Book blogging

This is Book Blogger Appreciation Week!
Since I am not a book blogger, I have not signed up to participate, but I am a great supporter of book bloggers. Linking from book blogger to book blogger is one of my favourite ways of wasting an afternoon or an evening when the mind is tired and the body is weak. I have been a regular visitor to Dove Grey Reader's blog (dovegreyreader.typepad.com) for years and years. When blogging was just emerging as an indoor sport in Britain, lagging a few years behind the States, I read a newspaper article condemning these new upstarts who thought they could be arts critics. The article was written by a book critic, so Dove Grey was singled out, and when she was described as a quilter and a knitter, I knew I had to check her out. All those snooty journalists have had to pull in their horns and hope to keep their jobs these days. Dove Grey is now a celebrity -- courted by authors, publishers, festivals -- and we all love her because her head has never been turned around by the recognition. She has retired from her day job as a visiting nurse for the NHS in rural Devon (really, how did she have time for everything?), and now has more time for knitting and quilting, and for the hundreds of books she reads every year. (Does she sleep?) Starting with Dove Grey, I can link to dozens of other book blogs, and from those to dozens of others, and on and on.

Except for Dove Grey, I don't follow any other book bloggers regularly. I am not a steady reader of newspaper "professional" reviews either. The literary mafias here and in the States get it wrong so often, that I almost shy away from the the hot new literary books and the prize winners too. I have yet to find anyone who felt Kiran Desai's Inheritance of Loss was worth the inordinate amount of time it took to read, much less the Booker Prize it won. I read it for a book group, and we all wanted to like it because her mother, the writer Anita Desai, had been a book group guest a few year's before, and she was such a lovely woman and so proud of her daughter's writing career. Once one member of the book group (probably me because I am usually the contrarian) admitted to hating the book, everyone admitted to skimming, stopping at page 50, or unhappily slogging through. I seem to have more of a problem with highly championed books than most people. For example, I hated Brick Lane -- and Monica Ali has not had much success post-Brick Lane; Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture has such a stupid premise and ending, it shouldn't have been in the running for prizes, much less won the Costa; The Suspicions of Mr Whicher was just plain boring once you got through the history of detection and realised there was no story; and the Orange Prize winner last year was the ridiculous The Road Home whose author Rose Tremain is way overrated if you ask me, talk about a writer with no ear for dialogue. Saturday by Ian McEwan is without any shadow of a doubt, the worst book ever written (and "you don't have to take my word for it," as LeVar Burton used to say on Reading Rainbow, but you can take John Banville's [whose Booker winning The Sea, I did very much like] word for it in the NYRB) by an established author who has written good books (Enduring Love) and great books (Atonement). In my defense, I thought The Road, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and The White Tiger were all great reads and had important points to make, so I am not a complete philistine when it comes to award winning, best sellers.

What I do find fascinating when I page through book blogs is the inconsistency of opinions that match my own critical opinions. This came as a shock to me because up until I moved to London, I almost never discussed books and opinions on books with anyone else. I was not in a book group, as the only book group I had ever heard of in Hingham never asked me to join them (although with typical Hingham inhospitality, I was occasionally asked for suggestions!); the internet hadn't discovered organised social networking; friendly discussions never included opinions on books. When I read a book, the opinion I formed was mine and rarely, if ever, shared. It is hard to imagine that life now. The book group was the first activity I joined when I was settled in London. Authors speak all over London all the time, including at the Waterstones here in Hampstead, just up the street. There isn't a living author I can't see and hear -- and question if I were brave (but I am not) -- with only the least effort of keeping track of perhaps a dozen events calendars, and paying a few pounds, which at bookstores is usually refunded if you buy the book at the reading. Some of the world's most popular writers have been guests at my book groups: Tracy Chevalier, the sorely missed Carol Shields, Esther Freud, among others. When I moved to London, reading turned from being private and personal to public and social. I discuss books at book groups of course, but I also discuss books while quilting and knitting with friends, comparing what our various book groups are liking and disliking. And if a live person is not available for an opinion, the book bloggers always are. I really cannot ever imagine going back to a world where reading is a private matter. When my opinions became a shared event, I was struck by the fact someone could agree with me wholly on one book, and disagree just as wholly on the next book. At first, I couldn't understand how that could be, but of course, everyone enters a book with their own life experiences and biases shaping what the author is serving up on the page. What may be tosh to me, will resonate with my opposite. The joy of book groups and book blogs is the multitude of individual personal insights that can make a book come alive. Too often professional critics want to pronounce on how we should feel about a particular work based on some arcane literary standard, hence the overhyped disappointments we may read and the overlooked gems that are invisible. Of course some of the biggest successes these days are the "word-of-mouth" bestsellers that emerge from the vast sea of readers who pass recommendations through the web of book groups and book bloggers.

Those with a discerning eye will notice that March has moved from reading to read on the lists to the right. Another book off The Book Pile, bought at the Library book sale two years ago, and ready to be returned for resale this year. March won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2006. The narrative is related in the voice of Mr March, the father of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, as he recounts his early life and his terrible experiences as a chaplain in the American Civil War. The voice shifts to Marmee March, when she hurries to Washington to care for her gravely ill husband. The story is well done enveloping the Marches -- using Bronson Alcott as a model for Mr March -- in the intellectual and abolitionist life of the Concord, Massachusetts inhabited by Thoreau, Emerson, and a cameo of Hawthorne. Mr March's Civil War includes a long section on the Union's attempt to employ "contraband" -- which would be the homeless slaves about to be emancipated -- in model agriculture schemes. An element of the war that I certainly knew nothing about. March was a good read.

Geraldine Brooks's first novel, Year of Wonder, was set in the Derbyshire village of Eyam, famous for quarantining itself to prevent the plague from spreading through the shire during the late 17th century. That was also a very good read. I had read a long time ago Jill Paton Walsh's YA novel A Parcel of Patterns on the same subject. The plague is thought to have arrived in Eyam with a postal delivery from London where the final round of plague was petering out. A disturbing cautionary tale as we wait to see what will happen with our Swine Flu pandemic in the months to come. Brooks's most recent novel, People of the Book, was interesting, but ultimately not satisfying. The book of the title is the Sarajevo Haggadah, saved again during the most recent bombardment of Sarajevo by a librarian. The novel traces the real, when known, and invented history of the book back to the medieval clerk who lettered the manuscript. The story is told through a series of historical vignettes, interspersed with a present day story of the young woman who has been hired to restore the book for display in a new museum. I read the book for a book group and was surprised at how many people disliked the book. I disliked the book restorer, a young woman, but chosen for this important job because of her professional skills and training under the finest craftsmen, yet she acted like an immature teenager throughout, and I thought that did not ring true as a character. I did, however, like the historical vignettes, and that was the part with which others found fault. So once again, you just never know what to expect.

Now I am on to C.P. Snow's The Masters for next week's book group.