Harriet Devine's Blog

Very Inspiring Blogger Award

It was very nice of my fellow SNB editor Annabel to nominate me for this award. Here are the rules:

• Thank and link to the person who nominated you.
• List the rules and display the award.
• Share seven facts about yourself.
• Nominate 15 other amazing blogs and comment on their posts to let them know they have been nominated
• Optional: display the award logo on your blog and follow the blogger who nominated you

7 Facts About Me

1. I've lived in rural France for the past three years 

2. My parents were both in the theatre -- my father an actor/director, my mother a theatre designer

3. I wanted to be an actress but found out I wasn't very good at it

4. I didn't go to university till I was in my 30s

5. I have two kittens who are fighting on the sofa next to me as I write this

6. I've been practicing meditation for over 40 years

7. I used to live near Glastonbury and went to the very first Glastonbury Festival

Fifteen Amazing Blogs

I suppose I can't nominate Annabel back, though I would if I could. But I can nominate my two other fellow ed.s, whose blogs I loved and admired long before we started working together.

Simon of Stuck in a Book - Simon's was one of the first blogs I started following, and we first met when I lived rather briefly in Oxford a few years ago. Lovely to be working with him now.

Victoria of Tales from the Reading Room - ditto Victoria -- though we never met in person until earlier this year, I've admire her lovely, intelligent blog for years.

Then some of our lovely contributors:

Alex of Thinking in Fragments - a fellow lover of crime novels, about which she writes with great perceptiveness. 

Helen of A Gallimaufy - if we want someone to do justice to anything slightly quirky, this is who I always think of. Her blog is a delight, witty and intelligent and honest.

Elaine of Random Jottings - another long-time favourite, avid and wide-ranging reader, not afraid to express strong opinions! 

Barb of Leaves and Pages - a blog I discovered only  a few months ago and have come to love. Vintage books, gardens and more besides, from a blogger who lives in Canada

Rachel of Book Snob - Rachel can be counted on for the most intelligent, readable and perceptive reviews. 

Hayley of  Desperate Reader - for some reason Hayley and I seem frequently to be reading the same books, especially of the vintage variety. I always think her reviews of them are better than mine. 

Falaise of 2606 Books - another new discovery and a lover of Euro crime, a genre that on the whole I think I don't like all that much -- until I read his reviews, when I decide I have to read the book.

Dark Puss of Morgana's Cat - ah, Dark Puss -- a scientist, a lover of SteamPunk, an indefatiguable searcher-out of paintings and information about the artists. 

Danielle of A Work in Progress - Danielle reads more books than anyone I have ever encountered - I'm always totally amazed at the breadth of her reading and reviewing.

Lyn of I prefer reading - Lyn loves vintage books as much as I do, and blogs about them, and her cats, and her Australian garden.

Karen of Cornflower - one of the first blogs I ever read, full of interest, and with a very wide readership.

And two who can't be left out

Simon of Savidge Reads - who could forget "the other Simon"? Delightfully honest and open -- much loved by the whole blogosphere, I think.

Karyn of A Penguin a Week - yes, once a week there's a real treat -- Karyn's review of her latest old Penguin, which she collects avidly and writes about wonderfully well.

Sorry to anyone who should be on here -- too many great blogs to include them all.

 

Summer Holiday Reading

Wondering what to read in the hols? Why not check out one of the BookBuzz features in the new edition of Shiny New Books?: 

The Editors Pick Their Summer Holiday Choices!

Lots of recommendations for books to take on the beach, the plane, the train, or to just stay at home and curl up with. 

Also, I finally got round to doing a bit of housekeeping on here. I haven't been paying much attention lately, what with the run-up to the new edition, but I took at look at the Blogroll (over there on the right) this morning and found to my shame that there were defunct blogs on it, and worse, some of the sites I visit regularly were not there at all. So I've started to update it, and it's looking better already. I know there are lots of wonderful blogs I've missed, but hope that will be remedied soon. In the meantime, if I've missed yours, many apologies.

Death in Pont-Aven

I'm lucky enough to live in rural France, which is lovely in itself, but also great if you want to pop off for a little jaunt to some other glorious places. One such is Finistere, the most western part of Brittany and less than three hours' drive from my home. Close though it is, I hadn't visited the area until a month or so ago, when I took a trip which included a visit to the beautiful little village of Pont-Aven, once home to the painter Gauguin. When I got home I remembered I had a book called Death in Pont-Aven waiting to be reviewed for Shiny New Books, so I read it with great delight and here's my review of it.

In fact the novel whetted my appetite so much that last week I went there again, and visited some of the places Jean Luc Bannalec (who is really a German publisher called Jorg Bong) mentioned in the novel. One such was supposedly Gauguin's favourite beach, which he christened Plage Tahiti. Happy days!

 

HD on EBB in the OED

As some of you undoubtedly know, Simon of that great blog stuck-in-a-book has recently started working on the blog which lives on the website of the Oxford English Dictionary. I've always enjoyed reading the OED blog so I was really delighted to be invited to write a guest post on Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I can't claim to be a great expert on EBB, but having taught Victorian Women's Writing for a number of years I was willing to give her a go, especially when Simon piqued my interest by telling me she was the fifth most quoted women in the OED's illustrative quotations. So I did it, and it went live today, and here it is. I'd love to take credit for the title, 'A-tremble and dimplement',  but Simon did that too. Nice one. 

And, by the way, today is her birthday!

 

Time for a change

Yes I have a new banner -- I've had so much trouble getting it right and I think it's still a bit off but I can't go on fiddling for ever. Not sure even why I needed it as I really liked the old one, but perhaps it's spring in the air that makes me think of new beginnings.

And while I'm at it I must apologise for not posting any reviews for a while -- I have been all over the place, back and forth to the UK from France, going to funerals, trying to keep up with the demands of my life. I haven't even done all that much reading in the past couple of weeks but I will be back, I promise. One problem is that the book I'm reading at the moment, which I bought on impulse on Brittany Ferries, is more than 500 pages long and I'm finding it so entertaining and informative that I can't give it up till I get to the end. I'm also reading Muriel Spark, which I shouldn't be as Muriel Spark Week is still almost a month away. But I'm deep in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (reading it on my iphone) and am absolutely swept away by what a wonderful novel it is. So you will be hearing more about these before too long.

Now I have to read Elizabeth Taylor's A View of the Harbour because I'd forgotten about this.

Dickens Month, Anyone?

I've just been alerted, via Thomas at My Porch, to Charles Dickens month, which is going on throughout January and ending on Dickens's birthday (his bicentenary) on 7 February. Hosted by Fig and Thistle, this entails blogging about something Dickens related every Tuesday throughout January and drawing attention to this in the comments on the Fig and Thistle entry for that day. With me? There's a Dickens-related giveaway involved though I'm not sure what this will be. I'm going to join in as I am already re-reading Great Expectations in the wake of my disappointment with the BBC adaptation -- yes, I know I'm in a minority of one here, but never mind. 

Why not join in? You could always read along even if you haven't got a blog.

Winter

 

Here in the UK, and probably elsewhere in Europe, I suspect we are going to have quite a mild winter (though now I've said that it will probably start snowing almost immediately). Anyway this morning I saw this wonderful painting on a blog I've recently discovered and wanted to share it with you to show what we are (probably) missing. 
The painting is by Gijsbrecht Leytens (known as 'The master of the winter landscape'), and called ‘Winter Landscape with People strolling on the Banks of a Frozen River where Children Play’. The blog is called a gallimaufry and is well worth a visit.

Mondegreens and Eggcorns

Feeling a little under the weather -- nothing terribly serious, just a mild stomach bug that I hope will be gone by the end of today -- I've been amusing myself following various links from Lingua Franca, which led me first to The Eggcorn Database, a site  'devoted to collecting the kind of unusual English spellings that have come to be called eggcorns', and thence to Language Log, to which I owe the discovery of the wonderful concept of the Mondegreen.

What is she on about, I hear you say. Well, an eggcorn is a substitute spelling for a word that someone has heard but never seen written down. I first heard of them on the wonderful Adam and Joe's BBC 6 Music show -- you can hear an extract on eggcorns here. There seem to be a lot of people who think acorn is spelled eggcorn, and you can find many other misspellings on the Eggcorn Database.

As for the Mondegreen, you will already know of some examples of this though you may not have realised what they were called. The name originated as early as 1954 in an article by an American writer, Sylvia Wright. She described how, when she was a child, her mother used to read her a Scottish ballad, of which one verse went like this:

Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,

Oh, where hae ye been?

They hae slain the Earl O' Moray,

And Lady Mondegreen.

Or at least that was how she thought it went. Of course as she grew up she finally came to realise that this was not the case -- the fourth line was really 'And laid him on the green'.

I'm willing to bet that you or someone in your family has a similar story to tell. My aunt was one of the many many people who used to enjoy the English hymn about 'Gladly, the cross-eyed bear', and it's a great joy to know that Jimmy Hendrix sometimes used to suit the action to the words after the line ' 'Scuse me while I kiss this guy'. 

Know any more?

 

Teflon and Velcro Writers

I've recently discovered a new (to me) blog called Lingua Franca -- thanks to my friend Rob who pointed me in its direction. It's subtitled 'Language and Writing in Academe' so probably doesn't sound wildly exciting to those who are not involved in writing, but I've been finding it fascinating and often very funny.

Today's interesting and entertaining post, written by one Allan Metcalf, is called Teflon and Velcro Writers, and briefly the argument is this:

Teflon writing is smooth, polished, gemlike. You can admire it, but it doesn’t reach out to you. It leaves you in peace.

Velcro writing, on the other hand, grabs you, sticks with you, changes you. It isn’t necessarily pretty to look at, but it gets hold of you and shakes you up.

If you read the whole post you'll see that he gives some examples, mostly taken from American poetry. But in principal this can be applied to any writing and I tend to think it's very apt, though it may be quite subjective, and very much sums up my own feelings about literature in general.  I'm just about to finish a review of a writer who I'd definitely put in the Velcro camp -- wonderful Elizabeth Bowen. But maybe she doesn't reach out and grab everyone?

Retrospecting/The Death Instinct

Yesterday I was trawling through all the posts I've put up on here since the very beginning, which I discovered to my astonishment was actually 27 September 2006, almost exactly five years ago. I was just reading my old reviews and was interested to see how my reading habits, and my reviewing habits, have changed in that time. I didn't actually start reviewing seriously and frequently until early 2007, and one of the first books I reviewed was The Interpretation of Murder  by Jed Rubenfeld, which I seem to have liked quite a lot -- along, I may add, with almost a million other people in this country alone.

Anyway, though I didn't remember a great deal about this novel, when I spotted Rubenfeld's follow-up in an airport bookstore, I thought it would be a perfect way to pass a nine-hour flight. In actual fact I hardly read any of it on the plane as I spent most of my time either eating or watching X Men movies (the prequel and the first two, in case you are interested) which I'd never seen before and enjoyed enormously. So Jed had to wait till I got home, and then I was frightfully jetlagged and reading became a real strain as I kept falling asleep. This partly explains why, after getting back to the UK almost 6 days ago, I am still only two thirds of the way through this novel. Partly but not completely -- as to tell the truth I am finding it really boring and not at all well written -- it kept reminding me of Dan Brown, not a good thing at all. Certainly it is interesting historically -- like his first novel, this one is based on real events, in this case a (still) unexplained terrorist bomb which exploded in the centre of New York City in 1920. Once again Sigmund Freud appears, as do many other real people, and we meet again Stratham Younger, the charismatic young psychologist, this time in pursuit of a beautiful French radiologist called Colette. So there's lots in here about psychoanalysis and the early use (or misuse) of radium. But I'm just not enthralled and am getting irritated with it all, though of course I do want to find out about the three red-headed women who keep appearing in front of Colette, and I do want to know if Freud is going to be able to cure Colette's little brother of his inability to speak. I think skipping and skimming is called for here.

What struck me forcibly about my earlier reading habits was how much my tastes have changed since 2007. In those early days I was mostly reading recently published novels, and now I hardly ever do. Almost all my reading now is of novels published in the middle years of the twentieth century and I can't seem to get enough of them. As for my reviews, the early ones were much briefer and, to me, not nearly as interesting. So blogging has honed my critical abilities, I think -- and let's hope it goes on doing so.