#ReadingtheMeow2025, Part II: Books by Mayo, Reinhold, Taylor and More
This year’s Reading the Meow challenge is drawing to a close. I’m adding to my first set of reviews with these selections: a novelty book about women and cats, an autobiographical sequel about an animal-lover’s menagerie in Provence, and a travel book about Scottish wildcats – plus a one-off essay that drew me in for its title and one more children’s book.
Behind Every Great Woman Is a Great Cat (2019)
The only name on the cover is Lulu Mayo, who does the illustrations. That’s your clue that the text (by Justine Solomons-Moat) is pretty much incidental; this is basically a YA mini coffee table book. I found it pleasant enough to read bits of at bedtime but it’s not about to win any prizes. (I mean, it prints “prolificate” twice; that ain’t a word. Proliferate is.) Among the famous cat ladies given one-page profiles are Georgia O’Keeffe, Jacinda Ardern, Vivien Leigh, and Anne Frank. I hadn’t heard of the Scottish Fold cat breed, but now I know that they’ve become popular thanks Taylor Swift. The few informational interludes are pretty silly, though I did actually learn that a cat heads straight for the non-cat person in the room (like our friend Steve) because they find eye contact with strangers challenging so find the person who’s ignoring them the least threatening. I liked the end of the piece on Judith Kerr: “To her, cats were symbols of home, sources of inspiration and constant companions. It’s no wonder that she once observed, ‘they’re very interesting people, cats.’” (Christmas gift, secondhand)
Watchers in the Sun: Life at Mas des Chats by Margaret Reinhold (1994)
Last year I read the previous book, Sanctuary in the South (also titled Watchers by the Pool) on holiday. This is more of the same: pleasant stories about the personalities and interactions of a rotating cast of cats, some of whom she’d brought with her from England to Provence, others who transformed from strays she fed outdoors to part of the indoor hierarchy. Lily is the grande dame with private quarters upstairs; Monsieur le Gris is the top cat, bullying several younger cats but forming strong bonds with others. Most of the time Reinhold seems to hit a natural limit of nine, but that’s with several dying and being replaced by cats who wandered in or kittens people brought her. She also has two dogs and at one point rescues an old, deaf spaniel from drowning. Her French neighbours seem (to her, and probably us readers) strangely unsentimental about their pets by comparison. I enjoyed this a bit less than the first book because it was so similar – again with the Doreen Tovey-like anecdotes about the local humans – and because with the former I had the benefit of reading it on location in the South of France. The photographs by William Gooddy are a quaint reminder of the days when you shot a roll of film and had no idea how your photos had turned out until you got it developed. Even if some were blurry or underexposed, you used them because that was the best you had! (Secondhand purchase – Awesomebooks.com)
Tracking the Highland Tiger: In Search of Scottish Wildcats by Marianne Taylor (2019)
A perfect segue from Reading the Meow to our Scotland holiday coming up on Friday. I’d not heard of Taylor although she’s a prolific natural history writer. Such species quest narratives have become very common. The contextual information about the world’s cat species and the difference between Scottish wildcats and domestic cats, including the example of a half-feral cat she adopted, is fairly interesting, but the way she separates it from her trips to Speyside and Ardnamurchan to look for wildcats in 2013–18, which are each given their own chapter, feels odd. A similar book being published today would have blended the travel, research, and autobiographical information better. There’s plenty of habitat in the Scottish mountains for wildcats; the problem they face is hybridization with domestic cats. There’s no such thing as a purebred anymore. Captive breeding and reintroductions are the only way the species is likely to survive. “Timing a trip to look for Scottish wildcats is difficult in a way, but in another way it’s not: no matter what time you go, you’re almost guaranteed not to see one.” (At least she’s self-deprecating about it.) For most of the way through, you’re convinced the author will never find one. But you’ve got to keep hoping…
[I got this from a Little Free Library on Lewis, probably the most remote one I’ve ever frequented. Alas, it’s the only one in the Outer Hebrides and there aren’t any others that we’ll pass by on our travels in the Highlands.]
And a couple of bonus books:
The Mousehole Cat by Antonia Barber; illus. Nicola Bayley (1990) – The town of Mousehole in Cornwall (the far southwest of England) relies on fishing. Old Tom brings some of his catch home every day for his cat Mowzer; they have a household menu with a different fishy dish for each day of the week. One winter a storm prevents the fishing boats from leaving the cove and the people – and kitties – start to starve. Tom decides he’ll go out in his boat anyway, and Mowzer goes along to sing and tame the Great Storm-Cat. This story of bravery was ever so cute, words and pictures both, and I especially liked how Mowzer considers Tom her pet. (Free from a neighbour)
“A Conversation with a Cat” from A Conversation with a Cat and Others by Hilaire Belloc (1931) – I have no idea how I came across this but I had to borrow it for the title. Alas, only the six-page opening story is actually about a cat; the rest is, I suspect, light essays in the vein of Jerome K. Jerome. In the title piece, a man stops for a beer at a railway station bar and a beautiful long-haired cat jumps up onto his lap. “If it be true that nations have the cats they deserve, then the English people deserve well in cats, for there are none so prosperous or friendly in the world,” he thinks. He considers himself chosen and names the cat “Amathea.” He monologues to her about how comforting her presence is (“there is not a man living who knows better than I that the four charms of a cat lie in its closed eyes, its long and lovely hair, its silence, and even its affected love”) and how wonderful it is that she knows nothing of mortality. “You will never leave me. I will respect your sleep and we will sit here together through all uncounted time,” he vows. At which point she, of course, hops down and promptly approaches another patron for attention. Just like a cat. (University library)
I also enjoyed this page from Awkward Family Photos by Mike Bender and Doug Chernack, which I perused from the Little Free Library:
I’ve had such fun with Reading the Meow this year! Thanks again to Mallika for hosting it. My favourite read of the challenge was Poets Square, followed by Mornings without Mii. The Mousehole Cat was great, too. (All are pictured below apart from Mii, which I read on Kindle.)
Book Serendipity, June to Mid-August 2024
I call it “Book Serendipity” when two or more books that I read at the same time or in quick succession have something in common – the more bizarre, the better. This is a regular feature of mine every couple of months. Because I usually have 20–30 books on the go at once, I suppose I’m more prone to such incidents. People frequently ask how I remember all of these coincidences. The answer is: I jot them on scraps of paper or input them immediately into a file on my PC desktop; otherwise, they would flit away!
The following are in roughly chronological order.
- A self-induced abortion scene in Recipe for a Perfect Wife by Karma Brown and Sleeping with Cats by Marge Piercy.
- A woman who cleans buildings after hours, and a character named Tova who lives in the Seattle area in A Reason to See You Again by Jami Attenberg and Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt.
- Flirting with a surf shop employee in Sandwich by Catherine Newman and Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt.
- Living in Paris and keeping ticket stubs from all films seen in Paris Trance by Geoff Dyer and The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick.
- A schefflera (umbrella tree) is mentioned in Cheri by Jo Ann Beard and Company by Shannon Sanders.
- The Plague by Albert Camus is mentioned in Knife by Salman Rushdie and Stowaway by Joe Shute.
- Making egg salad sandwiches is mentioned in Cheri by Jo Ann Beard and Sandwich by Catherine Newman.
- Pet rats in Stowaway by Joe Shute and Happy Death Club by Naomi Westerman. Rats are also mentioned in Mammoth by Eva Baltasar, The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo, and The Colour by Rose Tremain.
- Eels feature in Our Narrow Hiding Places by Kristopher Jansma, Late Light by Michael Malay, and The Colour by Rose Tremain.
- Atlantic City, New Jersey is a location in Florence Adler Swims Forever by Rachel Beanland and Company by Shannon Sanders.
The father is a baker in Florence Adler Swims Forever by Rachel Beanland and Our Narrow Hiding Places by Kristopher Jansma.
- A New Zealand setting (but very different time periods) in Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly and The Colour by Rose Tremain.
- A mention of Melanie Griffith’s role in Working Girl in I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself by Glynnis MacNicol and Happy Death Club by Naomi Westerman.
Ermentrude/Ermyntrude as an imagined alternate name in Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly and a pet’s name in Stowaway by Joe Shute.
- A poet with a collection that was published on 6 August mentions a constant ringing in the ears: Joshua Jennifer Espinoza (I Don’t Want to Be Understood) and Keith Taylor (What Can the Matter Be?).
- A discussion of the original meaning of “slut” (a slovenly housekeeper) vs. its current sexualized meaning in Girlhood by Melissa Febos and Sandi Toksvig’s introduction to the story anthology Furies.
- An odalisque (a concubine in a harem, often depicted in art) is mentioned in I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself by Glynnis MacNicol and The Shark Nursery by Mary O’Malley.
- Reading my second historical novel of the year in which there’s a disintegrating beached whale in the background of the story: first was Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Connor, then Come to the Window by Howard Norman.
A short story in which a woman gets a job in online trolling in Because I Don’t Know What You Mean and What You Don’t by Josie Long and in the Virago Furies anthology (Helen Oyeyemi’s story).
- Her partner, a lawyer, is working long hours and often missing dinner, leading the protagonist to assume that he’s having an affair with a female colleague, in Recipe for a Perfect Wife by Karma Brown and Summer Fridays by Suzanne Rindell.
- A fierce boss named Jo(h)anna in Summer Fridays by Suzanne Rindell and Test Kitchen by Neil D.A. Stewart.
- An OTT rendering of a Scottish accent in Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly and Test Kitchen by Neil D.A. Stewart.
- A Padstow setting and a mention of Puffin Island (Cornwall) in The Cove by Beth Lynch and England as You Like It by Susan Allen Toth.
- A mention of the Big and Little Dipper (U.S. names for constellations) in Directions to Myself by Heidi Julavits and How We Named the Stars by Andrés N. Ordorica.
- A mention of Binghamton, New York and its university in We Are Animals by Jennifer Case and We Would Never by Tova Mirvis.
- A character accidentally drinks a soapy liquid in We Would Never by Tova Mirvis and one story of The Man in the Banana Trees by Marguerite Sheffer.
The mother (of the bride or groom) takes over the wedding planning in We Would Never by Tova Mirvis and Summer Fridays by Suzanne Rindell.
- The ex-husband’s name is Jonah in The Mourner’s Bestiary by Eiren Caffall and We Would Never by Tova Mirvis.
- The husband’s name is John in Dot in the Universe by Lucy Ellmann and Liars by Sarah Manguso.
- An affair is discovered through restaurant receipts in Summer Fridays by Suzanne Rindell and Test Kitchen by Neil D.A. Stewart.
- A mention of eating fermented shark in The Museum of Whales You Will Never See by A. Kendra Greene and Test Kitchen by Neil D.A. Stewart.
- A mention of using one’s own urine as a remedy in Thunderstone by Nancy Campbell and Terminal Maladies by Okwudili Nebeolisa.
- The main character tries to get pregnant by a man even though one of the partners is gay in Mammoth by Eva Baltasar and Until the Real Thing Comes Along by Elizabeth Berg.
- Motherhood is for women what war is for men: this analogy is presented in We Are Animals by Jennifer Case, Parade by Rachel Cusk, and Want, the Lake by Jenny Factor.
Childcare is presented as a lifesaver for new mothers in We Are Animals by Jennifer Case and Liars by Sarah Manguso.
- A woman bakes bread for the first time in Mammoth by Eva Baltasar and A Year of Biblical Womanhood by Rachel Held Evans.
- A gay couple adopts a Latino boy in Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly and one story of There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven by Ruben Reyes, Jr.
A husband who works on film projects in A Year of Biblical Womanhood by Rachel Held Evans and Liars by Sarah Manguso.
- A man is haunted by things his father said to him years ago in Parade by Rachel Cusk and one story in There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven by Ruben Reyes, Jr.
- Two short story collections in a row in which a character is a puppet (thank you, magic realism!): The Man in the Banana Trees by Marguerite Sheffer, followed by There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven by Ruben Reyes, Jr.
- A farm is described as having woodworm in Mammoth by Eva Baltasar and Parade by Rachel Cusk.
- Sebastian as a proposed or actual name for a baby in Signs, Music by Raymond Antrobus and Birdeye by Judith Heneghan.
What’s the weirdest reading coincidence you’ve had lately?
Review: The Tidal Year by Freya Bromley (2023)
The Nero Book Awards category winners will be announced on Tuesday. I haven’t had a chance to read as many of the nominees as I would like, but I’m catching up on one that I’ve wanted to read ever since I first heard about it early last year. Even though Stephen Collins sums up about my feelings about coldwater swimming well in this cartoon –
– I was drawn to The Tidal Year for several reasons. First off, I’ll read just about any bereavement memoir going. Second, I love following along on a year challenge. Third, even though I haven’t been much of a swimmer since childhood, I appreciate how outdoor swimming combines observation of nature and the seasons with achievable bodily exploits; you don’t have to be an exercise nut or undergo lots of training to get into it. There was a spate of swimming memoirs back in 2017, including Jessica J. Lee’s superb Turning and Ruth Fitzmaurice’s I Found My Tribe. Headlines often tout the physical benefits of coldwater swimming, but it’s the emotional benefits that Bromley emphasizes in this record of facing grief and opening up to love.
Bromley was the middle of five children but her boisterous family’s dynamic went out of kilter when her younger brother Tom was diagnosed with bone cancer and died at age 19. Suddenly she could hardly talk to her mother, let alone to Tom’s twin, Emma. Isolated in London, where she worked in music journalism, she roped her friend Miri into wild swimming excursions and threw herself into Internet dating. She and Miri concocted a plan to swim in all of Britain’s mainland tidal pools (saltwater enclosed by manmade elements) in a year; she started seeing Jem, a free-spirited documentary filmmaker – but also Flip, a Black actor she met when he came to buy her neighbour’s antique chairs; he nicknamed her “Poet” and encouraged her in her writing.
Each short chapter is identified by a place name and its geographical coordinates. Most often, these correspond to a swimming destination, but they can also be clues to interludes or flashbacks, whether set in London (“Jem’s Skylight”), on the last night she spent by Tom’s hospital bedside, or at the Brecon Beacons home her parents moved to after Tom’s death. A lot of the tidal pools are in Devon and Cornwall, but she and Miri also make expeditions to Scotland and Wales and elsewhere along the south coast.
At a certain point Bromley realizes that they aren’t going to hit every single pool before the year is over, but the goal starts to matter less than the slow internal transformation that’s taking place. “Swimming had been a way for me to rediscover my body as a place of power, play and movement.” We see the gradual shifts: she’s more able to talk about Tom, she commits to her writing through a Cambridge course, she’s a supportive big sister to Emma, and she breaks it off with one of the boyfriends.
I had to suppress my judgemental side here. I know monogamy is not a universal value, especially among a younger generation, and Bromley does acknowledge that she was behaving badly in stringing two partners along – grief leads people to make decisions they might not normally. The other niggle for this pedantic proofreader was the non-standard way of introducing dialogue. Bromley chose to put all dialogue in italics – fine with me – but doesn’t consistently bracket phrases with “I said” or “she asked.” Usually it’s clear enough, but sometimes the interruption of speech with gesture is downright maddening, e.g., “There’s this, I blew on the tea, well inside me” and “It’s magic isn’t it, Miri rolled down her window”.
But I was (mostly) able to excuse this stylistic quirk because Bromley writes so acutely about herself and others, giving a lucid sense of the passage of time and the particularities of place. She’s observant and funny, too. “I find what people often mean when they say ‘resilient’ is that they want people to be good at suffering in silence.” Youthful, playful, sexy: those are unusual characteristics for a book on the fringes of nature writing. The voice was distinctive enough that, though I’ve rarely met a 400+-page book that couldn’t stand to be closer to 300, I thoroughly enjoyed my time spent with it.
The Nero Awards judges chose an all-female inaugural shortlist made up of four works of opinionated nonfiction. I’ve read the first 42 pages of Undercurrent, Natasha Carthew’s memoir of growing up in poverty in Cornwall, and will probably leave it there; I didn’t care for the writing in Fern Brady’s Strong Female Character, her memoir of being a young autistic woman (it’s said to be funny but I didn’t get the humour). Hags, Victoria Smith’s book about the societal marginalizing of older women, is the sort of book I’d skim from the library but am unlikely to read in its entirety. I would have been very happy for Bromley to win. 
With thanks to Coronet (Hodder & Stoughton) for the free copy for review.
Nonfiction November Book Pairings: Hardy’s Wives, Rituals, and Romcoms
Liz is hosting this week of Nonfiction November. For this prompt, the idea is to choose a nonfiction book and pair it with a fiction title with which it has something in common.
I came up with three based on my recent reading:
Thomas Hardy’s Wives
On my pile for Novellas in November was a tiny book I’ve owned for nearly two decades but not read until now. It contains some of the backstory for an excellent historical novel I reviewed earlier in the year.
Some Recollections by Emma Hardy
&
The Chosen by Elizabeth Lowry
The manuscript of Some Recollections is one of the documents Thomas Hardy found among his first wife’s things after her death in 1912. It is a brief (15,000-word) memoir of her early life from childhood up to her marriage – “My life’s romance now began.” Her middle-class family lived in Plymouth and moved to Cornwall when finances were tight. (Like the Bennets in Pride and Prejudice, you look at the house they lived in, and read about the servants they still employed, and think, “impoverished,” seriously?!) “Though trifling as they may seem to others all these memories are dear to me,” she writes. It’s true that most of these details seem inconsequential, of folk historical value but not particularly illuminating about the individual.
An exception is her account of her dealings with fortune tellers, who often went out of their way to give her good – and accurate – predictions, such as that she would marry a writer. It’s interesting to set this occult belief against the traditional Christian faith she espouses in her concluding paragraph, in which she insists an “Unseen Power of great benevolence directs my ways.” The other point of interest is her description of her first meeting with Hardy, who was sent to St. Juliot, where she was living with her parson brother-in-law and sister, as an architect’s assistant to begin repairs on the church. “I thought him much older than he was,” she wrote. As editor Robert Gittings notes, Hardy made corrections to the manuscript and in some places also changed the sense. Here Hardy gave proof of an old man’s continued vanity by adding “he being tired” after that line … but then partially rubbing it out. (Secondhand, Books for Amnesty, Reading, 2004) [64 pages] 
The Chosen contrasts Emma’s idyllic mini memoir with her bitterly honest journals – Hardy read but then burned these, so Lowry had to recreate their entries based on letters and tone. But Some Recollections went on to influence his own autobiography, and to be published in a stand-alone volume by Oxford University Press. Gittings introduces the manuscript (complete with Emma’s misspellings and missing punctuation) and appends a selection of Hardy’s late poems based on his first marriage – this verse, too, is central to The Chosen.
Another recent nonfiction release on this subject matter that I learned about from a Shiny New Books review is Woman Much Missed: Thomas Hardy, Emma Hardy and Poetry by Mark Ford. I’d also like to read the forthcoming Hardy Women: Mother, Sisters, Wives, Muses by Paula Byrne (1 February 2024, William Collins).
Rituals
The Ritual Effect by Michael Norton
&
The Rituals by Rebecca Roberts
Last month I reviewed this lovely Welsh novel about a woman who is an independent celebrant, helping people celebrate landmark events in their lives or cope with devastating losses by commemorating them through secular rituals.
Coming out in April 2024, The Ritual Effect is a Harvard Business School behavioral scientist’s wide-ranging study of how rituals differ from habits in that they are emotionally charged and lift everyday life into something special. Some of his topics are rites of passage in different cultures; musicians’ and sportspeople’s pre-performance routines; and the rituals we develop around food and drink, especially at the holidays. I’m just over halfway through this for an early Shelf Awareness review and I have been finding it fascinating.
Romantic Comedy
(As also featured in my August Six Degrees post)
What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding by Kristin Newman
&
Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld
Romantic Comedy is probably still the most fun reading experience I’ve had this year. Sittenfeld’s protagonist, Sally Milz, writes TV comedy, as does Kristin Newman (That ’70s Show, How I Met Your Mother, etc.). What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding is a lighthearted record of her sexual conquests in Amsterdam, Paris, Russia, Argentina, etc. (Newman even has a passage that reminds me of Sally’s “Danny Horst Rule”: “I looked like a thirty-year-old writer. Not like a twenty-year-old model or actress or epically legged songstress, which is a category into which an alarmingly high percentage of Angelenas fall. And, because the city is so lousy with these leggy aliens, regular- to below-average-looking guys with reasonable employment levels can actually get one, another maddening aspect of being a woman in this city.”) Unfortunately, it got repetitive and raunchy. It was one of my 20 Books of Summer but I DNFed it halfway.
Reading the Meow: Cat Books by Nadia Mikail, Derek Tangye and Doreen Tovey
Reviews of books about cats have been a standard element on my blog over the years, though not for quite a while now. The new Reading the Meow challenge, hosted by Mallika of Literary Potpourri, was a good excuse to revive the feature. I read all of these from the library. #ReadingtheMeow2023 #LoveYourLibrary
Alfie, who turned 15 last month, accompanies me in all things, including reading. I made him a medallion for his birthday that reads “World’s Best Cat” on one side and “World’s Most Annoying Cat” on the other.
The Cats We Meet Along the Way by Nadia Mikail (2022)
Just the one cat, actually. (Ripoff!) But Fleabag, a one-eared stray ‘the colour of gone-off curry’ who just won’t leave, is a fine companion on this end-of-the-world Malaysian road trip. Mikail’s debut teen novel, which won the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize 2023, imagines that news has come of an asteroid that will make direct contact with Earth in one year. The clock is ticking; just nine months remain. Teenage Aisha and her boyfriend Walter have come to terms with the fact that they’ll never get to do all the things they want to, from attending university to marrying and having children.
Aisha’s father died of cancer when she was young, and her older sister June disappeared two years ago. Aisha decides that what is most important now is finding June and trying to heal their estrangement, so she and Walter set out in a campervan with his parents and her mother (and Fleabag, of course). Mikail sensitively portrays the tangle of anger, grief and fear these characters feel, and it’s interesting to encounter the food and flora of a country that will be unfamiliar to many. Even though everything feels doomed, there are hopeful tasks Aisha and her family can be part of. Teens will no doubt be smart enough to realise that we face a similar calamity in the form of climate breakdown; it’s just that the timescale is a little different. 
A Cat in the Window by Derek Tangye (1962)
My second from Tangye. I’ve read from The Minack Chronicles out of order because I happened to find a free copy of Lama a few years ago and read it for Novellas in November. Tangye wasn’t a cat fan to start with, but Monty won him over. They met in the Savoy hotel when Tangye and Jeannie were newlyweds of three months, and Monty was six weeks old. He lived with them first in the London suburb of Mortlake, then on their flower farm in Cornwall. During the London years they kept long hours and often returned from gatherings at 2 a.m., to be met with Monty in the front window giving a lordly and annoyed glare.
When they moved to Minack there was a sense of giving Monty his freedom and taking joy in watching him live his best life. In between, they were evacuated to St Albans and briefly lived with Jeannie’s parents and Scottie dog, who became Monty’s nemesis. Ever after, he would attack dogs he saw on the canal path. In Cornwall, the threats to a free-roaming cat included foxes and rabbit traps, but Monty survived into his 16th year, happily tolerating a few resident birds: Hubert the gull, Charlie the chaffinch and Tim the robin.
Tangye writes warmly and humorously about Monty’s ways and his own development into a man who is at a cat’s mercy.
I had observed … that cat owners … were apt to fall into two types. Either they ignored the cat, put it out a night whatever the weather, left it to fend for itself when they went away on holidays, and treated it, in fact, as a kind of better class vermin; or else they worshipped the animal like a god. The first category appeared callous, the second devoid of sense.
He portrays life as a series of manageable incidents. This was really the perfect chronicle of life with a cat, from adoption through farewell. It’s the kind of thing I might like to write about Alfie, if only for my husband’s and my benefit, after he shuffles off this kitty coil.
Cats in Concord by Doreen Tovey (2001)
My seventh from Tovey. I can hardly believe that, having started her writing career in the 1950s, she was still publishing into the new millennium! (She lived 1918–2008.) Tovey was addicted to Siamese cats. As this volume opens, she’s so forlorn after the death of Saphra, her fourth male, that she instantly sets about finding a replacement. Although she sets strict criteria she doesn’t think can be met, Rama fits the bill and joins her and Tani, her nine-year-old female. They spar at first, but quickly settle into life together. As always, there are various mishaps involving mischievous cats and eccentric locals (I have a really low tolerance for accounts of folksy neighbours’ doings). The most persistent problem is Rama’s new habit of spraying.
Towards the end, Tani succumbs to a virus while Rama recovers … and guess what, Tovey immediately gets a replacement. In fact, the last lines of the book are “If anyone reading this book has lost a beloved cat and is grieving, I would urge them to get another. I am sure they were put into this world for our admiration—and I think that they think that way too.” I’m probably done with Tovey; Cats in the Belfry and Cats in May were terrific, but it’s been diminishing returns ever since and I’ve ended up skimming most of the last few I tried. 
I also recently enjoyed these two picture books, one about a cat’s mercurial day-and-night moods and the other about an indoor cat who doesn’t realize how good he has it. (Also pictured in the left-hand photograph above.)
Daphne du Maurier Reading Week: Rebecca Reread & Forster Biography
It’s been a couple of years since I took part in HeavenAli’s annual Daphne du Maurier Reading Week (the last time was with a review of My Cousin Rachel; this year, links are being hosted by Liz here).
My last-minute and meagre contribution comprises an attempted reread (which ended up being a skim) of Rebecca for book club last month, and a partial, ongoing read of Margaret Forster’s cracking biography of DDM.
Rebecca (1938)
I must have first read this in my early twenties, and remembered it as spooky and atmospheric. I had completely forgotten that the action opens not at Manderley (despite the exceptionally famous first line, which forms part of a prologue-like first chapter depicting the place empty without its master and mistress to tend to it) but in Monte Carlo, where the unnamed narrator meets Maxim de Winter while she’s a lady’s companion to bossy Mrs. Van Hopper. This section functions to introduce Max and his tragic history via hearsay, but I found the first 60 pages so slow that I had trouble maintaining momentum thereafter, especially through the low-action and slightly repetitive scenes as the diffident second Mrs de Winter explores the house and tries to avoid Mrs Danvers, so I ended up skimming most of it.
However, it was satisfying to rediscover the Jane Eyre parallels and there are deliciously chilling scenes, like with Mrs Danvers at the window and the way she then sabotages her young mistress at the costume ball. This was one of four rereads for book club already this year, which has the benefit of reducing pressure and sometimes increasing the comfort-read factor. We have two Rebeccas in my book club, so it seemed an appropriate choice. Others found the book as gripping as ever, with one member reading it in a day thanks to long hospital waits. Would you believe, I hadn’t at all remembered the truth of what happened to Rebecca! So there was that surprise awaiting me. In our discussion we remarked that though this has the trappings of a romance novel or mystery (e.g. see my dreadful paperback cover above!), it also has enduring literary weight – it won the National Book Award, for instance.
Daphne du Maurier by Margaret Forster (1993)
I read my first work by Forster, My Life in Houses, last year, and adored it, so the fact that she was the author was all the more reason to read this when I found a copy in a library secondhand book sale. I started it immediately after our meeting about Rebecca, but I find biographies so dense and daunting that I’m still only a third of the way into it even though I’ve been liberally skimming.
So far I have noted: du Maurier’s artistic pedigree, including her grandfather’s authorship of Trilby and her parents meeting through stage acting; her frank engagement in sexual activity, and presumed bisexuality (so far only evident through a requited crush on a teacher at her French finishing school, though perhaps there will be more to come); her first publications of short stories (“inspired by her three favourite short story writers, Maugham, Mansfield and Maupassant”) and the early novels, including one from a male point of view; her close relationship with her father and the crushing blow of his death; her determination to escape London for Cornwall; and her marriage to a soldier and ambivalent motherhood.
The last chapter I got to was all about the success of Rebecca. Though the critical reaction was generally favourable, reviewers also deemed it melodramatic … fair?
#DDMReadingWeek
Patrick Gale at Marlborough Literature Festival
It’s been a long time since I attended a literary festival in person rather than online. Four of us from my book club went along yesterday evening to the headline event of Marlborough Literature Festival. Marlborough is a pleasant market town in Wiltshire about 40 minutes from Newbury, and I’d like to get back to it sometime soon when things are open so I can explore its secondhand and plastic-free shops.
Patrick Gale closed the festival by speaking about his new novel (his 17th), Mother’s Boy. I knew it was a historical novel that covered the Second World War, but I had no idea that it was based on a real person, poet Charles Causley. With Andrew Motion, Gale is a patron of the Charles Causley Trust, which runs an annual poetry competition for children. I hadn’t heard of Causley, but Gale and some members of the audience recall memorizing his poems in school – like Roald Dahl’s, they can have a wicked sense of humour. Causley also wrote in the style of traditional ballads; my husband knows a version of one on a folk album.
Gale called Causley the “least sexy” of the war poets. He was from Launceston, Cornwall and left school at age 15, joining the Navy and later working as a schoolteacher for many years. He lived with his widowed mother and, if you believe the legend, died a virgin. However, Gale unearthed evidence that Causley was in fact a closeted homosexual and had sexual encounters with men during the war. He experienced survivor’s guilt because he escaped his ship’s explosion while he had an on-shore posting so that he could sit his exams.
Equally important to the novel is Causley’s mother, Laura, who grew up in extreme poverty and, after her husband’s death from TB, raised Charles in a slum on a laundress’ salary, even managing to buy him a piano. Launceston was decimated by the two world wars, and essentially colonized by the segregated U.S. Army. Gale made up a Black character named Amos, but gave him a horrific real-life story. Laura would have met Black soldiers and, later, German POWs through her working-class church.
Gale acknowledged that he had to make up more of Laura’s story, relying only on the information about her in Causley’s tiny appointment diaries. In response to an audience question, he said he thinks Causley would be “utterly appalled” at the existence of this novel because he was an intensely private person, but that he’s salved his conscience with the fact that the book is driving people back to Causley’s poems. He wrote this as a novel rather than a biography because he tends to “overempathize” with characters, and likes to go “behind the bedroom door,” as he put it – indeed, one (non-graphic) scene he read was of Charles’s conception, while the other was about Charles learning to read at age five and enjoying his father’s company though he knew he was ill.
Mother’s Boy is most like A Place Called Winter from his oeuvre, Gale remarked, in that it’s historical fiction based on real people – in that earlier case, his own relatives. Gale’s father was the governor of Wandsworth Prison and his mother the daughter of the governor of Liverpool Prison (where he oversaw many hangings). In fact, he’s now at work on a sequel to A Place Called Winter, about his grandparents and parents, and researching from letters.
I was impressed with Gale’s delivery: he spoke engagingly for 45 minutes about the book and its context, peppering in readings and recitations, with no interviewer to prompt him. It was clearly a practiced lecture, but he had no notes and spoke warmly and as if off the cuff.
Are any of these poem titles familiar to you? These were the ones mentioned during last night’s event. (You can listen to Causley reading some of them in his eighties – with his large cat purring in the background – on the Poetry Archive site I linked to above.)
- “Timothy Winters”
- “Rattler Morgan”
- “Eden Rock”
- “The Ballad of a Bread Man”
- “Angel Hill”
I have a copy of Mother’s Boy on hold at the library for me to pick up tomorrow, and we fancy reading A Place Called Winter for book club soon – his Notes from an Exhibition was one of our all-time favourites that we’ve read together.
Are you a Patrick Gale fan? Have you been able to attend any literary events recently?
10 Days in Spain (or at Sea) and What I Read
(Susan is the queen of the holiday travel and reading post – see her latest here.)
We spent the end of May in Northern Spain, with 20+-hour ferry rides across the English Channel either way. Thank you for your good thoughts – we were lucky to have completely flat crossings, and the acupressure bracelets that I wore seemed to do the job, such that not only did I not feel sick, but I even had an appetite for a meal in the ship’s café each day.
Not a bad day to be at sea. (All photos in this post are by Chris Foster.)
With no preconceived ideas of what the area would be like and zero time to plan, we went with the flow and decided on hikes each morning based on the weather. After a chilly, rainy start, we had warm but not uncomfortable temperatures by the end of the week. My mental picture of Spain was of hot beaches, but the Atlantic climate of the north is more like that of Britain’s. Green gorse-covered, livestock-grazed hills reminded us of parts of Wales. Where we stayed near Potes (reached by a narrow road through a gorge) was on the edge of Picos de Europa national park. The mountain villages and wildflower-rich meadows we passed on walks were reminiscent of places we’ve been in Italy or the Swiss and Austrian Alps.
The flora and fauna were an intriguing mix of the familiar (like blackbirds and blue tits) and the exotic (black kites, Egyptian vultures; some different butterflies; evidence of brown bears, wolves and wild boar, though no actual sightings, of course). One special thing we did was visit Wild Finca, a regenerative farming project by a young English couple; we’d learned about it from their short film shown at New Networks for Nature last year. We’d noted that the towns have a lot of derelicts and properties for sale, which is rather sad to see. They told us farm abandonment is common: those who inherit a family farm and livestock might just leave the animals on the hills and move to a city apartment to have modern conveniences.
I was especially taken by this graffiti-covered derelict restaurant and accommodation complex. As I explored it I was reminded of Cal Flyn’s Islands of Abandonment. It’s a wonder no one has tried to make this a roadside eatery again; it has a fantastic view!
It so happens that we were there for the traditional weekend when cattle are moved to new pastures. A cacophony of cowbells alerted us to herds going past our cottage window a couple of times, and once we were stopped on the road to let a small group through. We enjoyed trying local cheese and cider and had two restaurant meals, one at a trendy place in Potes and one at a roadside diner where we tried the regional speciality fabada, a creamy bean stew with sausage chunks.
Sampling local products and reading The Murderer’s Ape.
With our meager Spanish we just about got by. I used a phrase book so old it still referred to pesetas to figure out how to ask for roundtrip tickets, while my husband had learned a few useful restaurant-going phrases from the Duolingo language-learning app. For communicating with the cottage owner, though, we had to resort to Google Translate.
A highlight of our trip was the Fuente Dé cable car to 1900 meters / ~6200 feet above sea level, where we found snowbanks, Alpine choughs, and trumpet gentians. That was a popular spot, but on most of our other walks we didn’t see another human soul. We felt we’d found the real, hidden Spain, with a new and fascinating landscape around every corner. We didn’t make it to any prehistoric caves, alas – we would probably have had to book that well in advance – but otherwise experienced a lot of the highlights of the area.
On our way back to Santander for the ferry, we stopped in two famous towns: Comillas, known for its modernist architecture and a palace designed by Gaudí; and Santillana del Mar, which Jean-Paul Sartre once called the most beautiful town in Spain. We did not manage any city visits – Barcelona was too far and there was no train service; that will have to be for another trip. It was a very low-key, wildlife-filled and relaxing time, just what we needed before plunging back into work and DIY.
Santillana del Mar
What I Read
On the journey there and in the early part of the trip:
The Murderer’s Ape by Jakob Wegelius (translated from the Swedish by Peter Graves): Sally Jones is a ship’s engineer who journeys from Portugal to India to clear her captain’s name when he is accused of murder. She’s also a gorilla. Though she can’t speak, she understands human language and communicates via gestures and simple written words. This was the perfect rip-roaring adventure story to read at sea; the twisty plot and larger-than-life characters who aid or betray Sally Jones kept the nearly 600 pages turning quickly. I especially loved her time repairing accordions with an instrument maker. This is set in the 1920s or 30s, I suppose, with early airplanes and maharajahs, but still long-distance sea voyages. Published by Pushkin Children’s, it’s technically a teen novel and the middle book in a trilogy, but neither fact bothered me at all. 
& to see me through the rest of the week:
The Feast by Margaret Kennedy: Originally published in 1950, this was reissued by Faber in 2021 with a foreword by Cathy Rentzenbrink – had she not made much of it, I’m not sure how well I would have recognized the allegorical framework of the Seven Deadly Sins. In August 1947, we learn, a Cornish hotel was buried under a fallen cliff, and with it seven people. Kennedy rewinds a month to let us watch the guests arriving, and to plumb their interactions and private thoughts. We have everyone from a Lady to a lady’s maid; I particularly liked the neglected Cove children. It took me until the very end to work out precisely who died and which sin each one represented. The characters and dialogue glisten. This is intelligent, literary yet light, and so makes great vacation/beach reading.
Book of Days by Phoebe Power: A set of autobiographical poems about walking the Camino pilgrimage route. Power writes about the rigours of the road – what she carried in her pack; finding places to stay and food to eat – but also gives tender pen portraits of her fellow walkers, who have come from many countries and for a variety of reasons: to escape an empty nest, to make amends, to remember a departed lover. Whether the pilgrim is religious or not, the Camino seems like a compulsion. Often the text feels more like narrative prose, though there are some sections laid out in stanzas or forming shapes on the page to remind you it is verse. I think what I mean to say is, it doesn’t feel that it was essential for this to be poetry. Short vignettes in a diary may have been more to my taste.
Two favourite passages:
into cobbled elegance; it’s opening time for shops
selling vegetables and pan and gratefully I present my
Spanish and warmth so far collected, and receive in return
smiles, interest, tomatoes, cheese.
We are resolute, though unknowing
if we will succeed at this.
We are still children here –
arriving, not yet grown
up.
With thanks to Carcanet Press for the free copy for review.
I’d also downloaded from Edelweiss the recent travel memoir The Way of the Wild Goose by Beebe Bahrami, in which she walks sections of the Camino in France and Spain and reflects on why the path keeps drawing her back. It’s been a probing, beautiful read so far – I think this is the mild, generically spiritual quest feel Jini Reddy was trying to achieve with Wanderland.
Plus, I read a few e-books for paid reviews and parts of other library books, including a trio of Spain-appropriate memoirs: As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee, Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell, and A Parrot in the Pepper Tree by Chris Stewart – more about this last one in my first 20 Books of Summer post, coming up on Sunday.
Our next holiday, to the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, is just two weeks away! It’ll be very different, but no doubt equally welcome and book-stuffed.
Love Your Library Begins: October 2021
It’s the opening month of my new Love Your Library meme! I hope some of you will join me in writing about the libraries you use and what you’ve borrowed from them recently. I plan to treat these monthly posts as a sort of miscellany.
Although I likely won’t do thorough Library Checkout rundowns anymore, I’ll show photos of what I’ve borrowed, give links to reviews of a few recent reads, and then feature something random, such as a reading theme or library policy or display.
Do share a link to your own post in the comments, and feel free to use the above image. I’m co-opting a hashtag that is already popular on Twitter and Instagram: #LoveYourLibrary.
Here’s a reminder of my ideas of what you might choose to post (this list will stay up on the project page):
- Photos or a list of your latest library book haul
- An account of a visit to a new-to-you library
- Full-length or mini reviews of some recent library reads
- A description of a particular feature of your local library
- A screenshot of the state of play of your online account
- An opinion piece about library policies (e.g. Covid procedures or fines amnesties)
- A write-up of a library event you attended, such as an author reading or book club.
If it’s related to libraries, I want to hear about it!
Recently borrowed
Stand-out reads
The Echo Chamber by John Boyne
John Boyne is such a literary chameleon. He’s been John Irving (The Heart’s Invisible Furies), Patricia Highsmith (A Ladder to the Sky) and David Mitchell (A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom). Now, with this Internet-age state-of-the-nation satire featuring variously abhorrent characters, he’s channelling the likes of Jamie Attenberg, Jonathan Coe, Patricia Lockwood, Lionel Shriver and Emma Straub. Every member of the Cleverley family is a morally compromised fake. Boyne gives his characters amusing tics, and there are also some tremendously funny set pieces, such as Nelson’s speed dating escapade and George’s public outbursts. He links several storylines through the Ukrainian dancer Pylyp, who’s slept with almost every character in the book and has Beverley petsit for his tortoise.
What is Boyne spoofing here? Mostly smartphone addiction, but also cancel culture. I imagined George as Hugh Bonneville throughout; indeed, the novel would lend itself very well to screen adaptation. And I loved how Beverley’s new ghostwriter, never given any name beyond “the ghost,” feels like the most real and perceptive character of all. Surely one of the funniest books I will read this year. (Full review). 
Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
I was one of those rare readers who didn’t think so much of Normal People, so to me this felt like a return to form. Conversations with Friends was a surprise hit with me back in 2017 when I read it as part of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award shadow panel the year she won. The themes here are much the same: friendship, nostalgia, sex, communication and the search for meaning. BWWAY is that little bit more existential: through the long-form e-mail correspondence between two friends from college, novelist Alice and literary magazine editor Eileen, we imbibe a lot of philosophizing about history, aesthetics and culture, and musings on the purpose of an individual life against the backdrop of the potential extinction of the species.
Through their relationships with Felix (a rough-around-the-edges warehouse worker) and Simon (slightly older and involved in politics), Rooney explores the question of whether lasting bonds can be formed despite perceived differences of class and intelligence. The background of Alice’s nervous breakdown and Simon’s Catholicism also bring in sensitive treatments of mental illness and faith. (Full review).
This month’s feature
I spotted a few of these during my volunteer shelving and then sought out a couple more. All five are picture books composed by authors not known for their writing for children.
Islandborn by Junot Díaz (illus. Leo Espinosa): “Every kid in Lola’s school was from somewhere else.” When the teacher asks them all to draw a picture of the country they came from, plucky Lola doesn’t know how to depict the Island. Since she left as a baby, she has to interview relatives and neighbours for their lasting impressions. For one man it’s mangoes so sweet they make you cry; for her grandmother it’s dolphins near the beach. She gathers the memories into a vibrant booklet. The 2D cut-paper style reminded me of Ezra Jack Keats.
The Islanders by Helen Dunmore (illus. Rebecca Cobb): Robbie and his family are back in Cornwall to visit Tamsin and her family. These two are the best of friends and explore along the beach together, creating their own little island by digging a channel and making a dam. As the week’s holiday comes toward an end, a magical night-time journey makes them wonder if their wish to make their island life their real life forever could come true. The brightly coloured paint and crayon illustrations are a little bit Charlie and Lola and very cute.
Rose Blanche by Ian McEwan (illus. Roberto Innocenti): Patriotism is assumed for the title character and her mother as they cheer German soldiers heading off to war. There’s dramatic irony in Rose being our innocent witness to deprivations and abductions. One day she follows a truck out of town and past barriers and fences and stumbles onto a concentration camp. Seeing hungry children’s suffering, she starts bringing them food. Unfortunately, this gets pretty mawkish and, while I liked some of the tableau scenes – reminiscent of Brueghel or Stanley Spencer – the faces are awful. (Based on a story by Christophe Gallaz.) 
Where Snow Angels Go by Maggie O’Farrell (illus. Daniela Jaglenka Terrazzini): The snow angel Sylvie made last winter comes back to her to serve as her guardian angel, saving her from illness and accident risks. If you’re familiar with O’Farrell’s memoir I Am, I Am, I Am, this presents a similar catalogue of near-misses. For a picture book, it has a lot of words – several paragraphs’ worth on most of its 70 pages – so I imagine it’s more suitable for ages seven and up. I loved the fairy tale atmosphere, touches of humour, and drawing style.
Weirdo by Zadie Smith and Nick Laird (illus. Magenta Fox): Kit’s birthday present is Maud, a guinea pig in a judo uniform. None of the other household pets – Derrick the cockatoo, Dora the cat, and Bob the pug – know what to make of her. Like in The Secret Life of Pets, the pets take over, interacting while everyone’s out at school and work. At first Maud tries making herself like the others, but after she spends an afternoon with an eccentric neighbour she realizes all she needs to be is herself. It’s not the first time married couple Smith and Laird have published an in-joke (their 2018 releases – an essay collection and a book of poems, respectively – are both entitled Feel Free): Kit is their daughter’s name and Maud is their pug’s. But this was cute enough to let them off. 
Daphne du Maurier Reading Week: My Cousin Rachel (1951)
It’s probably a decade or more since I read anything by Daphne du Maurier. The three novels of hers that I know are Rebecca (of course), Jamaica Inn, and The House on the Strand. HeavenAli’s annual reading week was the excuse I needed to pick up the copy of My Cousin Rachel that I grabbed from the closed-down free bookshop in the mall about a year ago as we were clearing it out. I’m glad I finally got to this one: it has a gripping storyline and the title character is a complex woman it’s impossible to make up your mind about.
To start with, we have an opening line that’s sure to make my year-end superlatives post: “They used to hang men at Four Turnings in the old days.” The whole first chapter is heavy with foreboding, most of which I didn’t pick up on. It’s clear at once that the narrator, a young man named Philip Ashley, feels guilty for the situation he finds himself in, but can’t decide whether Rachel shares his culpability. Philip is the ward and heir of his older cousin, Ambrose, who winters in Florence for his health but on his latest trip marries Rachel, a widow and distant half-Italian cousin who also has roots in Cornwall, and stays in Italy.
From what little he learns of her through Ambrose’s increasingly incoherent letters, Philip is predisposed to dislike Rachel. When Ambrose dies of a suspected brain tumour, Philip is alarmed to hear that Rachel has already emptied their Florence villa and is reluctant to meet her when she arrives in Plymouth some weeks later. But she is not what he expected: just 35 and beautiful; with a passion for garden design and herbal medicine; witty and gently flirtatious. Before long Philip is smitten. “Why, in heaven’s name, did she have to be so different and play such havoc with my plans?”
The plot revolves around Ambrose’s unsigned will and what it means for the ownership of the Ashleys’ Cornwall estate. Philip is now 24, but on his 25th birthday, which happens to fall on April Fool’s Day, he will come into his inheritance and can make his own decisions. Will Rachel, notorious for her extravagant spending, bewitch him into altering the will to her advantage? A pearl necklace, hidden letters, a beggar woman, churchyard conversations, tisanes, lavish curtains, and a foppish Italian visitor form the backdrop to this Gothic tale.
I never succeeded in dating the action: the only major clue is that it takes three weeks to travel between southwest England and Florence, which seems to point to the nineteenth century. But a lack of definite markers makes the story feel timeless and almost like a fairy tale. Although she shrewdly looks out for her own interests and can manipulate Philip’s emotions, Rachel is no stereotypical witch. Sally Beauman’s introduction to my Virago paperback usefully points out that we only ever see Rachel through the male gaze (Philip’s perhaps unreliable narration and Ambrose’s letters) and that from the title onward she is defined in relation to men. In making a bid for her own independent life, she is the true heroine of what Beauman calls du Maurier’s “most overtly feminist” novel.
I always love the murky atmosphere of du Maurier’s work, but can find her plots contrived. However, this ended up being my favourite of the four I’ve read so far. Initially, it reminded me of E.M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread, while by the end I was wondering if Janet Fitch took it as inspiration for White Oleander. There’s an unusual pair for you! Make of it what you will…
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 