Not sitting comfortably: #1952Club

Stylised raven from the Sutton Hoo shield.

The Birds and Other Stories
by Daphne du Maurier,
introduction by David Thomson.
Virago Modern Classics, 2004 (1952).

First published in the UK in 1952 as The Apple Tree: A Short Novel and Several Long Stories (thus proclaims the dust jacket, though The Apple Tree: A Short Novel and Some Stories is on the title page) this collection features the novella Monte Verità as well as five stories of various lengths; ‘The Birds’, ‘The Apple Tree’, ‘The Little Photographer’, ‘Kiss Me Again, Stranger’ and ‘The Old Man’.

The six pieces straddle several genres and approaches – horror, spooky folklore, mysticism, and dangerous romance among others. In some ways all are very different but on closer examination several share certain themes and features. Having failed in the past to get into a couple of du Maurier’s novels I thought her briefer narratives might for me turn out more accessible entry points to her writing, and so it proved.

Indeed, I found this a very unsettling but fascinating collection overall, all the more so for those different approaches which nevertheless showed a writer confident and at ease in her craft; as befits the short story genre there’s a singlemindedness in each of these pieces, eschewing distractions and digressions to in time take the reader directly to their denouements.

A May Day garland

“A Garland for May Day 1895”: woodcut by Walter Crane.

What links Moses, William Morris and Walter Crane? True, all three are men, and all three are famously hirsute, having sported longish locks and luxurious facial adornments at some stage in their lives.

But one led his people to the Land of Promise, another was a writer and key figure in the Arts & Crafts Movement, and the third is well known as an illustrator of nursery books, such as The Baby’s Opera: A Book of Old Rhymes with New Dresses (1877) with music collected and arranged by his sister Lucy Crane.

Other than long hair and beards what else do they have in common? And why have I chosen to feature them and their deeds today, May Day? Three ingredients: morality, humanity, and radicalism. I hope you’ll find the story as fascinating as I do.

Bookwise 2025/4

‘Decadent Youth’ (1899) by Ramon Casas.

This month my post ‘Why do I read?’ stimulated some fascinating discussion, though luckily nobody saw it indulgent or even, as in the painting by Ramon Casas, decadent.  But if reading is indeed a decadent activity then I admit to being dissipated, dissolute and degenerate, and therefore beyond redemption! Still, I’m not in the habit of rushing through the kinds of racy yellow paperbacks Victorians thought were beyond the pale so perhaps I may be saved from perdition after all—phew!

In fact April has been an interesting month, bookwise at least (let’s not talk geopolitically). Lory’s Reading the Theatre led me to 1. learning about the worries of a child actor in Noel Streatfeild’s Gemma (1968), 2. about the worries of a cursed child in the 2016 playscript for the eighth instalment in the Harry Potter series, and 3. about the worries of an aspiring young ballet dancer in Eva Ibbotson’s A Company of Swans (1985).¹ Who’d be a child again?

Finally finishing Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn was an excuse to mark (Inter)national Unicorn Day. Then Brona’s Reading Austen 2025 encouraged me to reread Pride and Prejudice (1813) and also comment on the possible significance of the title, while Kaggsy and Simon’s 1952 Club gave me the chance to finally get a review written after revisiting The Borrowers by Mary Norton. (Daphne du Maurier’s varied 1952 collection The Birds and Other Stories, which I’ve just now come to the end of, will now be reviewed in May).

Little people: #1952Club

Detail from Richard Dadd’s ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’ (1855–64) in Tate Britain.

The Borrowers by Mary Norton,
illustrated by Diana Stanley.
Dent Children’s Books, 1992 (1952).

It was Mrs May who first told me about them. No, not me. How could it have been me—a wild, untidy, self-willed little girl who stared with angry eyes and was said to crunch her teeth? Kate, she should have been called. Yes, that was it—Kate. Not that the name matters very much either way: she barely comes into the story.

Here’s a wonderful puzzle box of a book, each move revealing the next nested inside: this story, told by Mary Norton (1903–1992), is about a girl called Kate . . . but no, it’s about the elderly Mrs May who’s telling the story to Kate – and yet it’s not, it’s really about Mrs May’s brother who as a sickly child had had to convalesce at the home of an elderly relative.

Even so, it’s not mainly about ‘the boy’ (who’s never named), for our focus will mainly be on the ‘little people’ (but don’t call them fairies) who secretly live under the floorboards of a house near Leighton Buzzard in Bedfordshire. To their consternation they’re seen by the boy, and so are faced with a dilemma: do they have to hunker down or will they – horrors! – have to ’emigrate’ to an old badger sett? But if the family under the floorboards will be our main focus, do also spare a thought for our author.

Young Kathleen Mary Pearson was shortsighted as a girl, and prey to all the childhood diseases going in the early twentieth century before inoculations and vaccinations were routinely administered. Recovering in bed and unable to clearly see anything not directly under her nose, she was in the habit of imagining how diminutive people could find their way around her sick room. Only in her forties, in the postwar years, was she able to fashion her childhood fancies into a tale about little folk whom she was to call borrowers.

Second impressions: #ReadingAusten2025

Stencil cover art by Bernie Reid for the 2007 Everyman / Telegraph edition.

Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen.
Edited by Pamela Norris (1993),
introduction by Peter Conrad (1978).
Everyman’s Library, 2007 (1813).

“Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.” — Elizabeth tells Darcy her chief philosophical tenet, chapter 58.

When I first read Pride and Prejudice I characterised it as having ‘a critical yet pleasing tone‘, one that I wrote I’d forever associate with Austen and her attitude to her readership. Now, a dozen years later, has my opinion of it significantly changed or do I have a deeper appreciation of what Austen aimed to achieve with this novel?

And bearing in mind that the alliterative phrase ‘pride and prejudice‘ also had strong associations with, first, revolutionary and then abolitionist sentiments, are there any echoes of these in the novel? Or does Austen merely build on themes already present in her narrative, themes which reflect the prejudices that can arise from ‘first impressions’ – her original choice of title – of a stranger’s haughtiness or vanity?

As with my revisit of Sense and Sensibility this will be less of a review and more of an essay on aspects of her second published novel that have stood out for me on this re-read – my second impressions, as it were. And those impressions, as I discuss in the following seven sections, will not only include the ideas Austen expressed and the way she expressed them but also a brief appreciation of how she makes her characters live.

Poorly guarded: #ReadingTheTheatre

Vintage photograph of Teatro Amazonas, Manaus, Brazil.

A Company of Swans
by Eva Ibbotson.
Young Picador, 2008 (1985).

“My aim is to produce books that are light, humorous, even a little erudite, but secure in their happy endings. One could call it an attempt to write, in words, a good Viennese waltz!” — Eva Ibbotson.

With a title that directly references Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake and a plot that also involves performances of The Nutcracker, La Fille Mal Gardée and Giselle, Ibbotson’s romance is clearly focused on the dance world, and her descriptions of exercises, dance moves and the plots of classical ballets securely anchor the reader there.

But this is also a tale set at the end of the Edwardian era, at a time when great changes were about to take place in the world: Europe in 1912 was scant years away from a devastating war, and in Brazil the riches made from a monopoly in rubber were about to receive a severe dent from rubber seeds smuggled out of the Amazon jungle to East Asia via Kew Gardens.

Young Harriet Morton has more pressing concerns, however: her widowed father, a Cambridge professor, is an unimaginative and stern pedant and her aunt – a stickler for propriety like her brother – restricts Harriet’s activities so much that only ballet remains as an outlet for her sensibilities. When the chance to join a corps de ballet performing in the Amazon jungle presents itself, can she – will she – take the opportunity, desert her captors and join the company of swans?

Why do I read?

Pexels.com

It’s in the title – CalmgroveBooks is a book blog. Other than as a record of my reading it’s not a diary in any but a general sense, nor is it posted online to persuade you towards any political or religious belief; and it’s certainly not in existence to promote or monetise a business which I don’t have and have no intention of running.

The strapline for the blog, as it was for its predecessor, is Exploring the world of ideas through books, and that’s its whole raison d’être. But as it all starts with the act of reading I frequently return to a question I’ve been asked in the past, and then have had to ask myself — “Why do I read?”

There are utilitarian answers all couched in similar ways over on the internet, and they often go something like this: “Reading can be incredibly rewarding, and books can change lives, open minds and teach new things.” And then the writer might suggest six, or ten, or a dozen benefits of reading every day. But this isn’t necessarily how I would approach my answer.¹

Pain comes again: #ReadingTheTheatre

© C A Lovegrove.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child:
Parts One and Two
by Jack Thorne, John Tiffany and J K Rowling.
Sphere / Little, Brown, 2017 (2016).

“Harry, there is never a perfect answer in this messy, emotional world. Perfection is beyond the reach of humankind, beyond the reach of magic. In every shining moment of happiness is that drop of poison: the knowledge that pain will come again.” — Dumbledore, IV/4.

Can we turn back time? Can we take back something hurtful said in the heat of the moment? Can we really change history to make things perfect, the way we want them?

These are crucial questions faced in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by several of the actors in this drama, set when Harry Potter and his former classmates are fast nearing the age of 40, when some of their offspring are themselves entering Hogwarts School of Wizardry. For if somebody is able to use a Time Turner – all of which are now deemed destroyed, and future ones banned – what would be the consequences?

And what, moreover, would be the purpose? Surely it’s not to ensure that Lord Voldemort was indeed to be successful in his bid to become all-powerful, thereby enslaving the world of so-called Mudbloods and Muggles? Yet the fact that, along with the possibility of Death Eaters wishing to change history, Harry’s scar is starting to hurt again – and more frequently – is worryingly ominous.

“About the slave-trade”: #ReadingAusten2025

Jane Austen, 1775–1817.

Before completing my re-read of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) and preparing a new review for #ReadingAusten2025 I want to draw the attention of anyone else (who, like me before now, was unaware) to just how resonant the phrase “pride and prejudice” was in the years before and after Austen’s novels appeared.

Recent discussion, prompted mostly by articles and then a recent book by academic Margie Burns, has noted how the phrase was used by, for example, those who advocated for American independence from Britain in the late 18th century and then subsequently by advocates for the abolition of slavery in both America and in the British colonies.

Did Austen really pluck this phrase out of the air after discovering that First Impressions, her initial choice of title for the novel, had already been used, and recently? Did she choose the new title merely to echo the alliteration of Sense and Sensibility which had by then achieved some success after appearing in 1811? Was she nevertheless aware of its associations with revolution and abolition, and does Pride and Prejudice reflect those associations in any way?

Not always what we seem

Harpy, from Ulisse Aldrovandi’s ‘Monstrorum Historia’ (1642).

The Last Unicorn by Peter S Beagle.
Introduction by Patrick Rothfuss.
Gollancz, 2023 (1968).

The language and content of Occidental fairytales varies according to the age in which they’re told: in ancient times they were closer to the myths they overlapped, with divinities interacting with female warriors in chariots and shapeshifting magicians; in the medieval period there were knights in armour, damsels in distress and castles with beetling battlements.

And in the modern period tales of faërie and wonder and enchantment draw from these rich sources while adding contemporary touches, introducing the kinds of anachronistic details just as their antecedents always did.

So it is with Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn: here we have mythical beasts and a magician, a king and a prince, wastelands and a castle, but also one of the Pleiades out of Greek tradition, and snatches of songs and mentions of artefacts from our own recent history. On paper it shouldn’t work but yet it does, as all good fairytales should.

The stage is set: #ReadingTheTheatre

© C A Lovegrove.

Every April – the month in which Shakespeare was both born and died – I try to read at least one book which involves theatrical matters before reviewing it.

It might for example be a play like Volpone, a Jacobean comedy by Ben Jonson (1606-7), or Comus (1634), a masque by John Milton, or (more obscurely) The Dragon: A Satiric Fable in Three Acts (1944) by Russian dramtist Eugene Schwarz, all of which I’ve reviewed elsewhere.

But what most appeals is a fiction set on or around the stage, and that is because Lory initiated her #ReadingTheTheatre event back in 2021, originally in March, encompassing all aspects of the dramatic arts – and I joined in most willingly!

From screen to street: #ReadingTheTheatre

Edwardian terraced housing.

Gemma by Noel Streatfeild.
Illustrated by Betty Maxey.
Fontana Lions, 1978 (1968).

The Robinsons lived in Headstone, an industrial town about 150 miles north of London. There were five of them: father, mother and three children.

With this innocuous beginning the author of the famous Shoes sequence of children’s fiction initiated a quartet of books featuring a family bursting with talents in the performing arts who are joined by the children’s cousin Gemma, their maternal aunt’s daughter.

Less Swiss Family Robinson but not quite Von Trapp family, the Headstone Robinsons in their terraced house will seem a massive comedown for young Gemma Bow, star of TV serials and films; the eleven-year-old is virtually foisted onto the Robinsons when her mother Rowena gets a contract to work for a film studio in the States.

How will Gemma get on with her uncle and aunt – Philip and Alice – and what will siblings Ann, Lydia and Robin make of her? What exactly is distressing her about joining the local comprehensive school, and will her fears about this provincial town turning out really dull prove well founded?

The Kalends of April

Without the aid of [insert search engine of your choice here] can you identify, from the following list, which of the entries with a month embedded in their title aren’t genuine novels, novellas, or short stories? There is at least one which lacks authenticity!

I’ve cheated slightly with the works by George Eliot and D H Lawrence as the names of the months are parts of longer names. I’ve also not distinguished between short stories and longer works, which may slightly throw some of you.

Finally, a couple of additional points: Mary Westmacott was one of Agatha Christie’s aliases for when she wasn’t writing crime novels; and though I’ve read most of the titles on my list I can’t swear I did more than skim through the Gillian Bradshaw historical fiction about Sir Gawain, nor can I remember whodunit in the E F Benson crime novel. Oh, and to my shame I’ve yet to finish Middlemarch – this summer, hopefully!

Bookwise 2025/3

© C A Lovegrove.

Some do it weekly, some annually, but I’m aiming to do it monthly – all through 2025, at any rate. I’m of course talking about taking a bookish look at what I’ve been reading recently and what I’m planning for the next four weeks, part of a feature I’ve been calling Bookwise. (Feel free to nick the idea!)

So, to March: what have I actually read and enjoyed? For Karen’s #ReadingWales25 I enjoyed Jan Newton’s Rather to be Pitied, Arthur Machen’s The Great Return, and Alex McCarthy’s The Unbroken Beauty of Rosalind Bone. Then, for Cathy’s #ReadingIreland25 I posted a review of Brian Moore’s The Colour of Blood and a discussion of the ancient Irish epic The Táin.

Finally, for #MarchMagics2025 I visited two fantasies by Diana Wynne Jones – one near the start of her career and another at the end – and one of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels about the wizard Rincewind. And on my Calmgrove blog I’ve been reposting the standalone fantasies by Jones I’d read by the end of 2024 (though I fear there may still be one or three titles left to go if this list is anything to go by).

Doing exactly what she wanted: #MarchMagics2025

Japanese poster of Studio Ghibli’s ‘Āya and the Witch’.

Earwig and the Witch
by Diana Wynne Jones.
Illustrated by Paul O Zelinsky.
Greenwillow Books, 2012 (2011).

“Got the other twelve witches all chasing me. I’ll be back for her when I’ve shook them off. It may take years. Her name is Earwig.”

What child doesn’t at some stage fantasise about being an orphan, their parents unknown, or adopted into the family they’ve in fact been born into? Whatever drives these common fantasies the protagonist of this story, being an abandoned child in an orphanage, seems happy to play aspects of them to her advantage.

Unbeknown to her, though, her birth mother was a witch, and not only might this account for Earwig’s particularly persuasive powers but it will also have repercussions for the couple who adopt her.

This, the last book completed by Diana Wynne Jones and published just three months after her untimely death in 2011, is – despite its brevity – a summary of many of the themes her vast body of work dealt with and therefore, as we may see, a very fitting epilogue.

Homeric Hibernians: #ReadingIrelandMonth25

Stylised raven from the Sutton Hoo warrior’s shield.

The Táin:
from the Irish epic Táin Bó Cúailnge,
translated by Thomas Kinsella,
brush drawings by Louis le Brocquy.
Oxford University Press in association with The Dolmen Press, Dublin, 1970 (1969).

Much of Táin Bó Cúailnge – often called, simply, The Táin and anglicised as ‘The Cattle Raid of Cooley’ –  first began to appear in 12th-century manuscripts in Old Irish, a form of Gaelic which flourished from the 7th to the 9th century CE. Thus the main action of this epic tale, part of the Ulster Cycle, predates the 600s and could refer to supposed events occurring a few centuries earlier, during Ireland’s Iron Age.

But this is no documentary history: much of the narrative is patently mythical, involving gods and demigods, impossible deeds and reported speech. Yet the action ranges across the four provinces of Ireland – Connacht, Leinster, Munster and Ulster – and much of the movement of individuals and armies can be traced on a map, giving the tales a semblance of true history.

Above all, this is a story of human emotions and actions on a grand scale – faithfulness, jealousy, compassion, ruthlessness, diplomacy, battle frenzy, boastfulness, vendetta and more – committed by larger than life individuals. We may not always understand or approve what they do but nevertheless it’s hard for the modern reader not to respond to the tragic consequences of dubious decisions made and rash acts carried out.

The thinnest interface: #MarchMagics2025

11th-century carving on north door, Urnes Stave Church, Norway.

‘Everard’s Ride’ (1995),
in Unexpected Magic: Collected Stories
by Diana Wynne Jones.
Greenwillow Books, 2004.¹

It’s Christmastide sometime in the middle of the 19th century, that twilight period between the winter solstice and the New Year when there might be strange visitations and the interface between worlds is thin enough to pass through.

And where else should one expect that interface to be thinnest than an island, a tump as it were surrounded by a moat, preferably with a seemingly ruined castle on it? Time and place are then set for something magical to happen.

And that’s what Diana Wynne Jones promised us in this novella penned early in her career: a visit to a kind of fairyland, a perilous realm where mortals should fear to tread. Though inklings of her later themes and literary motifs are already in evidence, this is not yet the glorious firework display of her later fantasies; still, I think there’s enough here that invites favourable comparisons with other work published in this genre in the 1960s.

To hell … and back? #MarchMagics2025

Detail of Hell from a triptych by Hieronymus Bosch.

Eric by Terry Pratchett.
No 4 in the Rincewind series,
Discworld No 9.
Gollancz, 2023 (1990).

Eric was nearly in tears.
‘But it said her face launched a thousand ships—’
‘That’s what you call metaphor,’ said Rincewind.
‘Lying,’ the sergeant explained, kindly.

There is a literary trend for modern writers to take an old plot – it could be by Homer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Shelley, Austen or whoever, all are grist to the mill – and reprise it in a form attuned to contemporary tastes and expectations. Pratchett of course did this back in 1990 with Eric, his take on Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe, and early editions of his novella made this debt clear with ‘Faust‘ crossed out and replaced by its assigned title.

But – this being Pratchett and his setting being the Discworld – can the reader really expect Eric to be merely a slavish rerun of the motif of selling your soul to the devil in return for three wishes! Perish the thought! Standing in for Mesphistophes and Faust are two of the most unlikely denizens of Discworld and, as is his wont, the author’s substitutes will discover that nothing can be taken for granted.

Also, given Pratchett’s penchant for holding a mirror up to Nature (in this case, the modern world), here we have a broad satire on the growing trend in the 1980s to mould every aspect of daily life to fit – however awkwardly or inappropriately – a soulless business template.

A kind of scapegoat: #ReadingIrelandMonth25

Red flag (photo: Soman, 2006).

The Colour of Blood
by Brian Moore.
Paladin, 1988 (1987).

‘From now on, I must draw the danger towards me. As always, I am Your servant. Do with me what You will.’ — Chapter 19.

Suspicion. Betrayal. Paranoia. When matters spin away and out of your control who can you trust? Friends, colleagues, or total strangers? Yourself, when your own actions, facial expressions or unguarded words may reveal what you must hide? Or, if you are religious, God?

We are in an unnamed Eastern bloc country in the late 1980s during the Cold War, at a moment in time when the Catholic Church and State have reached an understanding: if religion doesn’t stray into politics, the political apparatus won’t interfere in religious matters. But, worryingly, that won’t do for certain people, who are prepared to take matters into their own hands.

In a few days pilgrims will be making their way to a church ceremony to commemorate a couple of hundred Catholics who’d been martyred there two centuries before; and only now are whispers emerging of agitators planning to hijack the service to issue a clarion call for a strike and civil disobedience. But the first that Cardinal Stephen Bem becomes aware of the dangerous crossroads the country has arrived at is when there’s an attempt on his life.

Light and shade: #ReadingWalesMonth25

Photo: C A Lovegrove.

The Unbroken Beauty of Rosalind Bone
by Alex McCarthy.
Penguin Books, 2024 (2023).

‘For there is no friend like a sister
In calm or stormy weather…’

For shade you need light, else all will be utter darkness. So it proves for the village of Cwmcysgod, the name of which could be translated as ‘shady coombe or shadowy dale’. For dark deeds have occurred here, on which light will finally be shone years later; and it all begins with arson and a grass fire.

Set in the South Wales valleys, this novella is beautifully written despite its sombre themes – jealousy, agoraphobia, substance abuse, criminality and, distressingly, more – with the eye of its omniscient narrator roving over the thoughts and actions of key players through successive short chapters.

And, as is the way of the world, outcomes for those players are a mix of the fortunate and the unfortunate, though not always in the way they might deserve given how they’ve behaved.

Glory! Glory! #ReadingWalesMonth25

‘The Attainment: The Vision of the Holy Grail’ designed by Edward Burne-Jones.

The Great Return (1915)
by Arthur Machen,
in The White People and Other Weird Stories;
foreword by Guillermo del Toro,
edited by S T Joshi. ‡
Penguin Classics, 2011.

“The Bell that is like y glwys yr angel ym mharadwys—the joy of the angels in Paradise—is returned; the Altar that is of a colour that no men can discern is returned, the Cup that came from Syon is returned, the ancient Offering is restored, the Three Saints have come back to the church of the tri sant, the Three Holy Fishermen are amongst us, and their net is full. Gogoniant, gogoniant—glory, glory!”
— Chapter VII.

This novella, first published in instalments by the London Evening News and then in booklet form by the Faith Press in 1915, was – back in the early 1970s – my favourite fiction by Arthur Machen because it felt like a heartfelt response to the legend of the Holy Grail.

Like C S Lewis – who in 1963 wrote that he was “not a good enough Grailologist (to coin a dreadful word)” – I have nevertheless dabbled enough in grail research to know there’s no simple answer to the question “What is the Holy Grail?” But I did at least recognise that Machen felt that as a symbol the grail spoke profoundly to him.

And as a symbol its inherent ambiguity also reflected his own position: in a country of nonconformist chapel-goers he was an Anglo-Catholic from Monmouthshire – then often seen as an English county though officially in Wales. Still, he retained a sense of hiraeth, a yearning or nostalgia for the land of his birth, even when self-exiled as both journalist and author in London. And that ambiguity suffuses The Great Return and, indeed, much of his writing.

Disappearing acts: #ReadingWalesMonth25

© C A Lovegrove.

Rather To Be Pitied
by Jan Newton.
No 2 in the DS Kite Mystery series.
Honno Press, 2019.

What a school student thinks is the body of a sheep on a hillside in the Cambrian Mountains turns out to be nothing of the sort. Scant months after Detective Sergeant Julie Kite transferred from Manchester to Mid Wales she finds herself investigating a second death in the Elan Valley.

But then the emaciated body of the supposed young man is confirmed by forensics as other than expected, with murder strongly suspected, and so Julie and her colleagues have a conundrum on their hands: what’s the victim’s identity, how did they get to such an isolated spot in the hills as summer gets into its stride, and if it’s indeed murder what was the motive?

Yet though this crime mystery sits firmly and squarely in the police procedural subgenre, Rather to be Pitied is so much more than a collection of clues for readers to pit their wits against. As with Remember No More, the author’s previous novel in the series, we continue to be invested in DS Kite’s life, wondering whether she and her partner will still manage the move from an English urban existence to Welsh rural life.

When comfort’s most needed: #JapaneseLiteratureChallenge18

Bookshop interior in Jinbōchō Book Town, Chiyoda, Tokyo, 2010. Image: 007 Tanuki.

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (2010)
by Satoshi Yagisawa,
translated by Eric Ozawa.
Manilla Press / Bonnier Books UK, 2023.

The title really tells you all you need to know about this novella, really two related novelettes combined: it’s set largely in a Japanese used bookstore in the first decade of the 21st century and involves the people who are connected to it. Takako the narrator is a young woman in her twenties, disappointed in love, jobless as a result, who is invited to stay in a room above the secondhand bookshop by the owner, her uncle Satoru Morisaki. He’s persuasive and, in the final analysis, what has she got to lose?

Part One describes how, little by little, the previously listless and directionless Takako comes to discover a love of modern Japanese fiction, an affection for her idiosyncratic uncle, and the delights of the Tokyo district known as Jinbōchō Book Town. Here she meets and makes new friends, especially from what becomes her favourite café. As she tells us on the first page, ‘The Morisaki Bookshop is precious to me. It’s a place I know I know I’ll never forget.’

But there is a tinge of sadness. How does she feel about her former boyfriend who had suddenly announced he was getting married to someone else? And why is her uncle Satoru reluctant to talk about his former wife Momoko, who left him without warning five years previously? Will we ever know if there will be a resolution?

Secrets, sickness and spinsters: #ReadingAusten2025

‘The Linley sisters, Elizabeth and Mary’, painted 1772-1785 by Thomas Gainsborough (Dulwich Picture Gallery).

Though I have previously written a review of Austen’s first novel in the post ‘Half sick of shadows’, this new review – an essay, really – was written to mark the 250th anniversary of the author’s birth in 1775 and thus coincide with #ReadingAusten2025.

Here I’m attempting to view the novel with different eyes, particularly reflecting on some of the additional points made by Tony Tanner in the essay introducing the 1969 Penguin edition of Austen’s work but also considering remarks by other critics. There will be spoilers . . .

---

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen.
Edited with an introduction by Tony Tanner.
Penguin English Library, 1980 (1811).

Jane Austen’s debut novel has not been universally approved: Charles Jennings states that “For all its incidental pleasures […] Sense and Sensibility has the unmistakable feel of an apprentice work, of Jane Austen finding her voice and delineating her world,” resulting in “an inconsistency of tone”. Tony Tanner’s introduction quotes Arthur Walton Litz who declared that it was “the least interesting of Jane Austen’s major works” because it was neither a comedy nor a serious novel. Claire Tomalin, while accepting that fiction can “accommodate ambivalence as polemic cannot,” thought that the novel’s vacillation between sense and sensibility as honest positions to take represented a “wobble in its approach.”

David Cecil asserted that in spite of being revised before publication it “still has some of the weaknesses of an early work”. During this second read, however, I wasn’t aware of these presumed weaknesses but found myself thoroughly enjoying all those “incidental pleasures”, because they held a mirror up to the age as well as the humans caught up in the narrative, because they made me laugh as well as grind my teeth at social injustice and gender imbalance, and because Austen is just so darned good at plotting.

And more than that, I liked the so-called inconsistency in tone as it rather leavened the mix; I appreciated the swing from bathos to pathos, from comedy to tragedy and back again; and I liked the challenge to my perceptions occasioned by Austen’s deliberate ambivalences. From the pages I’ve filled with notes and quotes I shall try to distill my further thoughts on what the author has asked us to consider.

Diana Wynne Jones standalone fantasies: #MarchMagics2025

CalmgroveBooks.wordpress.com

For fans of Diana Wynne Jones and Terry Pratchett, each of whom left us during the third month of the year, the return of March Magics – first inaugurated by Kristen Meston, formerly of WeBeReading.com, but now hosted here – will be a welcome excuse to remember them and their work.

As previously noted I’ve assiduously reviewed most of Diana Wynne Jones’s standalone novels on my Calmgrove blog, and I’ve been tidying them up for reposting in chronological sequence there; but I won’t be neglecting Pratchett, a couple of whose Discworld novels I also intend featuring over this coming month in #MarchMagics2025.

As for Diana’s several fantasy series – Chrestomanci, Dalemark, Derkholm, Magids, Land of Ingary – with luck I shall be focusing on them during a future March Magics event. 🙂

Bookwise 2025/2

Cartoon (2017) by Dan Piraro (https://www.bizarro.com/).

The stack of books on my bedside table waiting to be read has at times become alarmingly high (as my partner often reminds me) but luckily has not yet proved fatal, so I am currently in a position to tell you about the state of play – thus far, this year – in my book consumption, which Goodreads informs me now numbers just over a dozen titles.

Though February’s a short month, and by no means over yet, I’m still making inroads on Mount TBR. A trio of children’s books (Christianna Brand’s Nurse Matilda Goes to Hospital, Tove Jansson’s The Moomins and the Great Flood, and Hilaire Belloc’s Selected Cautionary Verses), a collection of short stories (Anne Donovan’s Hieroglyphics), Raymond Briggs’s humour in Notes from the Sofa, Jane Austen’s classic, Sense and Sensibility, and (it says here on the cover) ‘international bestseller‘ Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa.

Along the way I’ve reviewed at least four titles from independent publishers for #ReadIndies (Sort Of, Canongate, Unbound, and Bonnier Books), an overview of another for #ReadingAusten2025 is due soon, and lastly a title for the #JapaneseLiteratureChallenge has just been completed in the dying week of February. Two authors I wanted to tackle, however – Paul Auster and Umberto Eco – have slipped the net … for now. I blame the month for including only twenty-eight days…