Quick Lit: September 2019

Linking up with Modern Mrs Darcy for Quick Lit as usual. August was pretty slow on the reading front because we moved house and I travelled - and had lots of copies of Country Living magazine to catch up on while on the beach in Dorset. Not to mention scouring second hand book shops and summer fetes for titles and authors on my TBR list, and to stock my son's library. And - literary confession - I gave up on an audio version of The Pickwick Papers after I fell asleep three times while trying to listen. Maybe I need a new narrator or the paper version to keep my attention.

Pym illustrating how I feel when I read one of her novels

Barbara Pym - Jane and Prudence
I came late to discovering Barbara Pym, but she is now a firm favourite. To say I am working through her books would be a mis-description, because they are never work. As I have said before, they are light and witty without being shallow. She is, for many, the Jane Austen of the 1950s, with the backdrop of London, the suburbs, and the Church of England. Her heroines live lives, if not of quiet desperation, at least of quiet compromise. In Pym's eyes, post-war Britain is still in so many ways a world for men. The role of women is to support and soothe, whether as the wife at home, or the career woman whose position is inevitably that of serving a male boss. But don't let that description put you off - she tells her stories with a wry humour, and her female characters triumph by being more aware of the game than the men. Jane and Prudence follows this pattern: Jane is the promising academic who married a clergyman, whereas her younger friend, Prudence, is the spinster working woman who may have her love affairs, but is never asked to be the wife. Jane's desire to set Prudence up with a young widower in her husband's new parish becomes a catalyst that awakens rivals on all sides and gives Prudence new insight into herself and her chosen path. I identified so much with Jane: the aborted academic career in English literature, quotes that pop into her head for every occasion, and the wish to make witty but inappropriate comments on situations (excepting that she is loud, and I am withdrawn). Pym remarks in this book that Prudence likes to read the sort of novel without a definite ending, just like real life, a defense of her own conclusions, which, although bringing the immediate plot to a close, and remaining hopeful, never let us see a concrete future for her characters. Pym's career languished in the mid 60s-70s when she was deemed out of step with the times, but this injustice was happily overturned by the championing of other distinguished British writers. Long may she reign everywhere there is a pot of tea and a jumble sale.

Trying to show a few of my finds, plus a view down the street from our new house in Koper

Jane Austen - Sense and Sensibility
Ok, I confess, one reason I re-read this was so I could imagine Alan Rickman as Colonel Brandon (it was a tough month). I haven't read Austen since I got through all her novels as a young adult. I was glad to find that it was just as riveting thirty years later. In my teens, I was a little dubious about Marianne's 'happy' ending with someone as old as thirty-four, but now Brandon seems the true romantic hero of the novel. And FYI, Emma Thompson's screenplay is the only film that I have ever declared "as good as the book".

Colleen L. Donnelly - Out of Splinters and Ashes [audiobook]
This was a first for me - I've never before listened to an audiobook written by someone I know (Colleen is a member of my online critique group). In this historical novel with a slight paranormal slant, a German journalist travels to the US in the hopes he can dispel a disturbing accusation: that his writer grandmother had a child by an enemy lover on the brink of the Second World War. Truth and fiction merge in surprising ways in this lyrical novel with a difference. This was a finalist for the prestigious Indie RONE award.

On a vaguely literary front, while in Dorset, I visited the grave of T.E. Lawrence in Moreton village, aka (if you don't know) Lawrence of Arabia, so here's a couple of snaps. I have the badge for reading his hefty, genre-defying literary memoir Seven Pillars of Wisdom (and a bonus badge for his Oxford thesis, Crusader Castles).

Have you ever listened to an audiobook read by someone you know, or do you have any recommendations for narrators of Charles Dickens' novels?