Christmas books

Waking from the chocolate-flavoured, carol-sound-tracked, new-clothes strewn oblivion of Christmas Day, life surfaces again chez nous. This afternoon the Bass Player, the Other Half and I went shopping with the Waterstones’ cards we got for Christmas. The Ultimate Frisbee Freak was too busy doing payable chores around the place (severely broke after Christmas) to come with us, though he did send us off with instructions to see if the Dalai Lama’s autobiography was out yet – v. attracted by the Dalai Lama is the UFF.

Once over the threshold of the only bookshop left in town (sigh…) I was determined not to just go for the three-for-twos, partly because I’m beginning to feel dictated to and partly because I want to support authors whose publishers haven’t stumped up for a place on the front tables. And, if I’m totally honest, I’ve read all the three-for-twos I fancy anyway…

The results are in the pile on the right – three chosen by the Other Half, three by me. All will be read by both with much gusto.

Not that I’m going to get to these for a while, still got the birthday haul to enjoy. I’ve just finished reading The Lollipop Shoes by Joanne Harris which I raved about here a couple of days ago and which I loved more and more as I read it. There’s something timeless about Joanne Harris’s books, as if they’re purely about the people and their predicament and don’t relate to the rest of the world, be it political situation, cultural context (whatever that might be) or historical time-scale at all. it’s a clever trick if you can pull it off, and she can. Apart from the one mention of the internet (to say that Yanne and her family didn’t have it) and the fact that one character is welded to his mobile phone (which immediately puts him beyond the pale) the modern world doesn’t intrude into The Lollipop Shoes any more than it did into Chocolat. The result is a kind of fable, a timeless story with a uninversal meaning. And I love that kind of thing.

But, though I love it, I don’t write it. My stories are much more time-bound. Testament is full of very specific historical references, both in the fourteenth century where Simon’s life and ambitions are bounded by the heresies of Lollardy and in the contemporary world where neither Damia’s campaign to save the college nor her long-distance relationship with Catz could possibly survive without constant use of the internet. Of course, the internet has its down-side as Damia also discovers.

It’s the same with the current work-in-progress. A memoir written about a single summer in 1843 and a contemporary story based very firmly in the West Wales of the twenty-first century. But, as I say, I do love fables and I’ve put one in to the w-i-p, though whether it will survive beyond the first draft, I don’t know. Stephen King (whom I seem to keep quoting as if all I know about writing comes from him instead of twenty years of practice) says that we should kill our darlings, ie cut out those bits of our books we cherish the most as they’re likely to be dead, purple weight. We shall see.

Meanwhile, am I getting any writing – or even editing, as predicted – done this holiday? Not yet. But tomorrow may be another day in that respect…

Magic and The Lollipop Shoes

The Lollipop Shoes, by Joanne Harris, is a magical book. It has magic flung over it like fairy-dust and it pulls you into its world of a reality behind the real from the first sentence.

It is a relatively little known fact that, over the course of a single year, about twenty million letters are delivered to the dead.

And it is in this world of the dead-but-still-alive, the assumed identity, the life behind the life that The Lollipop shoes takes place. Vianne Rocher is dead – Anouk, her daughter, tells us so – but Yanne Charbonneau has taken her place. Anouk has become Annie but, she tells us, her real friends call her Nanou. Except she has no friends bar her real/imaginary rabbit Pantoufle.

And Zozie De l’Alba - formerly Francoise Lavery and countless other women - has taken on a new life in the Place des Faux-Monnayeurs where nothing – least of all her – is what it seems. The very name of the square – the faux-monnayeurs – means counterfeiter or forger and that is what both Zozie de l’Alba and Vianne/Yanne are. Both, for reasons of their own, are hiding their real identity, their true history. They are making their life up as they go along and that, too, is a kind of magic.

Zozie confesses to having dabbled in every kind of magic there is and Yanne, too, has cantrips for every occasion, runes for luck and skill with the Tarot. But it is not just this magic that the book is full of. Kate Mosse’s Sepulchre which I read recently was full of Tarot-lore - and even demons and the occult - but stopped short of being magical in the way that the Lollipop Shoes is. Because Joanne Harris is a genius at infusing the mundane with the magical. Who but she would have thought of describing shoes like this:

Those fabulous luminous high-heeled shoes in lipstick, candy-cane, lollipop red, gleaming like treasure on the bare cobbled street.

Gleaming like treasure. Yes! All the world gleams like treasure in the world of Joanne Harris’s books. It’s one of the things which thrills me about her writing. In the work of most authors, description merely serves to illustrate character or to provide a background of resonance against which things happen. In Joanne Harris’s books, description is very much a highlight – she sets the world ablaze with her words without ever descending to purple prose. I love the way she makes me see the world as if I’ve never really looked at it before and – every time I read one of her books, I vow never again to walk down the street without noticing things with all my senses.

Christmas, however religious you are or aren’t, is infused with dollops of magic and the sense of heightened expectation just makes it more so. If you want to immerse yourself in a magic which won’t make you sick from too much chocolate or too much saccharine on the TV, I cannot recommend The Lollipop Shoes too highly. I’m only a quarter of the way through the book and already, I believe….

Merry Christmas everybody!

Nice author, nice book?

I’ve just left a comment over at the Mostly Books blog which made me stop and think about my reading habits.
I was responding to the lastest post about a visit to the shop by author Julie Hearn. I said:
She sounded so fab that I went straight to her website. Then, because she still sounded lovely and her books sounded very much like the sort of thing I love, I to went to my local bookshop and bought the only one they had 'The Merrybegot'. It's already been promoted to the top of the 'to be read' pile!
Which it has.

But would I have bought Ms Hearn’s book if I’d thought it sounded great but she, personally, did not come across as the sort of person I would like to find myself stuck on a desert island with? [Or as a friend of mine from the former Yugoslavia says, darkly ‘in a bunker with’…] Do I, in other words, only read/buy books by people I like?

After racking my brains and casting an eye over the bookshelf pile which contains all the most recently read books in the house, I think the answer has to be ‘yes’. If I hear or read an author interview and the subject comes across as pretentious or misogynistic or objectionable, I probably wouldn't buy their books. Not because I wouldn't want to contribute to their bank balance (although...) but because reading something written by somebody whose basic attitude to people was so different to my own would probably lead to me feeling out of sorts and at cross purposes with what I'm reading. And life's too short, and I read too slowly, to spend time on novels which make you feel like that.

But what if the book was in a genre I really liked and that particular book seemed fantastically interesting?
Hmmm. Would I give up reading Minette Walters’ books if I found out that she was anything other than lovely? Or Philippa Gregory’s? Or Tracy Chevalier’s, Joanne Harris’, Sue Gee’s…

I suppose the cop-out answer is that these authors could not write such humane and engrossing books if they were unpleasant, narrow-minded or mean-spirited.

So, do I like books because I intuit, somehow, that their writers are nice people? Or because they give me an insight into other lives, other worlds and take me on a journey of discovery?

Perhaps it's just that the way my favourite writers look at the lives of their subjects and the world in which they live chimes with something in me.

Do other people read and enjoy books by authors whom they know they would dislike intensely if they actually met them? Or am I alone in my strange reading prejudices?