With September rolling around once more, my long summer holiday comes to an end and I am left wondering how the time has gone by so quickly. It’s been a good summer, with a trip to a brilliant music festival, and a fabulous family camping holiday. And, as is my habit, I’ve read some really great books – so great, that I want to share them with as many people as possible.
First of all, I read The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst. This is the kind of modern, literary fiction that I really like. His writing is very precise and observational, dealing with some very emotional issues in a very unsentimental way. This is the second novel by him I’ve read and I look forward to reading some more.
Next, I read a classic that I’ve had on my ‘to read’ list for a long time, The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers. It seemed like an appropriate book to read while camping – though my experience of the great outdoors was rather tame compared to what the characters experience in this novel. There’s a lot of highly technical yachting and navigating references in this novel, which I know nothing about, so it mainly went over my head. But that was fine, as it turns out you don’t need to understand all that jargon to follow what is a cracking plot and thrilling adventure. I’m glad I got round to reading it finally.
After that, I read another from Sebastian Barry’s backlist that I have been working my way through. Annie Dunne is one of his earliest novels and has the family connections that link many of his novels. It’s beautifully written, but rather unsettling and disturbing, not at all a comfortable read. But that’s what Barry is so good at.
That was quite a short novel, so I had finished it before the end of the camping holiday. Luckily, I had picked up another book while we were there – a novel set in Dorset, bought in Dorchester while we were on holiday in Dorset. It’s called The Whalebone Theatre, a debut novel from an author called Joanna Quinn. The Dorchester branch of Waterstone’s were promoting it pretty heavily, and while I was looking at it in the shop, a bookseller came over to tell me how good it was. That was the kind of thing I used to do when I was a bookseller, so of course I had to buy it. And she was right, it is really good. It’s the story of a family, based around their Dorchester estate between the years 1919 and 1945, a mixture of the unusual and eccentric, along with the events that you would expect to happen to a family at that period of the Twentieth Century. I hope Quinn has other work like this to come – I shall watch out for them. I would also say that I think my own writing style and subject matter are quite similar to this, so it gives me hope that publishers are looking for the kind of work that I am producing.
This got me through the camping holiday, and after we got home, I sped through Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library. This novel is all about the eternal question what if? Imagine if you got to see how your life would have turned out if you had made different choices. Although this is really a fantasy novel, it offers some thought-provoking ideas. I think I’ll be recommending this book to the teenagers I work with, to get them thinking philosophically about their futures.
Five books that I never read before – that is a productive summer for me. It’s very satisfying to read new novels. However, I then put aside the new material and launched myself into a rereading of The Lord of the Rings. I have read it twice before.- once when I was a student, and then for the second time prior to the release of the Peter Jackson films. And then I watched all the films and loved them too. However, the film adaptations also made me realise that there had been chunks of the book that I read and really not understood, even after reading them two times. It was the films that finally explained some parts of the novel that had mystified me. And yet I had completely loved the books; I’m talking ugly crying at the end every time, so obviously, my failure to follow every detail had not been a hinderance to me. But it is one of the few times when I would recommend watching the films before reading the book. This would usually be heresy to me – the book is ALWAYS better than the film. However, on this occasion, I would say that The Lord of the Rings is so dense and complex, so packed with histories, geographies, lore and legend that it can get very confusing, and watching the films condenses all this into something much more manageable. But I still recommend reading the book, because like all books, the extra detail is so satisfying. And now I know what’s going on, I’m enjoying even more!
All this reading, and there has still been time for some work on my own fiction. In the last week, I have started rereading the first draft of the novel I finished earlier this year. I’ve been letting it sit for a few months, knowing that the considerable amount of revision it needs will be more objective after a complete break from it. However, now seemed like a good time to make a start, beginning with a complete read through, noting down my thoughts chapter by chapter. So far so good – but I’ll tell you more about that next time.
M J Schofield 