I defy anyone to read Black Beauty and not be reduced to a sniffling, sobbing mess at least two or three times. If you haven’t read it – although I can’t imagine that there’s anyone left in the world who hasn’t – then you really must but save it for a day when you don’t have to face the world afterwards in all your weepy puffy-eyed glory. Poor Ginger.
Apologies for such a brief introduction to this book I’m afraid as we had a minor domestic crisis and I’m rushing around like crazy today…
Picking one book out of the dozens I don’t finish each year was almost impossible. Books arrive faster than I can read and the ones sent by publishers are sometimes indiscriminate, often not titles I would choose. That can be marvellous in that I discover authors that I would never gravitate towards normally, but it does mean that I abandon a lot of books.
So I picked the book I’m most ashamed of having given up on and it’s Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.
I read it when it first came out – before that actually because I had a proof copy – and it took me a while to get into. I really liked the idea of telling the story of Henry VIII from the point of view of Thomas Cromwell but there is a large cast of characters and names are used relatively rarely – I had to refer to family trees a great deal. Also, the pronoun ‘he’ is used a great deal with little speech being attributed – ‘he said’ is used often but where there are two or three characters talking in a scene, I needed to skip back often to check who had said a particular thing.
Gradually I got used to that and was about two thirds of the way through when we went away on holiday and I forgot to take it with me. When I got home two weeks later I somehow never went back to it and so it remains on my shelf, bookmark in place. And of course, unlike most books that I abandon, Wolf Hall was a huge bestseller, won awards galore and was almost universally admired, leaving me feeling rather guilty…
It was the early 80s and I’d discovered KM Peyton‘s Flambards series and my first literary crush was Mark Russell. He was dreadful to his horses and to the servants and behaved truly appallingly to Violet the impregnated housemaid but he was my first crush. Even more so in the later books in the series when he started behaving rather better. In the TV adaptation he was played by the terribly dashing Steven Grives who looked exactly as I’d imagined.
So own up? Who was your first literary crush?
It seems bit odd to nominate a book in this category which this week sees a film adaptation released and a decade ago was voted as the best Scottish book of all time, but Sunset Song, the first of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Scots Quair trilogy, remains largely unknown outside Scotland. So in best film trailer style…
(scenes of rolling Aberdeenshire farmland through the seasons)
Voice Over Man: In a land of beauty and power…
(images of workers toiling in the fields and men leaving to war)
Voice Over Man: At a time of … family and community … hardship and war…
(domestic and rural scenes of a young woman)
Voice Over Man: Chris Guthrie is a young woman … full of determination and passion…
(zoom across the fields to the face of a young woman surveying the land she loves)
Voice Over Man: … but can she survive this often cruel world?
It’s a great story that follows Chris Guthrie, a woman who endures terrible suffering as well as fulfilling love, prior to the outbreak of the First World War and its immediate aftermath, but it is Grassic Gibbon’s radical use of language, a variant of Doric, which gives the book its real strength. Undoubtedly the film will meddle with the language, otherwise it’ll leave nearly everyone confused, so if you want to experience a true feminist icon and Scottish history without the tartan tat do READ THE BOOK.
PS – you can see Cat Down Under’s choice for this here.
My friend Cat Down Under has summed up today’s category in a nutshell. Or in rather more than a nutshell as that’s kind of the problem. If you read crime fiction, how do you narrow down the brigade of fictional detectives to just one? Just as the type of crime fiction you choose to read depends on your mood, so does the detective you want to call on. If you’re feeling logical and methodical then you might want to read a Hercule Poirot novel, if you have a yen for Italian wine and sunshine then Donna Leon’s Guido Brunetti might be ideal, and if your love life’s a mess and you can’t do a thing with your hair then Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum is the ‘tec for you.
But one of my favourite crime writers is Golden Age novelist Dorothy L Sayers and her detectives Lord Peter Wimsey and his wife (after several years’ courtship) Harriet Vane. Peter is far more than the usual toff-turned-detective and has a fascinating backstory and Harriet, who Peter first encounters (as do we) in Strong Poison when she is on trial for the murder of her lover, is a novelist and early feminist – the intellectual equal of Peter. Checking a date on this web page reminded me that I have never actually read most of the short stories, so I’ll have to rectify that in the next few months.
Also, apologies for having to use a stock image from the publisher’s website. These books are only available in horrid B-format paperbacks and my own copies are beyond shabby. What I really need to do is track down a copy of this Folio Society box set…
Hi, I’m Vanessa and welcome to my site.
In 2015, I won Bloody Scotland’s Pitch Perfect event and my first novel, Death Will Find Me, was published in February, 2019. The second Tessa Kilpatrick book will be out early next year and in the meantime, I’ll soon be launching a series of art crime thrillers.
You can find out more about me and what I’m up to by following the links at the top, and there are contact details below if you want to ask me any questions or invite me to talk at your bookshop, library or festival.