John Lennon famously said that life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. I couldn't agree more. In the past month, my work life has gone a bit haywire, and for reasons I can't talk about right now, it's had a rather adverse impact on my reading. I just haven't been in the mood to read, but it hasn't stopped me from doing bookish things. Here's a rundown.
Dinner with a McGahern obsessive
Earlier this month Mr Reading Matters and I had dinner with Australian blogger Trevor Cook and his wife Julie, whom we first met a few years back. Trevor had just returned from Dublin to visit his daughter but while in Ireland he made a little side trip to County Leitrim, the home of the late John McGahern.
Regular readers of this blog will know that McGahern is my favourite author, but my knowledge of McGahern's life and loves is nowhere near as thorough as Trevor's. Mid-way through our meal I had to ask Trevor how many times he'd read That They May Face the Rising Sun because I couldn't keep up with all the scenes he kept referencing and all the characters he kept talking about. Turns out he's read it three times!
Trevor's now back in Australia, but he has posted two lots of photographs taken on his McGahern trip, which can be viewed here and here. It has me itching to take a trip myself, but I'll have to read the book again to make sure I'm completely up to speed just in case I bump into the Shah!
A week in the Lake District
We spent a week in Cumbria, pottering around the Lake District in our hire car and enjoying the scenery and late summer sunshine, between September 4 and 11.
Of course the Lake District has many literary connections, including Beatrix Potter and the Lake Poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey), but I was more interested in Haweswater (photographed above), which features in Sarah Hall's award-winning novel of the same name (currently sitting unread in my TBR), and Holker Hall and Gardens, which is home to the Cavendish family and has the most amazing library I've ever seen.
Unfortunately photography inside the house was not allowed but this page on the official website gives you a pretty good idea of how lovely and lavish the library is. With the sun streaming through the big windows, overlooking a truly stunning garden, I just wanted to sink down in one of the sofas for a day-long read!
(I should probably also point out that while on holiday, and unable to find the required concentration to read fiction, I taught myself how to do suduko, and I've become slightly addicted to it ever since. I use the games on my BlackBerry, but once my supply of 150 are exhausted I'm going to have to hunt out a book or two. Recommendations welcome in the comment box below.)
In conversation with Friedrich Christian Delius
On Friday September 17 I did my first "literary gig" and chaired a conversation between German man of letters, Friedrich Christian Delius, and his translator, Jamie Bulloch, at the Big Green Bookshop in Wood Green, North London.
The event was quite intimate, by which I mean there were only nine people in the audience, and two of those were from the publishing company and one owned the shop! But it was lovely to see three fellow book bloggers -- Simon from Stuck in a Book, Simon Savidge and Polly from Novel Insights -- in the audience.
I was terribly nervous, but once we got underway, I found I really enjoyed the conversation, which covered everything from the setting of Delius' book, Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman, to the challenges faced by the translator. I'm not sure his wife, sitting in the front row, appreciated my questions about the Nuremberg Rally and Albert Speer's architecture though!
I was buzzing afterwards, more from a sense of relief that it had gone okay and I hadn't made a complete fool of myself. It was lovely to chat to everyone, including Meike and Maddy from Peirene Press, and Jamie, the translator. It capped off what had been a rather traumatic week in the office, and I was still on a high about it two days later!!
Many thanks to Meike for asking me to chair the evening -- it was a big risk to take but I'm honoured to think she thought I would be more than capable! It's just a shame that so few people turned up, but as I pointed out, that far north of the river and even I begin to feel faint! It's a long trek to make on a Friday night...
(Meike wrote a lovely piece about it on her blog, and Simon T. had some nice things to say, too.)
A visit to Spitalfields market
It was Open House London last weekend, so after Mr Reading Matters and I ventured up to the 17th floor of the Broadgate Tower, we took a stroll around the nearby Spitalfields market. There's a couple of great book stalls there, including one that just specialises in old Penguins, worth a visit if you collect them, and another that had some good deals on recent literary fiction. Sadly, I didn't buy anything, but then I had different priorities on the day: at 11.30am I was sat drinking a glass of white wine while nibbling a selection of cheeses. Decadent? Moi? Never!
A drink in the Courthouse hotel
On Thursday evening I caught up with a old colleague for a meal in Soho, followed by a drink in the Courthouse Doubletree Hotel, a grade II listed building which was originally a real magistrate's court. (One of the bar's quirky features is that you can sit in the original holding cells for a drink, a little too claustrophobic for my liking. I should also point out that we saw a mouse run across the floor, and we are pretty sure it was real, and not some fakery to make the experience feel authentic! And no, I wasn't drunk at the time.)
There's a couple of literary connections, but the ones that tickled my fancy include the fact that in 1835 Charles Dickens worked as a reporter in the building for the Morning Chronicle (the bar actually offers a Charles Dickens cocktail made out of two kinds of rum) and, in 1895, Oscar Wilde took the Marquess of Queensbury to court on a criminal libel charge. There's more history on the official website.
So, as you can see, it is entirely possible to be literary-minded even when you are not reading novels! What literary-inspired things have you been up to lately?
Recent Comments