See the top three books on this stack? This was the month my Tea or Books recommendations started to arrive in the mail! That’s been one of the highlights of this year so far for me. In my 20s, with access to a very large library system teeming with out-of-print books, I read everything I could get my hands on by Elizabeth Goudge, E. F. Benson, Muriel Spark, Evelyn Waugh, Emily Eden, Barbara Pym, and Ivy Compton-Burnett, among others. I didn’t know about book blogs then, and once I’d read everything my library had by a certain author, my means of knowing which author to start on next were very limited.
Then we moved to the southeast and our new library, while excellent for its size and budget, was much smaller and had mostly newer books, as far as I could tell. Over the past ten years I’ve made several trips to the U.K. and have combed both new and used bookstores there and brought home many books from each trip. (Or shipped them home…a sweetly bemused lady in a post office in Windsor once asked us, “Don’t they have books in the states?”) I’ve also bought more and more books online and have definitely read some fantastic midcentury books, including mysteries, World War II memoirs, etc.; but I am truly thrilled just this year to have happened upon the beautiful world of book blogs, the Tea or Books podcast, Furrowed Middlebrow reprints, British Library reprints, and Persephone Books. Not to mention the growing list of formerly out-of-print books that have been newly re-released by mainstream publishers, even stateside, and many of which are now newly available even in my own local library! I’ll never lack recommendations for this category of book again, and I think it’s just completely wonderful that so many formerly forgotten writers have found a new readership and new appreciation.
I’m sure I’ll keep raving about that, but for now, here’s what I read July 14-August 13. Not in order (just size order, from how I stacked them).
Strange Journey – Maud Cairnes, 1935
This was everything I’d hoped it would be. I think body-swapping stories are so appealing, since of course we all wonder what it would be like to be another person, and Laughing Gas, which shares that premise, has been one of my very favorite Wodehouses (1936, by the way – maybe the mid-thirties produced a bumper crop of body-swap comedies?). Strange Journey is full of wonderful lines and moments, and I just loved the sensible way the middle-class main character approached the problems the upper-class character she swapped with was dealing with (or not dealing with). They both helped each other, in different ways, and it was just a joy to read.
(This was on my stack of possible alternates for 20 Books of Summer, and I decided to sub it in for The Temporary European, by Cameron Hewitt, which I did not finish. Something about his tone annoyed me. I sensed he had spent too much time in conversations with people who depended financially on his recommending their restaurant, bed and breakfast, or whatever, in the guidebooks.
Also, he used the word ‘impactful.’)
Family Roundabout – Richmal Crompton, 1948
The first Persephone I’ve ever read as a Persephone – the first of very many, I hope! (There are a few Persephone titles I’ve read in other editions, but not many. A whole new world) And I loved this book. In my family we all laugh like hyenas at the William stories and I had no idea until recently that Richmal Crompton had written anything else. Family Roundabout is a page-turning, gossipy story of two large families in a small English village, including one family matriarch who rules her family with an iron fist, and another, somewhat more aristocratic, who doesn’t rule her family at all but is always glad to see them (except when she’s in the middle of a good book). The relationships within and between both families had a lot of nuance, and for me, this was a perfect summer read.
A House in the Country – Ruth Adam, 1957
The description of this book really gripped me and I couldn’t wait to read it, after hearing Simon mention it on a years-old Tea or Books episode. A group of friends living together in London during the war get through the Blitz by daydreaming about renting a house together in the countryside once it’s over. You know from the very beginning that the reality doesn’t live up to their castle in the air, but you still can’t put it down as you turn the pages to find out what’s going to go wrong. There’s a fascinating cast of major and minor characters, a very engaging and sympathetic narrator, and an overwhelming amount of great period detail. This is ostensibly fiction, but I have a feeling it’s pretty close to memoir. It got darker and sadder than I had expected, but I don’t mean that in a bad way, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in the time period.
A Chip Shop in Poznan – Ben Aitken, 2019
20 Books of Summer. In the year of the Brexit vote, Ben Aitken decided to pack up and move from the U.K. to Poland. He spent a year working odd jobs and experiencing a part of Europe he’d known very little about; he journaled throughout the year, and this is his journal. He weaves in a little history, some reflections on immigration and politics, and a lot of people-watching. This was interesting and fun to read and I found the author likable; I would definitely read another of his books.
The New Kings of Nonfiction – ed. Ira Glass, 2007
20 Books of Summer. This was flawed but great, I plan to write about it in more detail here.
Peril at End House – Agatha Christie, 1932
This must be one of her best! It’s a Hercule Poirot and the classic set-up where we encounter a small cast of characters, one of whom we know must be responsible for the repeated attempts on this young woman’s life. I won’t say more but this was a very, very good Golden-Age mystery and classic Poirot.
The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float – Farley Mowat, 1969
A very funny readaloud. (I made some on-the-fly edits to make it appropriate for all the ages we have in our family.) We love reading about boats, and since we made I think either seven or eight failed attempts to take our own motorboat out on the lake this summer – the mechanic kept saying it was fixed and acting like it was our fault and we were crazy – we finally took it to a different mechanic – anyway, it was topical. At least we were never out in the middle of the Northern Atlantic with no radio as the water level in the cabin rose and rose! (As a matter of fact, we never got more than ten feet from the dock.) I didn’t know much about this book going into it, so I was pleasantly surprised to learn a lot along the way about Newfoundland and its surroundings, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, etc. I really want to go there now! NOT by boat though.
The Eyre Affair – Jasper Fforde, 2001
My third reading of this book, this time for book group – and I was so pleased that almost everyone in my group loved it. I didn’t really like it myself the first time I read it – at least, I thought it was fine, but I didn’t feel any need to read on. Then another friend who’s a trusted source of recommendations enthused about Fforde about ten years later (~2015), and I revisited The Eyre Affair and quickly went on to read the rest of the series – they just keep getting better, and they are just so fun, so funny, and so extremely clever. It is an alternate reality where literature is a matter of life and death, in fact literary and high culture are popular culture, and there is time travel. The main character, Thursday Next, is a strong and capable woman, not at all a stereotyped heroine though, and the books just teem with ideas and with humor.
Although Fforde jokes about the BookWorld only having a limited number of plot devices that are endlessly recycled – so that characters swear at each other by saying “Why don’t you go to Human Drama and do a Plot Nine!” (Plot Nine is where a character returns to his hometown to be reconciled to a dying parent) – Jasper Fforde throws plot twists into this series that I have never seen in any other book in any genre. I think he is just brilliant and I read whatever he writes, even though these Thursday Next books and Shades of Grey are to me the pinnacle of what he’s done so far. I’d love to now reread the whole rest of this series. My 14-year-old read them all for the first time this summer and he loved them just as much as my husband and I do.
Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft – Thor Heyrdahl, 1948
I had read this before and adored it, and this time I read it aloud to three of my kids as part of their school year. It was a great readaloud, and I did some on-the-fly editing to focus a little more on the adventure and less on the theory the adventure set out to prove. Not long after WWII, Thor Heyerdahl roped in five friends and set out to travel on a handmade balsa raft from Peru to the Pacific Islands, to demonstrate that people could have done the same in the distant past. It’s a fantastic true adventure story and you can’t help but love these six Norwegians. Some of the best parts are the descriptions of the wildlife they encountered out in the middle of the Pacific, hundreds of miles from any shipping route, let alone any island.
Being A Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide – Charles Foster, 2016
I loved this and wrote about it here.
CleverLands: The Secrets Behind the Success of the World’s Most Successful Education Systems – Lucy Crehan, 2016
20 Books of Summer. So thought-provoking! I’ve always followed the results of the international tests and wondered about the specifics of why various economically similar countries get such different results. So much to say here, I should really write more in detail about this so I’ll remember what I learned! For now I’ll just say it was great and I highly, highly recommend it to anyone interested in education (which should be – everyone?)
How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America – Clint Smith, 2021
For this book, the author visited five sites with strong connections to the history of slavery in the U.S. – Monticello, Angola Prison, Whitney Plantation, Blandford Cemetery, New York City, and Goree Island in Senegal – talked with the people in charge, took several tours, talked to other tourists, and wrote these engaging and interesting (but disturbing and hard) chapters about each one. It was extremely effective and instructive. If everyone in this country read even just the chapter on Blandford Cemetery, we would be living in a different world!
Blandford Cemetery, which I had actually never heard of before, is a huge memorial to the Confederate war dead, really not at all far from where I live, and this chapter confronts head-on the “Lost Cause” mythos which reinterprets the Civil War as having been fought for state’s rights and in response to northern aggression. “Very little to do with slavery, two sides to every story, nothing to see here!” Contra all that, it was incredibly powerful to read pages and pages of direct quotes from the text of each Confederate state’s Articles of Secession, besides other contemporaneous quotes from various Confederate leaders. You can never get to the end of how much the truth matters. One excellent reason, among so many reasons, to read.