Tangential

I'm feeling in the mood for a little carving and block-printing session. The inky muse is sitting on my shoulder.

This must have been because I sorted out my workroom yesterday and piled up all my lovely white and creamy-calico cottons, plus some of the brights I dyed a few months back.

We'll see what eventuates!

:: This is the papercut picture I cut for Tracey, way over in Far North Queensland. As well as bloggers, we are longtime Scrabble buddies on facebook, and while we were chatting during one of our games (she probably whipped my arse as usual), we organised a swap: a papercut for some of Tracey's brilliant quilting.

Tracey started the ball rolling by quilting this quilt I'd made for a cousin's first baby in England, and she did an amazingly beautiful job ...

... all swirls and stars. Gorgeous! I'm expecting to hear from Brighton any day now to say the quilt has arrived, and that baby Jasmine will stay warm and cosy beneath it during the rest of their Arctic winter. Brrr!

:: I'm reading Someone at a Distance, by Dorothy Whipple. It's a beautiful Persephone edition I bought in Powell's bookstore in Portland, Oregon — isn't that an exquisite cover?

(I went mad in there - imagine, a bookstore starts in a shop on a corner, then it buys and expands into the shop next door, and then the shop round the corner ... and eventually it takes up an entire city block, on all levels; a rabbit warren of books ... sigh!)

Whipple (1893-1966) is a brilliant writer, subtle and fluent, with a perceptive eye for characters. She says a lot by understatement and quiet observation — admirable.

Here in Australia, we haven't heard of her very much, if at all, but I recall listening to a few of her short stories being read by English luminaries through the BBC Radio 4 website, and was blown away by her story-telling.

Someone at a Distance, set just after the end of the war in the early 1950s, is about a warm, loving, happy family and the effect of the arrival in their midst of a cold-as-ice, hard-as-nails French girl, who is to be a paid companion to the family matriarch.

It's fabulous. As someone on the back-cover blurb says, Whipple is the 'literary heir to Mrs Gaskell'.

:: I'm off now to carve some rubber.

Reading through egg yolkThe pic above is of a tiny corner of Powell's, the amazing, vast bookshop that takes up an entire city block in Portland, Oregon. This is just the fiction by authors whose names start with C. They stack new books right in there with used ones and different editions. It's wonderful.
:: I'm crook as a dog at the mo — just a head cold, but yucky. I remind myself of that passage in Bonfire of the Vanities where Wolfe describes someone with a hangover as having egg yolks inside his skull. Eeyew. But accurate.
It's not the sort of condition in which to take cold pills and go to bed with sore nose, rheumy eyes and aching teeth, head and neck to woozily read poet Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face.
But this is really very good; a treatise on self-esteem, image and the nature of beauty, in which she also documents dozens of operations, starting with having a lot of her jawbone removed when she was nine, followed by almost two years of chemotherapy, and radiation. In all, she had 38 operations through the rest of her life, many of them vain attempts to re-construct the part of her face that was missing.
I finished it quickly and then moved on to what is really its companion book, Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty.
I'm a great fan of Patchett's Bel Canto, and I have two other of her novels in my TBR bookcase.
I bought the Grealy book and T&B at Powell's, intrigued by a notice staff had stuck to the shelf explaining that Patchett and Grealy had been very close friends, and that Patchett had written her book after Grealy died a few years ago.
This is the story of their friendship through college, their struggling to become writers, and Grealy's obsession with being found lovable.
I don't have enough brain power or energy to say much more about these two volumes, other than to recommend them as fascinating reading. Grealy wrote with great elegance and surprising detachment about how she dealt with what she went through — not just the incredible pain, but also the desire to 'put on a brave face' and the psychological effects of all that. It's not an exercise in self-sympathy by any means.
Read them both when you're feeling hale and hearty!

On isolation I watched a great documentary about Annie Proulx last night. It was a few years old, and in it she was researching and writing That Old Ace in the Hole, which I think was published in 2003. It was a fascinating documentary, though i confess I haven't read anything of hers since Postcards, which I didn't like nearly as much as The Shipping News, which remains one of my favourite novels.
Anyway, the program told of Annie's great love of driving herself all over the US, and how she lived in the Panhandle areas of Texas, in a little house all by herself, to research the hog farms and rural environment of this largely neglected part of the US for Aces in the Hole. And then, to write her book, she took herself off home, briefly, to her house in Wyoming, where she lives way out in the sticks so she can ski in winter.
There, she organised all her research material, and eventually took off again for her other house in a tiny little seaside village in Newfoundland.
All of which brought to mind our recent visit to Ghost Ranch, in northern New Mexico. On two or three hectares in the middle of this huge ranch, Georgia O'Keeffe had a low-slung adobe house, Rancho de los Burros, in which she lived off and on from the 1940s, in contented and productive solitude.
Her husband, Arthur Stieglitz, remained in New York, holding showings of her paintings, pushing up her profile and her prices. You can visit Ghost Ranch and stand on spots that must have been darned close to the actual places O'Keeffe set up her easel to paint some of her landscapes. But unfortunately, you cannot visit her house, which remains private and inaccessible — though you can catch a glimpse of it from the track. (If you click on the pic, you'll get a bigger image.) Well, I was enchanted by all this, and in raptures over the desert landscape. I joked to David that this would be a perfect set-up for us. I could live out here, painting and working in the beautiful wilderness, while he could live in some city somewhere, doing amazing PR for his wife and organising fabulous exhibitions of her work. Just the ticket.
But then I got thinking about the solitude. The place is remote even today. In O'Keeffe's day, getting into Santa Fe, which is about 95 kilometres away, or Taos, almost the same distance, would have been major undertakings on dirt roads in slow vehicles.
She had no electricity at her house, either.
I could get by without TV and computer, and maybe even radio, so long as I had the means to listen to music or something.
O'Keeffe had occasional help, and visitors and even guests, and the main ranch house was only about a a couple of kilometres away.
But those evenings must have been very long and quiet.
I don't think I could have hacked it — and even if my set-up was more like Annie Proulx's, with electricity, and connections to the outside world, I'd still find that solitary life unsettling, I think.

Booking through Thursday [Another pic from my daughter's recent hike in Utah.]

This week's question:

Quick! It’s an emergency! You just got an urgent call about a family emergency and had to rush to the airport with barely time to grab your wallet and your passport. But now, you’re stuck at the airport with nothing to read. What do you do?

And, no, you did NOT have time to grab your bookbag, or the book next to your bed. You were ... grocery shopping when you got the call and have nothing with you but your wallet and your passport (which you fortuitously brought with you in case they asked for ID in the ethnic food aisle). This is hypothetical, remember ...

First, I have to say, if you're flying Qantas, you don't need anything. The in-flight entertainment system, with TV and movies on demand, is just brilliant. Shameless patriotic plug!
But to answer this BTT, I'd buy three or four magazines on home decor, interiors, that sort of thing. Magazines with good-looking pictures and non-demanding text.
I just can't read books on planes, not even on the long flights to and from Australia, which can be up to 15 hours. I used to take books in my carry-on bag, but don't bother any more.
My kids gave me an iPod shuffle for my birthday last year — one of those neat ones with the clip — and I treated myself to some noise-cancelling headphones. So I plug in and drift off.
But I guess I wouldn't have that with me at the supermarket, would I? Or if I did, it wouldn't be charged ... and my headphones would be at home ...

PS (added later): I'd love to be able to knit on board. So soothing, so therapeutic. It's a shame my little bamboo dpns are seen as potential weapons. C'est la guerre. Sigh

Booking through Thursday

[Thought you'd all enjoy this pic, taken by my daughter Lily, of one of her college friends in Canyonlands National Park, south-east Utah, during spring break.]

This week it's all about seasons:

Do your reading habits change in the spring? Do you read gardening books? Even if you don't have a garden? More light fiction than during the winter? Less? Travel books? Light paperbacks you can stick in a knapsack? Or do you pretty much read the same kinds of things in the spring as you do the rest of the year?

I'm unaware of changing my reading habits in the spring, as, apart from my childhood in England, I always seem to have lived somewhere where there are really only two seasons: summer and not summer.
That's not to say there isn't evidence of spring here in San Diego, or that we didn't recognise spring in Western Australia. But when it's sunny all year, what's the fuss?
Here, in SD, there just isn't that sense of wonder after recovering from — and having survived — a winter immersed in snow, or even really icy-cold temperatures and weeks of rain.
Winter here is not so very different from summer, just a bit colder.
And in Western Australia, where spring comes towards the end of the year, in the crazy frenzy of the lead-up to Christmas, it causes mixed feelings in me: sure it's a wonderful warm growing season, but at the same time it's the precursor to the long hot summer, which is mostly something to be endured.
For me, the joy there is all about autumn, the longest time from the start of summer and the best possible weather.
So to get back to the point, no! I'm not reading anything different at all in spring!

Booking through Thursday
We're pondering this today:

I’ve always wondered what other people do when they come across a word/phrase that they’ve never heard before. I mean, do they jot it down on paper so they can look it up later, or do they stop reading to look it up on the dictionary/google it or do they just continue reading and forget about the word?

Have to be a bit priggish here and say that I don't often come across words or phrases I don't know. That is, apart from scientific, medical or other theoretical terminology — I'm usually a fiction reader, though, so this is a rare encounter.
But whenever I do hit the unknown, I'll look it up immediately, using the dictionary first, or my husband, and then maybe Mr Google.
That is, unless I'm reading in bed, when my husband is my first point of reference, especially for queries about history, poetry or the Black Death — and that way, he's often so intrigued that he'll willingly get out of bed to find the necessary reference book.

I must add, however, that I am easily enraged befuddled by the sort of communication usually attempted — in vain — by 'modern' young teachers with a tight grasp on educational theory and only a very slim grasp on English; or by a wannabe conceptual artist and indeed, his/her wannabe conceptual art critic; or by a pompous book reviewer; or by a government worker — but don't get me started on babble-speak ... please.

:: Added later: And what about words we read that we know the author (and editor and proofreaders) has got entirely wrong and obviously doesn't know?
I'm so sick of seeing 'enormity' used instead of 'enormousness', when 'enormity' has nothing to do with size ... and 'lay' instead of 'lie' ... bet you know a whole lot more!

Book haul #1
So these were the wonders I picked up on the first of my recent trips to Australia, in February.
The secondhand ones are all from a great bookstore in Albany. It wasn't cheap, but it was well organised with a great selection of titles. I could have spent a fortune there, but fortunately I had to think about the weight of my suitcase for the trip back to the US.
I picked up some great Australian works: a secondhand copy of Land's Edge by our Tim Winton, which I have in store back home but wanted to read again; Grace by Robert Drewe and a volume of short stories edited by him; Dislocations and The Ivory Swing, both secondhand and both by Janette Turner Hospital, whom I only recently discovered when I read Due Preparations for the Plague.
In the 'rest of the world' category, all secondhand, I have three old Virago editions: The Curate's Wife by EH White, Company Parade by Storm Jameson, and The Lost Traveller by Antonia White. Then there's The Winter Queen, by Boris Akunin, which I thought would do nicely for the Russian Reading Challenge that I'm supposed to be reading for this year. I also picked up The Flight of the Maidens by Jane Gardam, whose work I like, and Remember Me by Trezza Azzopardi, because it's set in a fictional version of my old UK hometown of Norwich. I bought the Tracy Chevalier, Falling Angels, because she's heartily recommended in many of the book blogs I read.
On my second trip to Australia, I went with hardly anything in my suitcase, so I brought back an even bigger pile of books, all of them secondhand. But that's for another day!

Booking through Thursday
This week's fabulous topic, which has provided a whole morning's chat in our kitchen:

• When somebody mentions “literature,” what’s the first thing you think of? (Dickens? Tolstoy? Shakespeare?)
• Do you read “literature” (however you define it) for pleasure? Or is it something that you read only when you must?

The very word, literature, conjures up an instant image of words on a page. Any words, any page; not just the classics, or venerable volumes gathering dust. It's anything written, from Harlequin romances to lofty esoterica; fiction and fact.
And there's bad literature and good literature — otherwise, what is the point of literary criticism?
I noticed in Australia that one of the chain bookstores has a section classified as 'literary fiction', separate from its 'popular fiction', a weirdly judgmental form of categorisation. And who decides what works go in what section?
Similarly judgmental is the primary definition of literature in our Australian national dictionary (the Macquarie, which I neither like nor admire): 1. writings in which expression and form, in connection with ideas of permanent and universal interest, are characteristic or essential features, as poetry, romance, history, biography, essays, etc.; belles-lettres.
I disagree. Literature, to me, is as universal and inclusive as the word 'movies'. There are classics, blockbusters, overnight sensations, absolute dross and all manner of stuff that falls in between.
Some of it is fabulous and will forever shine light on the world. A lot of it has a less permanent glow. Some of it is dark, base matter that is best left in the dirt, though it may glitter a bit if you work at it.
But it's all literature.

Booking through Thursday
This week's question:

While acknowledging that we can’t judge books by their covers, how much does the design of a book affect your reading enjoyment? Hardcover vs. softcover? Trade paperback v mass-market paperback? Font? Illustrations? Etc.?

It doesn't really worry me. So long as it doesn't have a tightly-glued spine or pages with narrow margins and tiny type, I can't say the design of a book affects my choice, or my enjoyment of it, very much at all.
Which is not to say that I don't relish a well-designed book, with a gorgeous font (Bodoni, or Bembo, or any of the Garamond family) on luscious stock, perhaps with deckle edges and a heavy, textured paper dust jacket. Yum-oh!
Frankly, my enjoyment is affected much more by bad editing, and mistakes in grammar or spelling. Heebie-jeebies!
My sister-in-law told me once of someone she knew (in publishing, I think) who flatly refused to buy any book that had embossed type on its cover. He'd shut his eyes and run his fingers over the cover and if there was any hint of raised type, he'd reject it. There's a good Aussie word for that and it begins with w.
In fact, there are several words for that ...

Booking through Thursday
This week's question:

You’ve just reached the end of a book . . .
what do you do now? Savor and muse over the book? Dive right into the next one?
Go take the dog for a walk, the kids to the park, before even thinking about the
next book you’re going to read? What?

Hmmm. I'm a definite diver.
These days, I have a to-be-read pile, and since I've discovered Australian second-hand bookshops in a big way (still way more expensive than amazon etc, but with lots of UK titles as well), I've got a lot waiting for me. So, by the time I get to the end of a book, no matter how good it is, I've already started working out what I'll move on to next. And then it's done in an instant.
I also find that while I'm reading one book, I can still mull over something I read recently, so there's no need for any hiatus. Just a big breath and dive right in.

Excellent women, part 1
When we were in our early thirties and had been reformed smokers for several years (I quit on September 6 1983), David and I amused ourselves one night — when we were missing the after-dinner light-up — by saying that when we turned sixty, if we were still hale and hearty, we'd take up cigarettes again.
Sixty seemed such a long way off then, and the sort of age when decrepitude and senility were just around the corner anyway, so seeing out our remaining few years with a hacking cough and an antisocial smell about us seemed an okay way to go. Of course, now we're in our fifties, sixty is fast approaching and hey! We'll be old! Isn't that strange? I , for one, am still waiting to think of myself as a grown-up ...
Being about to turn sixty is what prompts Maria Sharpe, the engaging heroine of Virginia Ironside's fun book, No! I don't Want to Join a Bookclub, to start a diary.
While Maria embraces her age with mixed reactions, the desire to remain 'young-at-heart', or to take up a new lover or weird pastimes is not among them. Instead, feeling mature, confident, and endowed with experience and intelligence befitting her years, she looks forward to relaxing into her old age with acceptance.

'The great thing about age,' said the therapist [at a dinner party with Maria and friends] ... is that it's never too late. You can do so many things. Take an Open University degree, go bungee-jumping, learn a new language ...'
'But it is too late!' I argued. 'That's what's so great about being old. You no longer have to think about going to university, or go bungee-jumping! It's a huge release! I've been feeling guilty about not learning another language for most of my adult life. At last I find that now, being old, I don't have to! There aren't enough years to speak it. It'd be pointless!'

'... I find, approaching sixty, that the real pleasure is that so many things are impossible ...'

Of course, there are drawbacks to being old. Like Maria, we have to learn to deal with the infirmity and eventual deaths of friends and others who have been close to us all our lives. But this can be balanced by the joy of grandchildren and a brand-new phase of family-hood.
I've loved Virginia Ironside ever since I read her columns when I was a teenager in England and envied her that extraordinary name - so strong-sounding! Last year, when I shouted myself to a subscription to the Oldie, I was delighted to find her name among those of this UK magazine's other illustrious columnists and regular contributors.
This is a crisp, funny book that is sentimental at times without ever resorting to the maudlin or wussy. Maria is acerbic, intelligent, a warm and loyal friend, and an all-round excellent woman. Recommended.

Booking through Thursday
This week's question:

You should have seen this one coming … Who is your favorite male lead character? And why?

Well, there are any number of male equivalents of the sort of female character I like (smart, gsoh, ddf, fta, ld/nd, n/s, w/own teeth and hair*).
Nominees could include Mr Darcy, Gandalph, and the guy who gets the girl in A Suitable Boy. But there is one who stands tall, head and shoulders above the rest: Atticus Finch.
He's a thoroughly good man, fits all the above criteria, seems ever-so-slightly vulnerable for all his strength and character, and looks like Gregory Peck.


* In personal ad shorthand: smart; good sense of humour; drug and disease free; likes fun, travel and adventure; light drinker/non drinker; non smoker; with own teeth and hair.

Due Preparations for the Plague
I'm ashamed to say I'd never heard of Janet Turner Hospital before I found this amazing novel in a bookshop in Perth, while I was grabbing a few Australian books to bring home to the US. Now I'm counting my blessings at all the books of hers I have yet to read.
JTH lives in the US — she's a professor of English at the University of South Carolina — though she was born in Melbourne, brought up in Brisbane and still considers herself a Queenslander.
Due Preparations for the Plague is one of the most gripping novels I've read in years, a very intelligent psychological thriller that is as tautly written as it is tense to read. While the main action takes place over five uncomfortable, claustrophobic days in 1987 — when a terrorist group hijacks an Air France flight from Paris to New York — the narrative shifts and swings dizzyingly through time, location and from person to person, at times as bewildering for the reader as its ghastly events are for the characters involved. And on top of that is the question of who can be trusted, and who's watching whom ...
Like the plague of the title (borrowed from Defoe), terrorism and war are inevitable occurrences, yet how can we ever be ready for them, let alone come to terms with them?
The terrorists are persuaded to let all the children off the Air France plane: 'Passengers reach out to touch and caress as the little ones are pushed down the aisles.' We see them in 1987 and again in 2000, once they've 'grown' from damaged, tortured youngsters into damaged, tortured adults unable to get past the cataclysm that so shaped their lives. They keep in touch via the internet and try to piece together any information about the hijacking they can lay their hands on, in the hope of healing/catharsis/redemption. Or an understanding, at the very least.
But can the truth make any difference to them? As kids, their release from the plane inspired high hopes of a happy outcome for all those left on board. And as adults, they're still clinging naively to hope.
In this novel, published in 2003, two years after 9/11, JTH makes incisive observations about both sides in this drama and draws chilling parallels between American intelligence operatives and the terrorists. CIA recruits, for example, are told by their instructor:
'In our profession (making the world safe for stability, as we like to say; and sometimes, relishing our own esoteric wit, making the world safe for moral systems) it is a given that chaos is all; that order is not only arbitrary but evanescent, and that it is the task of a small strong circle of like-minded people to establish and guard it. Exactly which system of order we sustain — morally and politically speaking — is immaterial. We support the system most likely to stay in place.
'Hence our dilemma. I am not speaking here of personal disintegration, or of that futile and panicked attempt to withdraw from the field ... This is not a field from which you can retire.
' ... Retirement from this career is not an option. We keep your soul in an escrow account. Take note: of the twenty of you in this room, the creme de la creme who have made the cut and registered for this course, nine of you will leave us before the end through one of the two trapdoors I just named. The wages of sin in the Intelligence community are erasure. I know you understand this. If you did not, you would not have reached this class.'
It's suicide on both sides of the equation, then.
JTH sprinkles the text with quotations from all manner of sources and references to others throughout history who were tainted by 'the madness of true believers'. Shakespeare, the Bible, Boccaccio, Defoe, Buddha, the Ancient Greeks and a host of others all get a look-in in this crackerjack read.
Thoroughly recommended.

Booking through Thursday

Who is your favorite female lead character? And why? (And yes, of course, you can name more than one . . . I always have trouble narrowing down these things to one name, why should I force you to?)

I don't know of a female character whom I could name as my perennial favourite ... there's always Elizabeth Bennett, I guess, and lots of people will think of her first. And I imagine the 'spirited' one from Little Women - Jo? - will get a few votes as well.
I get right into books I enjoy, and fall for many of the characters straight away. But it will all be over in a flash as I move on to the next book. It's hard to pick the most outstanding. So many books, so many great people to meet!
For example, while I was recently reading Barbara Pym's Excellent Women, set in post-war Britain, I thought her lead (Mildred? Winifred? I don't have the book with me right now) was a great character: strong and principled, with warmth and great wit, plus a healthy dollop of cynicism and a self-deprecating sense of humour.
Just like the character of Marie Sharpe in Virginia Ironside's No, I Don't Want to Join a Book Club, which I read just a few days ago.
I suppose my answer is that I like a certain type of female lead more than any one particular fictional female.

Booking through Thursday
This week's question:

All other things (like price and storage space) being equal, given a choice in a perfect world, would you rather have paperbacks in your library? Or hardcovers? And why?

Hardbacks are so much more expensive and cumbersome ... so perhaps I lean more towards paperbacks. They're lighter, cheaper, usually smaller (so they don't need extra headspace on shelves), and soften up as you read deeper into them, so they become more comfortable.
I'd rather go to bed with a paperback.
I can get a bit anal about any hardcovers I own, making sure their dustcovers remain neat and tidy, and that they are stored correctly.
Paperbacks are far less formal, more like old friends than old relatives!

Booking through Thursday
This week's question:

Have you ever fallen out of love with a favorite author? Was the last book you read by the author so bad, you broke up with them and haven’t read their work since? Could they ever lure you back?

I've been thinking hard about this one, and the only books that spring to mind are the sort of series like Lee Child's and his ilk. Oh - and Carl Hiaasen. They can be funny, and fast and entertaining reads, until you crack the formula, and then ... yawn.
I can almost forgive Hiaasen, as he's at least on a mission to draw attention to the over-development and unscrupulous exploitation of his beloved Florida. But after four or five, I simply cannot be bothered any more.
I have broken up with other writers only temporarily. I'll give them a little breathing space, and I'll see other people, but I'll return to them eventually.
Such as Minette Walters. I did get a little bit tired of her books after a while, though not so tired that I wouldn't read her again. She does great characters.
Same with Ian Rankin - only because his books are so gritty and occasionally bleak that you have to be of a robust disposition to read a lot of them one after the other. But I so admire his writing, and always know that whatever I pick up of his, I'll finish.

Booking through Thursday
This week's question:

Sometimes I find eccentric characters quirky and fun, other times I find them too unbelievable and annoying. What are some of the more outrageous characters you’ve read, and how do you feel about them?

I'm usually drawn to weird and eccentric characters in life — they're often much more fun than the bland and boring! — so I'm usually quite happy reading about them.
And, it can be fun, sometimes, to exist vicariously though characters who show more intellect, daring, nerve, talent and just all-round general gorgeousness than we may do ourselves: that's fiction for you!
What makes eccentric characters irritating is when they are badly drawn and totally unconvincing, and when you can't believe in them.
I have to whinge, therefore, about the utterly, utterly ridiculous character of Claire in Diana Gabaldon's hit, Outlander. She's a nineteen-forties military nurse (and unbelievably sexually liberated) who is suddenly whisked back in time to the 1740s; she's married (in her own time) but still falls in love with a brutish eighteenth-century lout; marries him as well; lets him beat the living daylights out of her and then says, meekly, 'Well, I supposed I deserved it really!' At that point, that book hit the bedroom wall. It's actually one I am ashamed to say I even started.
More recently, I was outraged by the character of Ali in Yasmin Crowther's Saffron Kitchen. He's a simple peasant boy living in an Iranian village way beyond the black stump in the 1960s and '70s, and yet he teaches himself English by listening to the radio with a dictionary — presumably Farsi-English — on his lap. And, to cap it off, he spouts Matthew Arnold!

Booking through Thursday

What’s your favorite book that nobody else has heard of? You know, not Little Women or Huckleberry Finn, not the latest best-seller . . . whether they’ve read them or not, everybody “knows” those books. I’m talking about the best book that, when you tell people that you love it, they go, “Huh? Never heard of it?”

:: Since 1966-67, when we read Flora Thompson's Lark Rise to Candleford in English class at school, I've always thought that no-one but my fellow students had ever heard of it. Shows how much I know: the TV series is now screening on English telly. I so loved this book, even after wading through it in school, and I've always owned a copy.

:: I'm always surprised when I get a strange querying look in response to mention of the short stories of Saki, the pen name of H.H. Munro. A boyfriend introduced me to Saki in the 1970s, and he's been in my collection ever since. These are brilliant, witty and often acerbic pieces, many of them satirising Edwardian life. They're full of eccentricities, bizarre happenings and weird characters — I just love them. Munro died aged 45 in 1916.

:: I'm going to take this opportunity to mention Rhubarb, by Craig Silvey — an absolute jewel of a book that hardy anyone outside of Western Australia will have ever heard of. It's a big-hearted story — a love story, in fact — about a traumatised blind girl, her seeing-eye dog, and an agoraphobic cello player.
Had this book been written anywhere else but in Perth, or set so firmly in Fremantle, Perth's port city on the Indian Ocean, it would have been a worldwide hit. I'm cheered to see amazon.com lists it — can I persuade some of you to try it?

Booking through Thursday
This week's question:

How much do reviews (good and bad) affect your choice of reading? If you see a bad review of a book you wanted to read, do you still read it? If you see a good review of a book you’re sure you won’t like, do you change your mind and give the book a try?

Reviews do have some effect on my reading choices, but I don't rely on them alone.
Nor do I read them religiously — there wouldn't be enough time to read the books if I did. My main sources are the LA Times and the NY Times online (amazing, just amazing), and the NY Review of Books which is delivered and sits in a pile by my bed for slow dipping and holiday reading.
I'll occasionally look at some of the readers' comments on amazon.com — that can be a lot of fun, once you wade through all the reviews that are nine-tenths synopses and one-tenth 'it was a very good book ...'.
A review is no guarantee of a book's chemistry with me, but it's a good starting point.
I buy a lot of books according to my own criteria, and some according to recommendations that may or may not include reviews.
Once I've read a review of a book I'm interested in — good or bad — I'll probably try to gauge any buzz about it among my friends whose tastes I trust. Nowadays, that includes the book blogs I read. Then I'll mull over it in the bookshop, if it's there.
Usually, I'll trust my own instincts about authors I respect. For example, On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan's latest, is getting mixed reviews that tend towards the negative, but I'll probably buy it anyway. I like him.
I'm not the sort of reader who buys the latest releases. I often come to books several years after most people have read them. Occasionally, if I remember there being a fuss about any particular title I've read, I'll search out the old reviews to see if my opinions and the reviewers' correspond.

A certain charm
This is such an unusual book: a pictorial monologue about a year in author/illustrator Maira Kalman's life, in which she tackles issues like life, death, family, history, travel, food and all the big philosophical questions of existence.
It has more than 300 pages, almost all of them with quirky Magritte-style illustrations that are often as humorous and charming as the text.
Maira Kalman's Jewish family fled Russia after the revolution and went to Palestine before settling in America. As I imagine many of those do whose families have endured lives fractured by the events of history, and so closely touched by atrocities like the Holocaust, Kalman seems never to take life for granted — she often expresses her concern about the point of it all, and the mess so many people make of it.
But for all that, this book is imbued with Kalman's overriding and utter joy in being alive. For example, while she's in Israel she writes of her despair about the embattled state of the Middle East, but once back home in New York she finds immediate reassurance and an antidote to her distress simply by observing the life on the streets — the colours, the people, the eccentricities, the humanity of it all.
On other pages she'll share her delight in wonderful hats, bravely-dressed women, old people, the collections of weird objects she keeps at home, and many of the amazing sights she observes and records on her travels at home and abroad.
I'd love to meet her: from my reading I imagine a strong New York humour and an infectious fascination for the cities she loves.
Recommended.