Hunters in the Snow by Daisy Hildyard

I've finally submitted my PhD dissertation, which means that I can read books for enjoyment and not just work. As soon as I have finished James Robertson's And the Land Lay Still, I'm going to be reading Hunters in the Snow by Daisy Hildyard.

I know Daisy, we have both just finished and submitted our dissertations at Queen Mary, University of London, and have been on panels about archives and anecdotes - although our fields are separated by at least three hundred years. Hunters in the Snow is sure to be a great book, and the first of many. The fact that Daisy has managed to finish both a novel and a PhD dissertation in the last few years is very impressive - she is an inspiration to us all! I wish her lots of success with this novel and am really looking forward to reading it.

AcWriMo III: derailed

Today has been less about writing and more about making sure I have the information to hand so that I can move forward with my chapter, which means I haven't done my 1200 words today. Yesterday went a bit wrong on the AcWriMo front because I had to leave the house and didn't get the opportunity to sit in front of my laptop until late, by which time I was tired. Tomorrow I have meetings but I hope to get something written by hand when I am travelling on the train to and from London.
This is all a bit frustrating because I wanted to have a productive week and build on the momentum generated at the end of last week, so on Thursday morning I will refocus and spend a few minutes setting some writing goals for that day. This is something which is really encouraged by the Thinking Writing department at QMUL and when I remember to do it I do find I am more productive. This evening, after reading through and doing a rough edit of the work I have written so far, I am going to spend a few minutes working out which section I want to focus on and then outline some goals so that I can focus them on Thursday morning.

Reading Lists, libraries and beautiful books

Somebody asked me recently what books I'd read recently - I had to think about this, which is unusual as I can usually reel off quite a few without thinking at all. I read everyday, but rarely these are books anyone else would want to read - New Perspectives in Historical Writing, Probing the Limits of Representation, Practicing New Historicism, anyone? Thought not.

To add to this I've been stuck in interminable chapter writing hell since sometime in March, which finally came to an end about ten days ago, but which has meant I've not been able to read anything non-chapter related, mostly because I've just been too tired to read anything else at the end of the day.

This term though I've been teaching a course on contemporary writing, so I've been reading a book a week, and this is the reading list:

Marilynne Robinson - Home
Ali Smith - The First Person and Other Stories
Sarah Waters - The Little Stranger
Michelle Paver - Dark Matter
Jackie Kay - The Red Dust Road
Jackie Kay -Fiere
Jeanette Winterson - Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Jose Saramargo - The Elephant's Journey
Alex Wheatle - Brenton Brown
Bel Mooney - A Small Dog Saved My Life

In the last week of term the students get to choose the book they want to read. A few of my students raised their hands 'What do we do in week 12?' questions abound. Choose a book you like and suggest it to the rest of the class. 'What?' - none of them could think of a book they had read. What did you read in the summer? Silence. You must have read something. One finally mumbled that he spent the rest of the year reading and so didn't read anything over the summer. What is he doing an English degree for if he doesn't like reading? When I finished my undergraduate degree I was so tired I couldn't read any of the books I loved or wanted to read, but I needed to read something so I trundled my way through all my Dad's crime novels. How can these students spend a whole summer not reading?

I would go crazy if I didn't or wasn't able to read - books have been there at the most difficult and terrible times and I've always used books as a way of escaping the terribleness. When I worked as a bank clerk I used to use my lunch hour to go to the library in the town (whatever town, as I was moved about a lot) where I was based and sit in there and read; it was an hour of grace day on day, week on week while I was doing a job which made me very unhappy; it got me out of the bank and effectively made the job bearable until a job I wanted to do came along. In the last month I have learned four out of the seven public libraries I used have been shut down, two have had their hours cut, and one risks closure.

The Kindle advert may be claiming the thing replaces the book (it doesn't because you can't drop in the the bath for a start, not to mention all the other things, which I won't mention otherwise I will be ranting) but I cannot replace the library: the experience of going into a place filled with books, pulling something off the shelf at random and starting the reading journey. Or going into a library with the reading list for your course and looking at the shelves and pulling books off to find which ones you need, which are interesting or helpful, and which are no good and can go back on the shelf. The rejection process in the academic library is as important as the act of discovery. 

I haven't managed to finish AL Kennedy's The Blue Book - I was just too tired and couldn't actually hold the book upright in bed, and decided the book and I would be much happier if we left each other alone for a while. I'll be reading it at Christmas though and I still love looking at it in all its blueness on my shelf. Slight aside - there seems to be a small trend at Vintage/Jonathan Cape at the moment to publish books which have the ends of the pages the same colour as the cover - Julian Barnes' Booker winner has a black hardcover with the ends of the pages also black, and the edges of the dust jacket also black so it sort of melds, the new Vintage edition of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is very orange in the same way that The Blue Book is blue. I wonder if the rise of the Kindle (how much do I hate that TV advert? More than the actual Kindle I think) and the iPad and other assorted e-reader things, has meant that publishers are trying to make (some) effort to produce hardback editions which look beautiful.

After I escaped chapter hell, I started reading Sara Wheeler's wonderful book Terra Incognita, which is about her travels in Antarctica. This is the first non-work book I've read since sometime in the spring. I've never read much travel writing before - there is so much fiction I haven't read, not to mention the poetry, that non-fiction - unless it is really vital and essential - tends to slightly fall off my radar. But this year I started to give in to my desire to read books about the Arctic and Antarctica, starting safely with a travel book about Norway, where I turned immediately to the bit about the Arctic Circle, and then picked up a copy of a novel called The Still Point whilst traveling to a conference in Exeter which I read in huge gulps on the train there and back, along with an article about the Northern Lights in the Saturday Guardian Magazine someone had left on the seat of the train from Exeter. Chapter hell began, along with some other awful things and my snow and ice filled reading dreams had to wait; I'm back there now and loving it.

I'm off to jump down another chapter black hole - I may be some time.

Tea Leaves, Tree Leaves, Book Leaves

My new TWSBI Diamond 530 arrived on Saturday morning from the super efficient online pen shop The Writing Desk - I placed my order for one pen, one bottle of J. Herbin Éclat de Saphir ink and a Clairefontaine notebook at around 10:55am on Friday morning and less than 24 hours later the postman was at the door - at about 8:20am. So The Writing Desk get a big thumbs up from me for excellently swift service, and I will certainly use them again in the future - probably to buy more ink in the near future, maybe even Herbin's Lie de Tea ink, because I am also a slightly obsessive tea drinker.

Indeed, as I type I am drinking a mug of freshly made Mélange Madeleine tea from Hédiard in Paris, which might be my favourite blend of tea. My mainstay teas are Earl Grey and Brodie's Afternoon Tea, both of which I have in the cupboard as tea bag teas for a quick cup of tea, then I have many different types of tea as tea leaves - including various green teas, an Earl Grey from Hédiard, a black tea and flower blend called Blue Lady which has mallow flowers, marigold flowers and grapefruit petals which I got somewhere in Scotland, a tea called Nirvana from another shop in Paris called Compagnie Anglaise des Thés, which my parents bought for me along with a rather lovely tea pot.

In the garden all the autumn leaves have finally been cleared up, and put in the compost bin. I've just ordered some new roses for my garden from Peter Beales Roses - I've ordered three ramblers to be trained against my garden fence panels:

Ghislaine de Feligone:




Phyllis Bide:




Narrow Water:




Now moving onto books. Why are there so many people with Kindles? I'm less bothered about iPads than I am about the Kindle, because the Kindle seems to be trying to pretend it is a book replacement. What is the appeal? I don't get it, and it isn't because I am a technophobe, because I'm not - I like my gadgets quite a lot, but I could do without them if it came to that, because there are books, and paper, and pens and pencils. BBC Four's series The Beauty of Books is a wonderful celebration of the book, and as one of the commentators points out - I think it might be Stephen Bayley - at the beginning, the book is the best information storage and retrival system ever created, and that you can read it in the bath - by which I think he is really saying 'you can read it in the bath, and drop it in the bath, without permanently, irrecoverably, damaging it. If you drop a paperback in the bath it will not be rendered unreadable - it will get a little warped but other than that you're still going to be able to use it. My main problem with e-readers of all types though is the lack of actual, physical, turnable, pages - essentially there are no 'leaves'. E-readers can attempt to manufacture the turning of the page all they want, but the thrill of opening a book and turning the page is gone. I'm sure there are people less bothered and obsessed about this than I am, but part of the reason I love books is the page-turning. I love that you can pass them onto other people, make a gift of a book which is especially special to you, make annotations or leave messages in them, not worry too much about dropping them, you can get them second hand so they have some past before coming to you, they are like old friends - my list could go on quite excessively.

Writing of books which are like old friends - yes you guessed it - my non-PhD reading this week has been a collection of AL Kennedy short stories, my brain is tired at the moment and can't sustain reading a novel, so I've been reading Indelible Acts again. Kennedy's new novel comes out in August and has a very blue front cover. Well, it is called The Blue Book. Hoping I might get my hands on a proof copy sometime in the next couple of months.

My visits to the British Library are becoming quite rare because it is becoming increasingly noisy in the reading rooms. Why? Mobile phones. Last time I was there the man sat next to me kept listening to his voicemail messages in the reading rooms. So I've taken refuge in the periodicals reading room at Senate House. However, when I have been at the BL I've taken to ordering up a book called How I Write, which is edited by Dan Crowe and Philip Olterman, and is really a collection of essays by different writers on various writing subjects - Will Self on post-it notes for example. I have a slump about half an hour before lunch so I read a couple of entries and then go off and have lunch. I've been working through it slowly and will soon reach ALK's entry called 'Notebooks thrown across rooms'.

I've been saving this entry - I was tempted to jump right to it, but have restrained myself - and have been wondering lately about notebooks, because I use them everyday for my work and I am beginning to understand exactly what I want from a notebook. Primarily three things: sturdiness, good paper and the ability to lie flat. I need one for my PhD research, a pocket notebook for other stuff and a diary (I've tried using my phone and computer for the latter but it doesn't work for me: I do use the laptop for 'to do lists' on iCal though). I used to get the 'pocket' sized page-a-day Moleskine diaries, but came to the conclusion that they were too bulky and I wasted many of the pages. This year I've got a soft-cover pocket size, page-a-week Moleskine diary, which has a lined page for notes on the opposite page. So far I quite like it - I have enough space for weekly notes, and if I keep my writing neat I can fit all my appointments and meetings in each day section. I've heard that some people have found the soft-cover Moleskines damage easily - the covers rip off and such like. The bugbear I have with it is really to do with the elastic band - it seems to have got baggier and a bit flimsy. And why do they persist in providing an address book in each and every diary? I've got three now which I will never need to use. We shall see.

My notebooks for my research tend to be hardback A5 hardback books, plain or lined pages, and most of them are red or some sort of reddish shade - not sure why - I've four in total: a Collins Ideal, which was started for an undergraduate journal I had to submit for a course years ago and which is actually larger than the A5 size, the first 20 pages or so are used, but I will cut them out and use the book at some point; a Seawhite of Brighton book, which I think is actually a sketch book; and two standard A5 notebooks with lined pages which I think came from WH Smiths, one of which is full and the other I am currently using. I expect to finish both the Seawhite and the Smiths books in the next few months and then will start using the Clairefontaine book I purchased last week. I also got a pile of black soft cover A5 notebooks free a few years ago on a festival I worked on, I don't actually like them all that much - the front cover is embossed with The Times logo, and they don't open out flat. I only continue to use them because I like the paper - pencils don't smudge and fountain pens don't feather or bleed through the page. On closer inspection the paper is made by Conquerer. I've got two of these Times notebooks on the go, I've donated two to my sister, and have two left which I will willingly send to anyone who asks. I'm quite happy with my red A5 notebooks for research notes and shall continue with them - they've all been sturdy and have good paper.

My problem is with the pocket sized notebooks. I've been using a hard cover, blank page, Moleskine for a few years and am towards the end of it now. It has withstood several festivals, a house renovation, many, many train journeys, and being in my bag on a day-to-day basis. It is one of the older Moleskines so has one of the older, tighter, sturdier, elastic bands. The top and bottom edges of the spine are slightly worn, but not enough to bother me. On the whole I like it, but I do have issues with it. My problem with Moleskine is about the paper, and about the falsified Moleskine 'legend'. I could overlook the latter - but I'm not willing to pay for it. The paper, however, I can't overlook because ink bleeds through and feathers - I've had problems with rollerballs, gel pens, and fountain pens, and the paper is particularly bad with some fountain pens and inks - although, oddly for a pen which can be a bit temperamental, my Waterman Hemisphere with black Waterman ink writes on Moleskine paper very well, doesn't put down a dry line, feather, or bleed through. However, because the Waterman pen was given to me as a present by my parents I consider it to be my best pen and don't want to have to carry it around with me everyday just because it is the only pen I have which writes perfectly in a Moleskine.

So while it is generally a good notebook, and I do have another blank page Moleskine, I am on a search for a new pocket notebook. There are several blogs who are on a quest to either find a Moleskine alternative, or inks and pens which are Moleskine 'friendly' - you can find links in the blog list on the left - I've read a few of these and recommendations include the Stifflexible (which I can't find anywhere online or in a shop), the Alwych 'All Weather Notebook', the Quo Vadis Habana, the Rite in the Rain notebook - another all weather notebook - Rhodia notebooks, and Cartesio notebooks. The Journal Shop offers paper samples from some of the notebooks they supply, so I'm going to ask for a sample from the Cartesio - I do quite like this bluey coloured notebook in the Cartesio range.

In the meantime I very much like my new TWSBI Diamond 530 and am going to enjoy using it on a daily basis.

On a final note, The Morgan Library in New York is currently holding an exhibition called The Diary: Three Centuries of Private Lives. If - like me - you are not in, or near, or going to or near, New York, then they have pictures from the exhibition online and an audio tour you can download.