Egg and Dart

This must be the thinking person’s light summer reading for 2008. I took a copy on holiday and found another already there in the place we were staying!

I was entertained by this and found the ending suddenly rather poignant, although earlier on the serious parts had been weaker than the funny bits and Mary Jones had come over as something of a caricature. Possibly it worked best as a satire on political spin. I thought the best joke was al-Qa’ida’s attempt to understand the significance of tartans!

It was spoilt a bit by some factual errors: e.g. ‘Lake Evian’ and Boris Johnson misquoting a famous Latin tag.

• Publisher: Phoenix; New edition edition (14 Jun 2007)
• ISBN-10: 0753821788
• ISBN-13: 978-0753821787

No spoiler! Read on as I won’t discuss the plot.

I thought this was one of the better Wexford ones I’d read. My main reservation was that the characters of Joyce Virson and Augustine Casey – intended I think to give some humour and light relief – were too close to caricature.

I tend to assume that Wexford novels are set in the present, but this is one of the earliest ones and was first published 17 years ago (in 1991). Long enough ago for life to have been different in various ways – mobile phones not ubiquitous, and foreign travel not as frequent as now. What really dates it quite precisely is a reference to the poll tax!

• Publisher: Arrow Books Ltd (April 15, 1993)
• ISBN-10: 0099249111
• ISBN-13: 978-0099249115

A favourite of my 3 year old son. We have it in board and paperback versions, both published by Egmont. Note (especially if you once read this book as a child) that both are abridgements of the original, but the board book version is abridged more. Details such as the scout’s cocoa, Plop’s headbutting his dad, and the names of the stars are missing, and the dialogue has become more abrupt and hence less easy to read aloud as compared to the paperback.

• Publisher: Egmont Books Ltd (October 1, 2005)
• ISBN-10: 1405221828
• ISBN-13: 978-1405221825

I still miss Bernard Levin’s articles; I wonder what he would have said about the Diana inquest, or the current US election campaign?  (Though the latter topic would be more his beloved Arianna’s territory).  I made do with reading ‘Conducted Tour’, a collection of accounts of ten music festivals he attended in 1980.  Some of these are well-known (Glyndebourne, Edinburgh, Bayreuth), others less so.  At times it’s a bit like watching someone else’s party as he describes in detail meals with his distinguished friends at long-gone eateries (e.g. in the chapters on Bath and Wexford).  The Florence Festival doesnt seem to have much music in it at all so he looked at the architecture instead.  Other chapters focus more on the music.

Levin is prone to discussing music in mystical terms which generally seem out of place today – if you have a mystical outlook now, it’s not usually classical music that you’ll be interested in.  I’m left with the impression that the only music he really loves, as opposed to enjoying, is that of Mozart, Schubert and Wagner.  Certainly he has a blind spot when it came to French music and little interest in the twentieth century apart from Britten and Shostakovich.  To be fair though, he listens to first performances of new works with an open mind.  And he is certainly able to spot up-and-coming singers bound for greater things.

If you enjoy Levin’s writing, this little book is worth seeking out.  In future years it might be fun to read for its description of the way things were in 1980, but not enough time has gone by yet. It is not so interesting in what it has to say about music, though there are some good anecdotes.

• Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd (February 1, 1988)
• ISBN-10: 0340404884
• ISBN-13: 978-0340404881

Chick-lit of a kind I wouldn’t usually read!

I found the main character rather tiresome (though have children of similar ages so empathised a bit). I preferred the sub-plots involving Cressida and Freddie; but both wound up some time before the end of the book!

I thought the humorous asides worked better than the set-piece amusing situations, which were a bit overdone with the characters becoming less believable.

(from BookCrossing)

ISBN: 0755304918

I enjoyed this but not as much as the other contributors. It takes a while to get going, and I wish there had been more scenes set at the hotel and less of the earlier misery-memoir stuff from the farm. Particularly in the early part of the book, I felt the author was making a point of demonstrating to the reader that she’d done her research (e.g. giving long lists of farming activities). The narrator is a would-be author (many of the chapters are prefixed with obscure words she is learning, like a winning competitor in the US national spelling bee), but her voice didn’t sound quite right for someone writing at the turn of the 20th century. This was shown up by the contrast with the style of the actual letters from the period which she quotes.

In the appendix the book is referred to as A Northern Light. Was the name changed so as not to create confusion with Philip Pullman’s book?

If you liked this you would probably also enjoy Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson.

(from BookCrossing)

ISBN: 0747570639

I’m now 3/4 of the way through. My husband tried to buy more volumes in France but for some reason it’s much easier to get v.1 than any of the others. I can’t think why …
Trying to erase the sight of Jeremy Irons from my mind’s eye.

(I got an automated reminder from one Facebook application which knew I was reading this. ‘You have been reading A la Recherche du Temps Perdu for a long time. Have you finished yet’?)

• Publisher: Gallimard Education (July 2001)
• ISBN-10: 2070379248
• ISBN-13: 978-2070379248

I’d be happy to read more Banks on the basis of this one. I wondered whether the sci-fi setting was necessary for what Banks had to say, though. I can’t compare it to other sci-fi, but I noticed that the novel is in various ways as stylized as the ancient epic poetry I used to study. Less explicit about sex than violence, and the many planets described are reassuringly geoid (would trees evolve almost everywhere, for example?) Perhaps this was what ‘AnonymousFinder’ meant, and perhaps also the person who once described the Odyssey as the earliest work of science fiction.

(from BookCrossing)

ISBN: 185723135X

One of the most useful reference works for music that we have is a 1985 edition of The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music, edited by Michael Kennedy. This manages to pack a huge amount of information into a paperback of 700-odd pages, especially when it comes to listing works by major composers. (To say nothing of entries on individual compositions, performers, instruments, organisations, terminology and so on). It achieves this by using abbreviations as much as possible without becoming unintelligible, for example ‘Comp. 2 vn. concs., str. qt., vc. sonata, etc.’ – hence our nickname for it*.

It has its idiosyncrasies too. In the composers’ biographies, it is regarded as almost essential to list the years in which they visited Britain (if they weren’t British already). On a more macabre note, the cause of death is usually given, when it’s known. But it doesn’t give precise dates of birth or death or reveal their embarrassing middle names, unlike one of the other musical dictionaries that we have.

A longer review would comment on surprising omissions. Allowing for the date of the volume (some composers or works have come into favour since, or simply weren’t around at all) I’ve found few and will cite only one here: no separate entry for Peter Grimes! (Eleven of Britten’s other operas have their own entries). But we wouldn’t be without this volume and it is particularly useful for settling discussions about when a particular work was composed: ‘Look it up in Dalton’s Weekly!’ is the refrain.

* Note for readers outside Britain: Dalton’s Weekly is a small-ads newspaper, where advertisers pay by the line. As a result the advertisements in it are heavily abbreviated in order to take up as few lines as possible.