The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2024, pt. 20: Lesley Hall

 

 

Pleasures of Reading, 2024

by Lesley Hall

 

 

 

I did a re-read of Middlemarch very early in the year, as part of a group reading project, and that set the bar rather high. Not sure how many times that makes it since the first I time I read it aged 16-going-on-17. It still offers more, new lights, and fresh insights. And in the noise and fume and fret of the modern world, that conclusion still resonates:

the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

However, there were other reading pleasures during the year if not quite on the same elevated pinnacle, but we cannot always live in that atmosphere.

A very different writer I discovered – in fact one currently in a general process of rediscovery – was Eve Babitz, whose work leant heavily on her own experiences, even if fictionalized, as an artist and writer hanging out with rock musicians in California in those days when it was all happening there. I read Sex and Rage and L. A. Woman as well as the biography by Lili Anolik, Hollywood’s Eve, and look forward to reading more. I wonder if there is a certain nostalgia involved, not so much for my actual own youth, but the sort of things I was reading in the 1970s and 80s about lifestyles and places very different from the way and places in which I was living myself.

A similar trip down memory lane was Lee Tulloch’s Fabulous Nobodies (1989), which I put in somewhat the same category except it is about clubbing in the East Village in New York when that was a happening scene. I must have read it around the time it came out, and it stuck in my mind, though I never heard it mentioned by anyone else at all until somebody namechecked it recently in a ‘Books in My Life’ article. So I got hold of a copy and re-read it and it was still really, really enjoyable even if it is one of those books that it is really hard to describe exactly why that is so and even what it resembles.

Another trip down the corridors of remembrance of reading past, and the recovery of writers apparently lost was the very welcome reissue of the idiosyncratic novels of Rosemary Tonks.

There was a small cluster of books published this year which, though quite different in themselves, all had resonating elements about the power of narrative. One of them, The Watermark by Sam Mills, I was alerted to by a rather snotty review – sometimes an adverse review can be a better pointer than a kind one in directing the reader to something to their taste, at least I have found it so. I can see that it’s the sort of conceit that might not work – the two main characters find themselves plunged into having to navigate the action of a series of very different novels – but Mills entirely pulls it off.

Sally Smith’s A Case of Mice and Murder is predominantly a brilliant historical murder mystery, set in the legal precincts of the Inner Temple, London, in 1901, as the Victorian era has just turned Edwardian. However, an important subplot deals with the disputed authorship of the sensationally best-selling children’s book Millie the Temple Church Mouse and this apparently twee tale turns out to have deeper resonance.

Furrowed Middlebrow, an imprint of Dean Street Press, has been doing sterling service bringing back into print works by ‘middlebrow’ women writers of the early to mid-twentieth century. Their latest, Eleanor Farjeon’s Miss Granby’s Secret, or the Bastard of Pinsk (first published in 1941), is an absolute delight. The prolific author of many successful melodramatic romances, Adelaide Granby, has died: her niece discovers in her papers the unpublished manuscript of her first novel, the eponymous Bastard of Pinsk, as well as her contemporaneous diaries. The various strands – the novel, and the events in Addie’s life it reflected, accounts by various other characters whose evidence is sought, the ‘modern’ niece rather aghast at the Victorian limitations on her aunt’s knowledge and her youthful misapprehensions – are all woven together to make a very satisfying and entertaining read.

So, while I felt sometimes during the year I was in a bit of a reading slump, looking back, there were some considerable high spots.

 

 

Lesley Hall was born in the seaside resort and channel port of Folkestone, Kent, and now lives in north London. She has retired from a career as an archivist of over 40 years, though she's still active in her field of specialization. Her recent essay "Send in the Clones?: Naomi Mitchison and the Politics of Reproduction and Motherhood," was published in Naomi Mitchison: A Writer in Time Edited by James Purdon, Edinburgh University Press https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-naomi-mitchison.html. She has published several books and numerous articles on issues of gender and sexuality in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain, and is currently researching British interwar progressive movements and individuals. She has also published a volume in the Aqueduct Press Conversation Pieces series, Naomi Mitchison: A Profile of her Life and Work (2007). She has been reading science fiction and fantasy since childhood and cannot remember a time when she was not a feminist. Her reviews have appeared in Strange Horizons, Vector, and Foundation, and she has been a judge for the Tiptree and Arthur C. Clarke Awards. She has had short stories published in The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women (1996) and The Penguin Book of Erotic Stories by Women (1995) and, most recently, is the author of the series The Comfortable Courtesan: being memoirs by Clorinda Cathcart and Clorinda Cathcart's Circle: https://www.clorinda.org. Visit Lesley's website.