Persephone Books Reading Week

I am really enjoying Paperback Reader's posts that bring together all the activity taking place for the Persephone Books reading week. I don't have much time to read many this week but I am already picking up lots of ideas for future reading.

Bloomsbury letters to go on sale

Letters of the Bloomsbury Group. Photo: Gorringes Auctioneers

A collection of letters between members of the Bloomsbury Group and Helen Anrep are to be auctioned on 3rd September. Helen Anrep, Roger Fry's partner from the 1920s until Fry's death in 1934, became a close friend of the Bloomsbury Group members despite not being an artist or an intellectual herself. She was extemely interested in the arts and the letters contain a broad range of topics from gardening to family issues.

The letters are estimated to fetch between £50,000 - £80,000. I am off to buy a lottery ticket.

Cover covet - Penguin English Journeys

Penguin have recently published a range of books under the title English Journeys - a series of short books celebrating the English countryside. Authors range from Vita Sackville-West to Henry James, Dorothy Wordsworth and Simon Jenkins. Below are some of my favourite covers in the range.

Book Review - The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows

There is nothing quite like the adrenaline rush that you can get from being thoroughly gripped by a good book and being physically incapable of getting off the sofa to do anything else until you have finished reading. This book will stop you from doing any cooking, cleaning, socialising or, in fact, living until you have read the novel from cover to cover.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is set in 1946 and follows the author Juliet Ashton who is searching around for an idea for her next book. Purely by chance Dawsey Adams from the recently liberated Guernsey contacts her as he has bought a second hand copy of Charles Lambs' essays which were previously owned by Juliet. He wants to know if she can help him find a biography of Charles Lamb as all the bookshops on Guernsey were shut down during the German Occupation. Dawsey mentions that he is a member of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and Juliet's intrigue is sparked. A regular correspondance develops between Juliet and Dawsey and later between Juliet and all the members of the society.

The novel is very funny and perfectly captures British eccentricity as well as examining the difficulties faced by the inhabitants of Guernsey during the occupation with touching honesty and insight into a community coming to terms with irrevocable change. The complexity of both the occupation and human nature is realised and dealt with through wit and sensitivity. From the horror of the war crimes committed on Guernsey to the wonderful tale of a literary society bringing people together and triumphing over adversity, this book will have you utterly gripped.

This is a tale that exalts the power of reading and the somewhat Arnoldian view that culture can be transformative - the L&PPPS not only transforms the lives of the Guernsey inhabitants during the occupation but it transforms Juliet Ashton's life; it gives her an idea for a book and also gives her a new life.

First page teaser - a letter from Juliet Ashton to her publisher Sidney Stark:

Now for my grim news. You asked me how work on my new book is progressing. Sidney, it isn't. English Foibles seemed so promising at first. After all, one should be able to write reams about the Society to Protest Against the Glorification of the English Bunny. I unearthed a photograph of the Vermin Exterminators' Trade Union marching down an Oxford street with placards screaming 'Down with Beatrix Potter!' But what is there to write about after a caption? Nothing, that's what.

An Arundel Tomb by Philip Larkin

Chichester Cathedral

One of my favourite buildings is Chichester Cathedral in West Sussex. The green, copper roof and elegant spire can be seen from the English Channel to the South Downs and are a beacon of home as Chichester is where I grew up.

Chichester Cathedral houses the tomb of Richard Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel and his wife Eleanor of Lancaster. This tomb was made famous by Philip Larkin as it inspired him to write An Arundel Tomb which was published in his 1964 collection The Whitsun Weddings.

An Arundel Tomb describes the stone effigies of the married couple - who are tenderly holding hands. On first reading, the poem celebrates their 'faithfulness in effigy' and seems to be a proclamatory poem about the longevity of love. However, I always trip over the final stanza and wonder if, in fact, the reality is that they never intended to be bound together for eternity and that Richard Fitzalan and Eleanor of Lancaster may not have loved each other at all. The final line seems to trail off in tone; a weak statement of hope.

An Arundel Tomb by Philip Larkin

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd —
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

Taken from Philip Larkin Collected Poems Published by Faber & Faber