for a nature book; a religious-themed one for a theology book, and so on. I also collect bookmarks linked to particular bookshops or literary prizes.
Here’s a recent pairing that particularly pleased me: a novel about Vincent van Gogh with a bookmark from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (I haven’t been yet; I found the bookmark in a book at the library where I used to work).
There’s not much of a narrative to this post. It’s just a chance to say, here’s some great book swag! T-shirts, tote bags, pin badges, a necklace my best friend got me: you name it, I love it. It’s a wonder I don’t have more.
Do you collect any book-related paraphernalia?
New Bookcases = Reorganizing
I knew the situation was getting desperate when I had to start stacking books on top of the row on top of the bookcase, and sideways on my bedside table so that I couldn’t see the spines.
So this weekend we journeyed to the fairly new Ikea store in Reading for two more Billy bookcases. We had a short list of other stuff we were looking for, but kept finding useful items – a desk chair for my husband’s attic workstation, a metal filing unit to replace the impossible stationery box we’ve used for years, two shelving units that would together hold all of our CDs and DVDs, etc. – such that by the time we finished our plates of meatballs we’d blown over £200 in store. But hey, we got loads of useful storage solutions, worked on our Christmas shopping, and found some bizarre Swedish foodstuffs to try too.
I’ve now been able to eliminate all double-stacking and make some more sensible categories. So upstairs in my study I have all classics in one bookcase, and another with one shelf of priority fiction, two shelves of biography and memoir, and one shelf of literary reference. Downstairs one whole bookcase is devoted to nature and field guides, another houses priority fiction paperbacks (two shelves) and science fiction (two shelves, thanks to my husband’s Terry Pratchett collection), and a third is split between travel (one shelf); general nonfiction, music and cats (together a partial shelf), and religion and poetry (two shelves). With the addition of a side table and floor lamp, my reading corner is now complete.
The good news is that I have the equivalent of two small shelves empty, which is unheard of in this household but means we have some room to expand into.
It’s been a busy weekend what with shopping, yardwork, editing and helping my husband make a Christmas cake. The downside is that pretty much zero reading got done. But it’s been fun to do some different things, including walking through chilly, fireworks-lit streets for a pint and a pie at one of our local pubs on Guy Fawkes Night.
How did you spend the weekend? Did any reading get done?
Birthday Happenings
One of the best things about being a home-based freelancer is that I can arrange my work schedule to suit my life. Having my birthday fall on a Friday this year was especially good because it meant I got until Monday to submit my daily editing load. My husband was working as usual, so I spent much of the day reading under the cat and charity shopping. I bought seven books, a nice mixture of England-themed nonfiction and juicy novels, plus new-to-me comfy black flats. (Total spend: £10.25.) Being short on time that evening, we lazily ordered delivery pizza for probably the first time in eight years, followed by cocktails and cake.
I didn’t end up using my literary cakes and cocktails books this year, but that gives me a chance to proffer my own pun names for what we did make. We tried two gin cocktails we’d found recipes for in the Guardian. The one they called “Elderflower Collins” was absolutely delicious: lemon juice, elderflower cordial and gin, topped up with San Pellegrino Limonata (lemon soda) and garnished with a lemon slice and a mint sprig. I dub it “A Visit from Mr. Collins,” as in the Bennet girls will have to down quite a few of these before…
Unfortunately, the second cocktail was not a hit. The “Miss Polly Hawkins” combines chamomile-flavored gin (I steeped two chamomile teabags in 60 mL of gin for a week), rose syrup (we didn’t have it or want to buy it so substituted our homemade rosehip syrup), plain gin and egg white. Egg white is a fairly frequent ingredient in cocktails – it adds gloss and body – but we found that it made the drink gloopy. That plus the overall floral and medicinal notes meant this was fairly hard to swallow; we had to drown it in sparkling water and ice cubes to get it down. Alas, I modify Iris Murdoch to call this “An Unappealing Rose.”
However, my cake was an unqualified success. I usually go for chocolate or chocolate/peanut butter desserts, but decided to be different this year and requested the Italian Pear and Ginger Cheesecake from Genevieve Taylor’s cookbook A Good Egg. It was sophisticated and delicious. Running with the Italy thing, I’ll pick out a Forster title and call it “Where Angels Pear to Tread.” (It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense; then again, neither do a lot of the names in Tequila Mockingbird and Scone with the Wind!)
On Sunday the birthday fun continued with a trip to Hungerford Bookshop (our nearest independent bookshop) and a gentle country walk. I bought two secondhand books but came away with a total of four – in the basement they have a table covered in free proof copies, so my husband and I grabbed one each (how I wish I could have taken the lot!). It’s a great idea for rewarding customer loyalty and dealing with unwanted proofs; perhaps I’ll donate a stack of mine to them next time I’m there.
Two proofs (left) and two nonfiction purchases.
This year I got a Kindle case and two bookshop-themed memoirs as presents: The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap by Wendy Welch and Books, Baguettes and Bedbugs by Jeremy Mercer. I started reading the former – the story of a married couple opening a bookshop in recession-era Virginia – right away. I also got a poster frame so I can finally hang my literary map of the British Isles on the wall above my desk, and a “Shhhh, reading in progress” mug.
Consuming tasty food and drink + acquiring a baker’s dozen of books + getting out into the countryside = a great birthday weekend!
What are the ingredients for your perfect birthday?
How People Found My Blog Recently
Back in May I surveyed a few months’ worth of the (often very odd) web searches that led people to my blog. In the past four and a half months the search terms have been more normal in that they generally relate to books or authors I’ve covered. However, I do hope I haven’t disappointed some searchers: after all, I don’t reveal the exact location of the croft in Seal Morning, instruct readers in how to pronounce ‘Athill’, or give any details about Ann Kidd Taylor’s wedding!
In any case, it’s always interesting to see what people were looking up – Oliver Balch’s Under the Tump, Michel Faber’s Undying, Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent and various graphic novels were popular topics – and I reckon I count among the “bookish cat people” of the first search. (Spelling and punctuation are unedited throughout this list!)
May 26: bookish cat people, oliver balch under the tump
May 31: a book review of any book about 140-160 words, in my next life i want to be a cat. to sleep 20 hours a day and wait to be fed. to sit around licking my ass., under the tump by oliver balch reviews
June 25: irmina yelin, george watsky bipolar
July 2: michel faber undying goodreads, the first bad man book miranda july plot
July 16: she’s my only father’s daughter, essex serpent, sue gee, hay on wye
July 21: the ghost of nelly burdons beck
August 5: correct pronunciation of athill in diana athill s name
August 11: the essex serpent usa release
August 24: ann kidd taylor wedding
August 25: paintings with a woman reading a book
August 29: michel faber undying review, to the bright edge of the world interview
September 8: agatha christie graphic novel, house of hawthorne
September 13: irmina by barbara yellen
September 19: paulette bates
September 21: bbc miniseris vs book war and peace
September 26: vincent van gogh graphic novel
September 28: reviews on my son my sonby howard spring
September 30: seal morning location of croft
October 3: john pritchard_something more
Literary Cakes and Cocktails
With my birthday coming up in the middle of the month, it’s time to start thinking about what treats I want to help me celebrate. Where better for a bibliophile to turn than to these two pun-filled bookish cookbooks?
I got Scone with the Wind from my in-laws for last year’s birthday, and found Tequila Mockingbird at the Salvation Army shop in Cambridge for 70 pence the other week. There’s some mighty tempting options in both. The Woman in Black Forest Gâteau? Finnegans Cake (chocolate/stout flavored)?
And to drink, perhaps The Lime of the Ancient Mariner (gin with lime and grapefruit juices in a salted glass) or Gin Eyre (if I can find something to substitute for orange bitters)? We don’t keep a lot of spirits around, but gin and rum are always in our drinks cupboard, so that’s a good place to start.
If you can’t handle puns, look away from these books now! However, if you or someone you know likes them, these make great gift books for the coffee table. I’ll report back on my culinary trials!
Ways of Finding out about New Books
People sometimes ask how I hear about all the books I add to my to-read list, especially brand new and forthcoming titles. Some are through pure serendipity when browsing in a bookshop or public library, or looking through the read-alikes on various websites including Goodreads and Kirkus, but for the most part I’m more strategic than that. Below are my go-to sources of information about books, with links provided where possible.
E-ARC REQUEST SITES
NetGalley and Edelweiss are the primary websites where I get the lowdown on upcoming books, and request e-copies to review.
E-NEWSLETTERS
Amazon Books
Biographile
Emerald Street (books content on Mondays and Wednesdays)
Omnivoracious (the Amazon Book Review)
MAGAZINES
North American magazine Bookmarks is terrific – and not just because I regularly write for it! As well as surveying new and upcoming titles, it directs attention to older books through thematic articles and author profiles. BookPage can be picked up for free in U.S. public libraries and has a great mix of reviews and interviews.
If you’re in the UK and manage to get hold of The Bookseller (perhaps at a public library), it has the full scoop on forthcoming titles, usually months in advance. Booktime (free in independent bookstores) and New Books (associated with Nudge) are also worth a look.
NEWSPAPER REVIEWS
More and more newspapers are starting to put up a paywall around their online content, but the Guardian is still free and excellent. Others like the New York Times offer you 5–10 free articles per month before you have to pay.
OTHER BOOK-THEMED WEBSITES
PRIZE LISTS
Every year I pick up recent titles I wouldn’t otherwise have heard of thanks to the longlists for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Folio Prize, the Guardian’s First Book Award or Not the Booker Prize, the Man Booker Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wainwright Prize, the Wellcome Prize, and so on.
TRUSTED RECOMMENDERS
This might be Goodreads friends, fellow bloggers whose opinions I value, or writers who know their books, like Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin (authors of The Novel Cure), Nick Hornby (articles from his “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” column in the Believer were collected into several entertaining volumes) and Nancy Pearl (the “Book Lust” series).
Follow as many authors, publicists, publishers and fellow reviewers as you can and you will never be short of book news! (The same goes for Facebook, should you wish.)
WEBSITES WITH SOME BOOKS CONTENT
Gretchen Rubin chooses 3 book club books per month
Where do you tend to find out about new books? Let me know about any resources I’ve missed.
Settling in, aka Organizing My Bookshelves
We moved into our new rental house a week and a half ago. For most of that time my husband has been away in Devon for work, which created the perfect opportunity for me to have free rein in organizing the place – clothes, framed photos, toiletries, desk supplies: yeah, sure, all that; but really, my focus was always on the books.
I thought I had the perfect plan: general fiction in our bedroom; classics and literary reference books in the spare room/office; and the rest in the lounge on a big bookcase divided into one shelf biographies, one shelf nature, one shelf religion, and one shelf travel. This system quickly broke down. For one thing, we actually have three or more shelves’ worth of nature books, more than a shelf each of most other nonfiction genres, and way more fiction than would ever fit on one small Ikea Billy.
The result has been some inevitable dividing and jumbling. Much as I didn’t want to do so, I’ve had to put some books on their sides on top of rows, and I had to double stack the religion shelf. I made three shelves of nature and travel combined, but put the travel guidebooks and the nature field guides in separate places. Fiction ends up scattered in several places, including priority stacks on our bedside tables plus one shelf devoted to novels I mean to get to soon.
Ultimately we’re going to have to get another bookcase, but I’m pretty pleased with the results thus far. Here’s a peek:
Lounge unit: three shelves of mixed nature and travel (alphabetical by author); one double-stacked shelf of religion.
Bedroom bookcase: general fiction (all but one of which I have read!) with areas on the bottom shelf for oversized graphic novels and science/nature books. On top are various nature field guides.
Spare room/office bookcases. Left: classics and poetry (Dickens set on top); right: top shelf of priority fiction, second shelf of biographies, third shelf of literary reference and generally nonfiction (divided by some Penguin paperbacks), and a bottom shelf of more literary reference and biography.
Overflow area (on office desk shelves): travel guides; mixed reference and humor; paperback fiction that doesn’t fit elsewhere.
I’ve been enjoying my walks into town along the Kennet & Avon canal. Up until Tuesday we were without Internet at home, so I had to make daily excursions to the lovely public library to do my editing work. It’s great watching life on a canal change: some houseboats seem permanent, while others drift in and out from day to day; the swans and ducks are always on the move, looking out for their next wheaten snack; and every time I walk the tow path I notice something new, like a large stand of hops. Home brew, anyone?
After several years of not having access to our own outdoor space, we now have as much garden as we could ever want. The back door lets out onto a large stone patio, followed by a grassy area with a rotary washing line, a huge combined storage shed and summer house (too warm now, but should be a perfect reading spot next month); an emptied pond, some pear and plum trees and a bench; blackcurrant and raspberry bushes; a second shed (currently inaccessible due to a wasp’s nest); a dilapidated vegetable bed; a compost heap; a cuttings area; more grass; some scrub; and finally the secluded gate onto the canal path. Every time you think you’ve gotten to the end, it just keeps going. At some point it’s going to represent an awful lot of work, but for now I’m just in awe of the space and the sense of freedom.
Looking back from the summer house.
We’re having the mildest of heat waves here in southern England, but the signs of autumn are poking through – especially the ripening fruit you see everywhere. We have lots of ready blackberries in the garden; add to that some foraged plums, pears and apples and we’ll soon have the makings of a hearty crumble with which to welcome our first guests this weekend.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 