RANDOM JOTTINGS

I have always been fascinated by the story of the Count of Monte Cristo. I first became aware of this way back when I was in my early teens and there was a dramatization of the same on the BBC. This was in the early sixties, so in black and white, and was one of the regular classic serials that the BBC used to show on tv at 6pm on a Sunday. I remember them well.

Edmund Dantes, the wrongly imprisoned hero was played by Alan Badel and I found his aristocratic good looks impressive at the time.

Since then I have watched numerous versions. Gerard Depardieu was excellent in a series made in 1998 which is available on DVD but as I no longer have a dvd player I was checking where I could find it and good old You Tube comes to the rescue again

Richard Chamberlain played the Count in a 1970s film which I recently watched and it has not aged well. As the Count he had white hair and spent all his time in severe elegantly cut black and I felt the producers were cashing in on is popularity at the time (remember Dr Kildare and the Thorn Birds?) and were out to make him as beautiful as possible.  The actress who played Mercedes was decked in heavy make up and false eyelashes and was not convincing.

A film starring Jim Cazaviel was made in 2002 and I really love this one. Very much in the Errol Flynn mold with a dashing swordsman and good looking hero. All very glamorous  but at the same time, Edmond’s suffering in the Castle D’if was well portrayed. Richard Harris turned in a good performance of the Abbey as well.

In the last three years there have been two new versions. One, which I watched last week, was made in France and I watched with sub titles. I found it fairly unconvincing and the actor playing the Count was lacking in any sort of charisma.

And then we come to the one made in 2024 which I have now watched twice and loved. Looks sumptuous and beautifully filmed and the casting is excellent. Jeremy Irons plays Abbey Faria and the Count is played by Sam Clflin and I think he is very very good indeed. Quiet and charming and the iron in his soul and his search for revenge is subtly done.

All of the above have either truncated the story or made changes. Inevitable I suppose. The recent French version creates a romance between two characters which does not exist. The Chamberlain version does retain the correct ending and the other two fall somewhere between two stools.

So, after all this and having blitzed The Count again I decided it was time to actually read the book. I read the Three Musketeers many moons ago and, having been reared on the swashbuckling film versions, found the book very difficult to get into. Well, I am now a bit older and wiser and as a life long lover of literature of the 19^th century decided to have a crack at Dumas again.

I ordered a lovely hardback edition, thought I may as well do it in style, and the delivery man had to knock on my door as it could not be popped through the letterbox and when I saw it I understood why. Over 1400 pages and as weighty as a doorstop my heart quailed. No way am I going to get through that thinks I so I decided to set myself a chapter a day.

By the end of the week I could not put it down so gripped was I. Full of detail that obviously has to be left out of dramatizations, great chunks of politics re the Bourbons and Bonapartists, which I found fascinating but would not have years ago.

It is a simply magnificent book. I am not making any attempt to review it, I am totally unable to do so and pretty sure I could not say anything that has been said by others better than I, but gosh I am so glad I finally got round to reading it. I felt so sad when I read the final page and this time found out the ending that the author wanted.

I might try the Three Musketeers again but have to say that I am not terribly interested in Athos, Porthos or Aramis so while I make up my mind have ordered and received The Black Tulip and am looking forward to reading that one.

Since writing this, I was checking up the versions of the Count and lo and behold I have found the Alan Badel version on You Tube.  It is pretty clunky and totally studio bound but I am enjoying it all over again.  One main scene with Villefort, the Prosecutor and his mother in law who doubted his Bourbon loyalties was wonderfully scripted and lifted straight from the book.  It was an intelligent and well done interaction and I doubt the BBC would produce something of this calibre today…..

If any of you have read The Count of Monte Cristo I would really be interested in hearing from you.

Well the sun is shining and I, for one, am very glad to see the back of February. A virus laid me low and it has taken a few weeks to get back to normal, well as normal as I can ever be..

I belong to a walking group and have been going on some of the more gentle strolls to get my fitness back and it is a bit daunting to realise that a few weeks lying on the sofa can set you back .I have a love/hate relationship with exercise. Well, more hate than love to be honest. I wrote about this recently and decided to put my thoughts on here as well, because I have a book review/thoughts coming up but need to concentrate my mind and I always feel guilty when I don’t post much so I hope you will forgive this ramble.

So here we go

I attended a school, many moons ago, when we were out on the playing fields in the freezing cold, gym tunics on (no leggings in those days), and getting hacked around the ankles with hockey sticks. We were made to climb ropes in the gym at which I was useless and would slide down suffering rope burns as I hit the floor. Vaulting over the awful wooden horse, dreadful. Fell off so many times they gave up with me and decided as I was a Big Girl, ie 5.9” they would give me the goal keeper position in netball (another awful game which involved a lot of running around and shrieking) working on the premise that I could stop the balls soaring towards me. They were wrong.

In my life I have tried Zumba, line dancing, steps (which did my knees in and they have never recovered) swimming which I love but oh the awfulness of getting dressed afterwards and pulling your trousers over damp legs etc, pilates (quite enjoyed that) and yoga which I also enjoyed. At the end of a session we had a relaxing bit when we lay on our mats and the instructor would talk very quietly about how we were little acorns growing through the ground and turning into oak trees at which point I used to fall fast asleep and had to be woken from my slumbers.

When commuting to London for 25 years I had a half hour walk to my office from Liverpool Street which kept me fit. Then when I retired the walking went to pot as I revelled in slothfulness and the joy of knowing I no longer had to get up at the crack of dawn.

It was a long slow slide to being totally unfit.

Lockdown came – so then I made the effort to go out every day.  I would wander round my neighbourhood and exchange frantic waves with anybody who I came across. I would walk on the beach at Frinton and once again wave madly at peeps walking their dogs. Oddly enough by the end of lockdown I was on my way to fitness.

So – walking. That was the solution.

Then came The Hip. Yes it got worse and worse and painful and walking was impossible. I got a new one. So physio and back to walking which by then was the only exercise I could contemplate. But as we all know walking on your own can be boring and tedious and also unsafe for women. 

I persisted though and then one day spotted a note on Facebook asking would anybody like to join a walking group WOMEN ONLY. Yes I thought and signed up straight away.

I turned up at the location for the first walk, very nervous and wondering what was going to happen. I saw a blonde woman arrive and pranced up to her beaming from ear to ear “hello are you Rebecca?” This lady looked me up and down as if I was lower than the dust beneath her chariot wheels, said coldly “No” and walked off. I retreated to my car, suitably crushed, and then Rebecca did appear and suddenly a whole bunch of us got out of our parked cars and met up and off we went.

I have to be honest here and say that Rebecca had to sit with me towards the end of this walk as I was not sure I was going to make it as I sat there puffing away like a grampus.  But I did though I had to lie down in a darkened room for an hour when I got home.

Since then I have done more walking than I ever thought I would and have had the joy of meeting up with so many funny, witty, interesting and lovely women. We all have our own stories and backgrounds and the support and friendship  shown by everybody I have met is simply wonderful.

I still get out of breath when going uphill and I am usually plodding at the back but my health has improved amazingly over the last year or so and I have discovered parts of Colchester I never knew existed.

While checking some quotes the other day I stumbled across this one which is attributed to Henry David Thoreau and I thought it was rather fun:

“I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understand the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks – who had the genius, so to speak, for sauntering; which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country in the Middle Ages and asked for charity, under the pretense of going  a la sainte Terre” to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed “there goes a Sainte-terre”a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander”

There you are.

We are all saints.

Not many people know that…..

 This is just a random ramble and catch up as I have been unwell for the last couple of weeks and totally unable to read or concentrate on anything.

January and February seem to be dragging, and yes I know it is nearly March, but the damp weather and the dreary rain seems to be never ending. I should not complain as I have a friend in New York who seems to spend most of her days shovelling mounds of snow off her doorstep.

I picked up a virus from somewhere (in fact pretty sure I got it from the waiting room when I visited my GP a couple of weeks ago) and it laid me low.  Hacking, sneezing, coughing, sore throat, sore eyes etc etc. On top of all that my water heater shorted and conked out so no hot water and no showers. I ended up boiling kettles to wash with and it all got a bit wearing. I finally had a new heater installed today and when I get up tomorrow morning I shall be in the shower and wallow.

And in the midst of all this, it was my birthday and I had a couple of nice outings planned which had to be cancelled and I lay on the sofa wallowing in self-pity.

Anyway, I am still here so I regard that as a blessing.

Not a great deal of reading under the circs and what I did pick up were old favourites, Austen etc as I did not feel like grappling with any new concepts at all.  

Over the last few months I have been watching a TV a series called Astrid, Murder in Paris. French with subtitles and it was recommended to me and I have to pass the recommendation on as I love it so much. Astrids work in the police records department in Paris. She is isolated and autistic and life is challenging. She has an uncanny ability to remember everything in the files she cares for and this brings her to the attention of Raphaelle, a police inspector and a friendship slowly grows, Now you may be wondering why I suddenly brought this into the post and it is because Astrid listens to Bach when she is at her desk. The mathematical intricacy of his music suits her personality. Now I have sung in choirs and sung Bach but have never been drawn to him but this music in the series started to haunt me.

So what I am finally saying is that while I was lying on my Sofa of Misery last week I logged onto my music app and played the Bach violin partitas and oh my goodness me. Balm to the soul and to the mind and they calmed me and made me feel that life was ok even with my hacking and sneezing,

Please forgive the waffle and if you already love Bach and are thinking Wot a Silly Woman to not discover them before now, I can only say better late than never.

Anyway, feeling more humanoid now but still have moments when I keel over, close my eyes for a minute and wake up two hours later but I am getting there.

Thanks for your patience,

I was trawling through old posts the other day and came across one entitled Favourite Characters.  It was interesting to read as it was several years old and views I expressed some time ago have more or less stayed the same.

• Jo in Little Women (Meg was too bossy, Amy too self obsessed and Beth just TOO good to be true)

• Anne Eliot – Persuasion (yes I love her more than Elizabeth Bennett, she is so true, so steadfast)

• Provincial Lady – Diary of a Provincial Lady by EM Delafield

• Newland Archer – Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton.  A man who had the misfortune to be engaged and then married to a seemingly innocent young thing who turns out to be manipulative and underhand. He gave up the love of his life for her.  A good man.

• Jane Eyre – Yes I know some people feel she can be a bit of a pain with her O poor me attitude but she is brave and fiery and her passionate claim to equality with Rochester is still, to me, one of the defining moments in women’s literature

• Aunt Betsy Trotwood – David Copperfield.  One of Dicken’s finest characters. Her taking in of the unloved unhappy orphaned David and her routing of the Murdstones. My favourite part of this favourite book

• Anne – Anne of Green Gables by L M Montgomery.  Red haired, hot tempered, endlessly funny and I love the way she gets up each day determined to wring every ounce of fun and enjoyment out of life.  Never tire of reading and re-reading these books

• Katy – What Katy Did by Susan Coolidge.  Yet another childhood book I love and re-read as we see how tomboyish, thoughtless Katy copes with a life changing accident.  The rest of the books in this series are all wonderful but the first is the best.

• Mary Lennox – A Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett.  Neglected by her parents, plain, stubborn, proud and inside longing for love and affection, a marvellous character and I always get cross when this book stops being about her and switches focus to Colin half way through.

• Obadiah Slope – Barchester Towers by Trollope. No need to explain why this ghastly creature is one of my favourite characters, but has nothing to do with Alan Rickman! I just find him utterly slimy and revolting and to see him get his come uppance is a joy.  One of the funniest and best of Trollope’s prodigious output

• Mrs Wilkins (Lotty) – The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim. Oh how I love this book and how I love Lotty who decides she has had enough of rainy miserable days and cooking fish for her boring husband and who takes off to an Italian castle for a month.  Bliss.

• Maria Merryweather – The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge.  Enchanting, magical story of the redoubtable Maria coming to Moonacre Manor to right wrongs and to find her heart’s desire.

• Jenny – A Civil Contract by Georgette Heyer.  I have read all of this author’s output and love them all in varying degrees, but I think this book is her best.  Jenny, quiet, plain and deeply in love with Adam and undertaking a marriage whereby her fortune rescues his estates and finding happiness.  This is not a tale of derring do or the usual dashing hero/heroine romance that we expect from Heyer but a quieter more thoughtful book and one that I return to time and time again.

• Roderick Alleyn – Ngaio Marsh’s charismatic detective and his wife, Agatha Troy.  Never get bored with these books, all read so many times I know the dialogue off by heart but Alleyn is fascinating and gorgeous; which leads me onto:

• Lord Peter Wimsey – for those DL Sayer’s afficionados out there, no explanation is necessary. A fascinating man,

I also noted that I had noted the Donna Leon books set in Venice and featuring her detective, Brunetti.  I remember really enjoying them until they palled mainly because there seemed to character progression at all. Now the same could be said of other long running series, but in this case I began to find Brunetti’s wife, a lover of Henry James, and a superb cook who seemed to be able to whip up a pasta dish of supreme wonderfulness at the drop of a hat,  rather irritating.  And then for entertainment in the evenings they would sit and discuss philosophy and  Brunetti would be reading Aeschylus or some such. It all got a bit wearing.

Then the books began to get vaguer and vaguer as if the author was as fed up writing them as I was reading them so I gave up.

I was also reading the Inspector Montebalno books by Camilleri and these were huge fun which at times had me crying with laughter. But, once again, the characters remained the same, nothing changed and though I enjoyed them, they also began to tail off.

On looking at the list above I would not change any of them, they remain my favourites to this day and I cannot see that changing.

I realise I could quite easily go on and on as more and more of my favourites come to mind (Dorothea in Middlemarch, Mr Jarndyce in Bleak House, Emma, Helen in Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Miss Pettigrew, Emily Fox-Seaton in Making of a Marchioness, Pippi Longstocking, Roberta from the Railway Children, Poirot, Miss Marple), but I will desist – for the moment anyway. Looking at this list what leaps out at me is that I have no contemporary fiction represented at all, this comes as no surprise to me, but I feel this is a shame and do wish I could think of somebody in recent fiction who I have fallen in love with, but try as I might I cannot.  I will keep pondering on this one…

Also, a lot of books I read as a child, but I still love them so much and their happiness and enjoyment I experienced when I first read them, remains with me still.

Would love to hear what your favourite characters are and your thoughts on the above.

No I have not vanished and my apologies for lack of posts. As I have mentioned my daughter had to have an operation and all going well, when she had to return and have another. So my mind has been somewhat frazzled over the last two months and blogging has taken a back seat. As she got better she started going back to the gym and swimming at the beach. The day of the Bondi attack she had mentioned that she might be going and I had a panic stricken morning until she told me she was ok. In the end she had decided not to go for which I am thankful as you can imagine.

The last few months have left me feeling a bit wobbly and the run up to Christmas and the busyness of it all did not help.

it is Christmas morning and I will be driving to London to be with my other daughter and her family so after finishing my cup of tea and breakfast I will be loading up the car and off I go.

All of you who have stuck with me please believe how grateful I am and I want to wish you all a wonderful Christmas wherever you are.

thank you all x

This simply stunning biography was written several years ago and, having recently been embarking on a re-read of some of her novels, I decided to give this another whirl. And glad I am that I did as this in depth book gives the background and situation in her life as each book was written and gives me a new slant on the story.

Having read  LMM’s Journals (there are five in all) the first part of the biography was on fairly familiar ground as the author uses these as background and for illustration and  example, but we soon come to the nitty gritty.   Did LMM write these journals with future publication in mind (yes she did) and did she therefore present herself as she wanted to be seen and not as she really was?  After reading The Gift of Wings I think the answer is both yes and no.  LMM scribbled notes when she did not have time to writer her journals and then wrote them up retrospectively, sometimes months later.  Of course, we all know how it is easy to represent events and happenings as we would have liked to have had them happen and I think that LMM has done the same in places. 

One instance of this is her outpouring in Journal 1 which had me pinned to the sofa, about her passionate love for a Hermann Leard, which totally overwhelmed her and really awakened her sensual feelings.  She makes it very clear that she pulled back from the ‘abyss’ and did not surrender her virginity to him, much though she wanted to.  She was worried that he would think the less of her and that rumours would spread.  Also, at the time she was engaged to Edwin Simpson, an engagement which she knew was wrong and which she wanted to end.  So in the journals we learn of her love and desire for this man and how she resisted him.  What she does not mention is that he, also, was engaged to another and, therefore, how much this love was really reciprocated is left open to question.  Whatever the answer to this may be, these pages in the journals make for powerful reading and her feelings at the time were genuine and true.

LMM herself makes the point, on re-reading her journals at a later date,  that they were the recipient of her outpourings when she was unhappy and depressed and that we were not to think that she was unhappy all the time.  Though she seems to have suffered dreadfully from a nervous state most of her life, Maud seemed to accept this knowing that she had to suffer the lows because the highs were so wonderful and that she would hate to be “phlegmatic and dull with an even temperament”.

She wrote  “I desire that these journals never be destroyed and kept as long as the leaves hold together. I leave this to my descendants or my literary heirs as a sacred charge….there is so much of myself in these volumes that I cannot bear the thought of them ever being destroyed”

Happy the biographer who has such material to use and Mary Henley Rubio, author of this biography, was one of the editors of the five volumes.  When they were first published, starting in 1985, readers, including a recent one, myself, felt we were on intimate terms with Maud having suffered though the pages of her life.  I found myself staggered at the frustration and torments revealed but in this biography, we find that those who still remembered her in the late 1970’s and early 1980s (as their relative, minister’s wife, their employer) knew another Maud: “an empathetic person deeply interested in others and sympathetic to them, a witty conversationalist who liked to socialise, tell stories and gossip; a lively woman who liked to attend movies discuss books and ideas and take joy in the beauty of the natural world around her”

Maud did not marry until she was 37 and had three children in the first few years of her marriage.  Considering her age she was lucky to have two out of three survive, but her marriage was not a happy one.  Her husband, Ewan McDonald, suffered from depression which afflicted him for years.  Treatment was rather rough and ready as knowledge of this mental problem is not as sophisticated as it is now, and it would appear he was mainly treated with a series of drugs, Chloral, Nembutal, Veronal which were taken continuously.  Mary Rubio has investigated and feels that he was probably medicated into a worse position than when he first fell ill.  Maud, herself a highly nervous person with depressive tendencies, suffered bouts of the same depressive kind (these seemed to come in the winter when she was enclosed indoors because of the severe weather and unable to get out), but she was more clear sighted about these episodes and knew they came because she was not busy enough.  She was able to nurse herself through them though by the latter years of her life, stressed and worried, she was also taking large quantities of drugs which rendered her nervous and shaky.  I think that modern medical science would prove that she and Ewan, all unknowingly, had become addicted to their medication.

Her two sons, Stewart and Chester were dearly loved but Chester turned out to be a huge disappointment to her.  He was lazy, spendthrift, obsessed with girls and sex (one episode which we read about in the book but which LMM glossed over in the journals, was the resignation of a much loved member of staff when Chester exposed himself to her), his habit of masturbation was so frequent that his brother slept in a tent in the garden rather than share a bedroom with him and as the years went by and his mother expended thousands of dollars on his lawyer training, he flunked his exams, made a rash and secret marriage when he got his girl friend pregnant and later on (fortunately after his mother’s death) he was arrested for fraud and jailed for two years. Pretty ghastly character.  No matter how much Maud tried to hide these facts from herself, she knew deep down that he was a wastrel and his much vaunted love for her was merely because he saw her as the source of comfort and money.

Her death, when it came, was viewed as suicide.  The doctors who came to see her, after she was found dead in bed, both thought so and when her younger son Stuart, himself a doctor, arrived he was ‘motioned towards Maud’s bedside table. Dr Lane told Stuart to “take care” of the things on it and he would take care of the body. Her bedside table held some bottles and a sheet of paper’.   Her possible suicide was kept secret.  Stuart’s medical career would be damaged if his famous mother had killed herself and suicide brought a terrible stigma on the family.  The note which was left was a page numbered 176 which would appear to be a journal entry, but the other pages were missing and it was assumed that Chester took these as these covered her heartbreak over Chester and her fear of his rages.  The entry which has been taken as a suicide note is ambiguous: “My position is too awful to endure and nobody realises it. What an end to a life in which I tried always to do my best in spite of many mistakes”.

Maud was ill when she wrote this, knowing that her life would soon be at an end and she may have just been finishing her entries for her final Journal and was summing up  her feelings at the time of writing.  Easy to feel that this might be a suicide note, but it is not clear. 

We will probably never know and when I came to the end of this wonderful book, I felt a deep sadness for her sense of loss and sorrow.  She has given me and millions of readers so many happy hours reading her books, I still re-read them now and feel the real Maud is in her stories, and know that she had many happy times even if they were those hours she spent in writing where she could close out the harsh reality of her life and just be.

Her journal was her saviour and her best friend and in it she wrote a latter to a future great-great- granddaughter:

“I lived a hundred years before you did, but my blood runs in your veins and I lived and loved and suffered and enjoyed and struggled and toiled just as you do.  I found life good, in spite of everything. May you find it so.  I found that courage and kindness are the two essential things……I hope you’ll be merry and witty and brave and wise, and I hope you’ll say to yourself ‘if great-great-grandmother were alive today, I think I’d like her in spite of her faults”

Well, I do.

Well another rather fraught few weeks which, hopefully, is now at an end. Firstly, my daughter in Australia had to go back to have another procedure as after her first operation a few more cells were discovered. The surgeon said that she was pretty certain they were benign but she wanted them out and, of course, that was sensible but it meant another op and recovery time. Anyway, to cut a long story short, it has been done and all is well with the second recovery.

On top of all this I have had electrical problems which I will not bore you with but meant I did not have a working cooker for a few weeks and this all added to my stress.

So, not much reading done. But I have read some.

I mentioned the new Ann Cleves book and that has been read and, as always, excellent.

Then a new book by one of my favourite crime writers, an American author, Michael Connelly. He has created a detective Harry Bosch and many novels featuring this character and all are excellent. I have read the lot over the last seven or eight years and always look forward to the next. He has allowed Harry, unlike Hercule Poirot, to age and he retires towards the later books but due to the outcry from fans, Connelly then teamed him up with a female detective, Renee Ballard and works cold cases with her. 

But much though I love the Bosch books, I think I veer slightly towards the series The Lincoln Lawyer as just pulling ahead in the favourite stakes.  Michael Haller is Bosch’s half brother though they don’t find this out until they are grown men and bump into each other and so we have a cross over when each of them pop up in the other series. That sounds convoluted but it makes sense believe me.

The first book in the Haller series is the Lincoln Lawyer. A movie was made with Matthew McConaughey as Haller and very good it was too. Over the last few years Netflix has made a series which is excellent. Connelly is executive producer on these and I think because of that they stick closely to the main story line. The latest one The Proving Ground kept me pinned to the sofa. A case against an A1 company, very topical, whose Bot urged a murder. Obviously been well researched and really really quite scary at the thought of what A1 can do.

So if you wish to give these a try, please do but do read them in order if you can.

I am also reading the latest in a series of books by an author T A Williams who I initially discovered a couple of years ago when offered one of his titles for 99p on Amazon. They were romances and I thoroughly enjoyed them. Slightly discombobulated to discover the author was not a pseudonym but was indeed a man but he seemed to be able to enter the mind and thoughts of his female protagonists very well.

He then turned to crime and has written a series of books set in Italy, which he clearly loves as they feature in nearly all of his writing, featuring a retired DCI from Scotland yard who now lives in Italy and has a dog called Oscar.  I am reading the latest, Murder in Venice, and really liking it. I feel they can be classified as Cosy Mysteries which is a genre which true crime writers rather despise but there is nothing cosy about them. Well plotted and yes, amusing in places, but they are worth reading.

T A Williams loves Italian food as well and the descriptions, mmm…….

Then the latest in the Karen Pirie series by Val McDermid which I am finding increasingly irritating. A shame as she is such a good writer and I have read and enjoyed all her books to date.  The reason for my feelings is that she lets her politics come into play and cannot resist taking pot shots throughout the narrative.

Her last book was set during the lockdown and she was quite obsessive about Covid and keeping to the rules etc. Admirable but we did not need to be told every chapter

• She is a supporter of Nicola Sturgeon, former first Minister of Scotland now retired in disgrace. In this book many comments about the police wasting her time “with stupid questions”.  (She had to resign over corruption charges)
• She doesn’t like Trump. Fair enough but leave him out of a Scottish crime novel
• She doesn’t like Nigel Farage. Again fair enough but leave him out of a Scottish crime novel
• Kemi Badenoch, the current leader of the Tory party is called “homophobic”

I used to read a series of novels about DCI Banks by Peter Robinson. They were good. OK the author used to bang on about old rock music but I used to just ignore that. Then came Brexit to which he took exception and the next books published had diatribes about it all. So I packed those in.

I rather object to having politics thrust down my throat when I am reading a story. It is a form of conceit to feel that your readers want to know what you think. I don’t. Same with “Celebrities” banging on about politics. Just because you have an Oscar or a Bafta does not make you qualified to lecture the proles.

OK stopping now because this is one of my things but you get my drift.

So after all this crime I decided I wanted some reality so I decided to re-read a biography of L M Montgomery, she of Anne of Green Gables fame, which I read several years ago.  She had a troubled life so hardly surprising she wrote these wonderful novels for us all. Will report back.

Signing off now.

Last week a friend and I went up to London and, thank goodness, this time there was no strikes in the offing so we were able to get on a bus to Trafalgar Square. From there we walked up the Mall and had grinning selfies with the Palace in the background. We were going to an exhibition at the King’s Gallery – The Age of Elegance. It covered the Edwardian era which is a time in history I love to read about. As the title says, elegant and of course stylish and beautiful. I appreciate that if you were a scullery maid or such it was not so elegant but I still find this period of history fascinating.

So in we went and oh my goodness, so much beauty and all fascinating. Faberge, Cartier, tiaras, pearls diamonds, we just kept going Oh Look Oh Look. Wonderful. I am putting a couple of collages on here to give you an idea of just how sumptuous it all was. And after a visit to the Gift Shop (I bought a Palace tea towel to add a touch of class to my kitchen) we walked back through James Park so beautiful in the autumn sunshine. A great day and we are back up in a week or two to the Cartier Exhibition at the Victoria & Albert and cue even more ooohing and aaahing…..

Just dropping by after my update in which I mentioned Ann Cleeves and her new book The Killing Stones. I have just finished it and it is, as always, excellent and I did not guess the murderer. I thought of somebody completely different.

No I am here because a friend mentioned that the author was signing her book at our local book shop so natch I tore along there and though I already had a copy (the lady in charge of the shop looked a bit cross when I told her I had bought it from You Know Where) that I purchased another copy there and then. Very glad I did as this book had a lovely picture on the pages when the book was closed. The other did not.

Well Ann arrived and was delightful and friendly and posed for pics with everyone as if it was the one thing she had wanted to do all day. So here I am

I will be back again soon as I went to a wonderful exhibition at the King’s Gallery and have loads to say.

I said when I transferred to WordPress that I was going to try and post more regularly and already have lagged behind. I have had a pretty worrying week as my daughter, who lives in Australia, has to have an operation and, being so far away, I have been incredibly worried. However, it seems that it is all going to be straightforward so I have calmed down a bit. I have not done a huge amount of reading but have been out walking which I find a great help to clear my mind.

Over the weekend I was in London and went for a walk in Kew Gardens one of my favourite places. My family live close by and have a membership card so can go in any time they wish so I make sure that I take advantage of this too.

It was a glorious day as you can see and I love these September days when the sun shines and the cold has yet to set it.

I will be back soon and have decided to do a monthly round up of my current and planned reading as I remind myself this is a book blog after all.

So back soon and once again my thanks to all of you who have stayed with me.

Now that the autumn is hear and the nights are drawing in I always find I turn to my great love, VIctorian Literature. In the summer I tend to read lighter books, don’t ask me why, I just do but when the leaves start to fall and the curtains are drawn against the dark, then I turn to my bookshelves.

Some years back one visitor to Random asked what were my favourite books from that genre. I have pulled up an earlier post on this subject and have gone through it to see if there are any additions and/or alterations. On the whole my feelings remain the same so I have decided to republish it with a few minor edits.

The book which started me off was Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and this is pretty near the top of my list. We have a plain heroine who has nothing going for her but is full of determination and spunk. 

There are times in my later readings of this novel when Jane’s determination to be a martyr has grated at times, not least when Mr Rochester wants to buy her new clothes for her wedding and she is determined to stick to her governess grey, though of course I do realise this shows her determination to be true to herself.  Her declaration of equality with Mr Rochester and the right to feel love as he does never fails to make my hair stand on end every time I read it.  The impact on Victorian women when it was published must have been stunning.  Lots of mothers would not allow their daughters to read it in case it gave them ideas.  First read when I was 11 and of course did not understand half of it, further repeated readings make me love it more and more each time.  Various film and TV versions of this book, yet to find one that I think is perfect – loved the one with Toby Stephens a couple of years ago, the sexual tension between him and his Jane leaped off the screen, but the script – too modern – rather let it down. Also there was a very silly wedding scene at the end.

Since then I have watched others, the one with Ciaran Hinds and Samantha Morton was particularly awful but the we had the film with Michael Fassbender as Rochester, Judi Dench as Mrs Fairfax and Mia Wasikowska as Jane. I think it is well night perfect and have watched it many times. What I particularly like is that Jane has a Yorkshire accent, not broad but slight, and this made a refreshing change from earlier versions of films and TV where she has cut glass English.

Middle March by George Eliot is one of the greatest Victorian novels ever written.  Set in the Midlands town of Middlemarch we come to know the lives, thoughts and loves of its inhabitants from the new idealistic Dr Lydgate who thinks he is going to change the world, marries a flighty beauty and gradually watches his idealism fall away, to Dorothea Brooke who marries the Reverend Causabon years older than her and then also has to see her youthful hope and idealism blighted.  I could go on for hours about the cast of characters in this superb novel but then this blog would run over into the week.  A masterpiece.  The BBC did a wonderful adaptation of it back in 1994.  Long unavailable to buy but I had an old DVD and watched it again recently and it has stood up really well .I read Adam Bede for the first time just a couple of years ago and it has come very close to replacing Middlemarch as my favourite Eliot. A trifle hard going at first, mainly because of the local dialect, but gradually this story got a hold of me and I was  unable to put it down.  The story of Adam and his love for the silly empty headed Hetty Sorrell and the ultimate terrible fate that awaits her is gripping and I sat up one night till 2 am to finish it. 

My first Mrs Gaskell, who was a contemporary and great friend of Charlotte Bronte and one of those prolific women Victorian writers who seem to have the knack of running a home, having children and writing in their spare time, wrote many novels and the first one I read was Cranford, the story of a  village largely populated by women and maiden aunts and this book is a delightful portrayal of their daily lives and is full of small things and minutiae. The BBC dramatisation of this some years back was a smash hit and justly so as the acting was of a stratospheric standard.  With Dame Judi Dench, Dame Eileen Atkins, Sir Michael Gambon and other luminaries such as Imelda Staunton and Julia McKenzie, to mention just a few, it could hardly fail.  It is a good starter book for Mrs Gaskell but in no way reflects her grasp of the bigger issues which are portrayed in her larger, greater works such as North and South(a family move from the South to an industrial town in the north and the daughter Margaret finds it difficult to come to terms with the different way of life) until of course a dark, brooding mill owner comes along.  Wives and Daughters is a portrayal of  the search for happiness and different marriages (I think this one might be my favourite Mrs Gaskell).  She has written many others but these will keep you going.    Sir Michael Gambon produced another stunning performance as the Squire in Wives and Daughters and it was North and South which introduced us all, via the TV series, to the utter delight which is Richard Armitage. Again, I have this version bought and kept and the last scene where they meet at a railway station surely has the best kiss ever in a tv series….

We categorise Victorian literature because of the Queen on the throne when these superb books were written but of course there are wonderful American writers of the period who also fall into this category and high on my personal list is Louisa May Alcott.When I was a young girl I adored Little Women and all the other books about the March family.  Her writing can seem somewhat moralistic in tone at times, but we have to remember when she was writing and who her audience was and there is a warmth about them which is impossible to resist.  I still weep buckets when Beth dies.

Frances Hodgson Burnett is one of my favourite American/English authors of this period.  I have discussed The Shuttle and The Making of a Marchioness earlier on Random (I will try and locate where), She may be famous for The Little Princess and the Secret Garden but she had written many adult books and Through One Administration and T Tembaron are really great fun and immensely readable.

I am including EF Benson in my list of Victorian Literature now as his first book Dodo was written in 1893 and  am slipping him in here as I cannot let an opportunity pass to urge anyone who has not read the Mapp and Lucia books to do so.  Some of his other stand alone works such as Michael, Mrs Ames and an Autumn Sowing show that he is not just a comedy writer. These three books show him at his best. Some of his others though are not so good but as he wrote about 90 I think he is allowed a few dodgy ones.

Now we come to Anthony Trollope who I simply love.  There is something so reassuring about his novels. Some of them are big, fat, comfortable books which will keep you going for days, others are slimmer and lighter in content. He has also written shed loads of short stories, some of which are sooo funny.I discovered Trollope about twelve years ago and am so glad that I left it late to find this author as it meant I had many happy years of reading ahead of me and so it has proved.   The Barchester Chronicles are, of course, simply wonderful.  Barchester Towers is the one that most people remember and enjoy the most and I am not about to disagree, but by the time you reach the Last Chronicle of Barset you realise you are in the presence of a master writer.  I think it is one of his finest books telling the story of a poor and proud vicar who is accused of stealing and cashing a cheque which was not his and the events which follow. Mrs Proudie makes her presence felt and the tragedy of her marriage to the Archbishop is quite heartbreaking.    Then the Palliser novels – quite magnificent, my favourite being Phineas Finn. I am absolutely staggered at just how many books AT turned out and I have all of them on my shelves, 50+ and they will keep me going for many a year.

But the man who towers over everyone is Charles Dickens. Worthy scholars and writers have lavished millions of words on this phenomenon so I am going to make no attempt to do so save to say that I first discovered the glory of Dickens when I was about 11 (in fact about the same time I discovered Jane Eyre so that was a good age for me).  We had a junior version of David Copperfield at school which dealt with his childhood only and finished with him finding a happy home with his aunt.  I thought that was an end to the story and was overjoyed when my English teacher told me that there was more.  I got hold of the complete book, read it, loved it and it has been one of my favourites every since.  I have to admit to problems sometimes with Dicken’s so called ‘funny’ characters who I can find irritating, and this put me off reading Pickwick Papers for a long long time as I was not drawn to the likes of Sam Weller. My mistake as when I finally read it I absolutely loved it and found myself sniggering away to myself as I read all the scrapes Mr Pickwick fell into.

My favourite out of all his books, and it is pretty difficult to separate them out, is Bleak House, which I had to read for my A levels at school many moons ago.  Tells story of Jarndyce v Jarndyce, a case in Chancery which has been dragging on for years  and which ruins the lives of everyone it touches.  It is a work of stunning brilliance with one of the most memorable opening paragraphs in all English literature. A year or so ago I reread Great Expectations and it is now fighting for the top spot.

The great thing about literature of this period is that there is so much out there still awaiting my attention.  In the last few years I re-read Cousin Bette by Balzac, Madame Bovary by Flaubert and discovered Zola for the first time when I read Ladies Delight in which I utterly wallowed which I suppose is FrenchVIcLit.  The American novels of this period still await me, Wharton just slips into this period by the skin of her teeth (have read everything she has written but always welcome to re-read), and then we slide effortlessly into the 1900s and 1920s onwards which also hold a fascination for me, bolstered by the publications of Persephone and the earlier Virago green editions. Then I have not even mentioned Dostoevsky or any of the Russian mob – SovLit?

So many books and so little time.   I read and read and read and I know that when I am trying tothink of some final words of wisdom to impart to my relatives when I am about to go to the library in the sky, all I will think of is Oh bugger it I never did get round to reading War and Peace (well actually I did but I was just plucking a title out the air).……

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Off to London today to the theatre. Matinee performance as do not want to stay up too late. Needless to say, this coincides with a Tube strike so I think I shall be doing a lot of walking. Hooray for the new hip! Will blog about it in a day or two