Reading Matters

Book bits: 10 news links to click

• The eight titles for this year's Fiction Uncovered promotion have been unveiled.

• BBC Radio 4 has revamped its Bookclub newsletter to include more bookish news. You can sign up here.

• Jenny Colgan has won Romantic Novel of the Year with Welcome to Rosie Hopkins' Sweetshop of Dreams.

• Europa Editions has launched a new World Noir series.

• Regional winners of the Commonwealth Book Prize have been announced. The main Commonwealth Book Prize will be announced on May 31.  

• A new blog platform designed for booklovers has gone live. More information via the official press release.

• Foyles has been named national bookseller of the year at The Bookseller Industry Awards 2013.

• Howard Jacobson has won this year's Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for his comic novel Zoo Time.

• Frisch & Co. Electronic Books, a new ebook-only publisher dedicated to literature in English translation, has been launched. Its first book is Anatomy of a Night by a young German-language writer, Anna Kim.

• A.T. William's A Very British Killing: The Death of Baha Mousa has won this year's Orwell Book Prize. A full rundown of all the winners is available on the official website.

Some exciting news

And no, I'm not talking about Australian Literature Month, which kicks off later today. (I'll have more on that later.)

I wanted to share some other news first.

Drum roll, please.

I've finally taken the plunge and done something I've always wanted to do — yes, I've opened my own bookshop!

Beatrix Potter plaque marks her childhood home

I don't know how many times I've walked past this attractive plaque over the past 13 or so years, but whenever I see it I curse myself for not having a camera. Thank goodness for smartphones, because when I strolled past it on Saturday afternoon, during a 15km walk to Chelsea and back (for lunch and then cake), I finally managed to take a snap.

The wording on the plaque reads:

Beatrix Potter, writer and artist, 1866 to 1943, lived in a house on this site from 1866 to 1913, erected by The Boltons Association, The Beatrix Potter Society and Frederick Warne & Co. in 1988.

It's located (almost) on the corner of Old Brompton Road and Bolton Place in Earls Court. To see a map of the location and find out some information about the author, visit the London Remembers website.

Apologies, but Typepad is eating my comments

Apologies if you have left a comment here over the past week that has disappeared into the ether. It seems Typepad is "eating" them and then dumping them into my spam folder.

I discovered this last Thursday thanks to eagle-eyed Stu, who let me know that none of his comments had appeared here. When I checked my spam folder there were all Stu's comments along with a handful left by other people. I published them all and hoped that would be the end of the matter.

But tonight I checked my spam folder and found another load of comments that people had tried to leave during the weekend. Aaarggh.

I know Typepad has introduced new tools for fighting spam, but I'm afraid they're working too well and preventing legitimate comments from being published. I've logged a "help ticket" with them to see if they can look into this for me so it can be fixed.

One of the best bits about blogging is all the lovely comments you leave, so I'm really sorry if you have been affected by this. I hope it doesn't discourage you from taking the time to leave comments in future.

In the meantime, if you leave a comment and it doesn't appear: don't worry — it will probably be in my spam folder and I'll publish it next time I'm logged in. Thanks so much for your patience.

My bookish life in photographs

If you follow me on Instagram you will know I am a bit obsessed with documenting my life in photographs using my iPhone. Quite a few of these photographs have a literary connection, so I thought I'd publish some of the more recent ones here for everyone to see.

If you click on each photograph, a larger version should appear in a pop-up window.

Let me know if there is anything here you'd like to know more about, and I'll happily respond in the comments.

My first read of the year

Sorting out my TBR in January

A classic cover from 1979

First book group read of the year

History of newspapers on wall

Daily Telegraph inaugaration, 1822

Wonderful debut from Oz

Street names in Bloomsbury

Shop that starred in "Black Books"

The doorway to heaven?

Where James Joyce once lived

A week's worth of book post!

My favourite coffee mug

View through a bookseller's window

Jean Rhys once lived in a flat here

Mervyn Peake's house in the 1960s

Building with a Dickens' connection

Japanese crime on my Kindle

Remembering Petrona

Early in 2007, I met Maxine Clarke in person for the first time. We had met "virtually" a year or so earlier via our blogs. Maxine was a regular commenter here at Reading Matters and often linked to my reviews. We had exchanged emails about books and authors we liked (we were both big fans of Nicci French, for instance) and we had done the odd book swap via Royal Mail.

We agreed to meet at Foyles on Southbank one wintry evening. "How will I know what you look like?" I asked. "I'll be the one with a copy of Nature tucked under my arm," she responded.

Little did I know Maxine had a high-powered editorial job at Nature and that she would offer me much wise counsel about my own career — not only at that first meeting where we bonded over a light meal and a bottle of wine, but in the years to follow. As recently as a year ago, she saw that I had gone freelance and put me in touch with one of her old colleagues who was looking for a freelance editor. It proved to be a very valuable introduction: I've been doing regular contract work for them ever since.

But that's what Maxine was like. Generous, warm-hearted, always willing to help. She was opinionated too, but I liked that, probably because she reminded me of myself.

And her blog, which evolved over time from a miscellaneous resource about science, technology and fiction to one that concentrated purely on crime fiction, particularly crime in translation, was smart, entertaining, thoughtful — and prolific. I loved her crisp, clear writing style and the way she structured her reviews, but most of all I loved the way she built and nurtured an entire community of crime fiction lovers. She founded the Friend Feed Crime and Mystery Fiction Room, which drove quite a bit of traffic to my site (Maxine always flagged up my crime reviews), and contributed to Euro Crime. And on top of that, she left comments all over blogland! (According to my Typepad account, Maxine left 260 comments on my blog over the years. Her last one was on 28 November under my review of Broken Harbour.)

Only recently it occurred to me that I hadn't "seen" Maxine about the internet for awhile. Her blog Petrona was last updated in October, probably about the time we last exchanged emails. That's when she told me she was no longer going in to the office because her health was so bad, but the internet was keeping her company and she was looking forward to reading JK Rowling's The Casual Vacancy.

I didn't like to pry about her health — it was the first time she'd ever mentioned it — but I now realise she was in the last months of her life. Today, I discovered she died in late December.

A blog to her memory has been set up — it's called Petrona Remembered — which I urge you to visit if you want to know more about Maxine's life. The book blogging community will be all the poorer for her absence and I will miss her reviews, comments, tweets, emails and generous words of encouragement.

My deepest condolences to her husband and two daughters. 

'Operation Sort Out The TBR' is finally over!

I don't normally make New Year's resolutions, but this year I decided I needed to tackle the ever-increasing TBR. I had so many books coming through the door — unsolicited review copies and personal purchases from charity shops and online stores — that I was simply sticking them in the corner of the living room and then pretending they weren't there. It got so bad that the "pile" had become 4ft high and three books deep. Every time I stuck another book on the top it was like playing Jenga in reverse: I kept expecting it to topple over.

So, in the first week of January, after 10 days' rest and recreation on the Sussex coast, I got stuck in. It was hard work. Not only did I sort the book mountain hulking in the corner of the living room, I also tackled the books in the bedroom — tucked away four deep on top of the wardrobe, on my bedside table and dresser — and those on display in our TV wall unit.

For about two days the living room looked like a book warehouse, with books covering every conceivable surface as I tried to sort books into the following categories: Irish fiction, Commonwealth fiction, British fiction, American fiction, books in translation, crime fiction and non-fiction.

Then I weeded out the books I did not want. This turned out to be quite a lot — 194 to be precise! That's 19 supermarket bags' worth — and they're all going to Oxfam, which has kindly agreed to come and collect them from me by car this weekend.

Then, with all the remaining books — the ones that I want to read — I had a rather hair-brained idea: I would scan in all the barcodes using my iPhone so that I could keep track of my TBR on GoodReads, a website I've not really used before. This took far longer than I thought — about two days to be precise!

But after all that time, effort — and dust — I felt like I'd really achieved something. Not only do I know exactly what books I own, but they are neatly stacked away — in a new Expedit bookshelf — albeit three-deep in no particular order.

The exercise also revealed the rather alarming fact that I currently have 553 books in my TBR! I reckon that's about 6.5 years' worth of reading for me.

If you are on GoodReads do feel free to send me a friend invite — you will find me here. And note I've stuck a little GoodReads icon thingy up there in my menu bar under the subhead "Follow Me" so that you can always find me there.

Happy Birthday to Jennifer Johnston

If you are a long-time follower of this blog, you will know I love Irish writer Jennifer Johnston. In fact, I'd go so far as to say she is my favourite living writer.

Jennifer Johnston was born on January 12, 1930, which means that today is her 82nd birthday. Remarkably, she is still churning out books — her last one, Shadowstory, was written when she was 80.

Her first novel, The Captain and the Kings, was published when she was 42. Since then she's penned 16 more. I have been making my way through them, slowly but surely, ever since I first discovered her, via a charity shop purchase, in 2006.

Recently, she was awarded a lifetime achievement award at the Irish Book Awards. (The picture, courtesy of the Irish Book Awards, shows her receiving her award from Joseph O'Connor.)

If you have not read her before, I'd suggest starting with her earlier work rather than her latter. I do have soft spots for The Christmas Tree, an exquisitely written tale about an Irish woman who returns home to die, and Shadows on our Skin, about a schoolboy in Derry during The Troubles, whose eyes are opened up to the world around him, but, to be honest, I've yet to come across a book by her that I have not liked. When it comes to a good yarn, she is remarkably consistent and dependable.

She also tends to write in a very stylised manner, often about writers or budding writers, and her characters are almost always from the Anglo-Irish ascendancy grappling with the past moving into the future. I love that she doesn't spell everything out for you and that you often have to work things out in your own head.

Today, in honour of her birthday, I finally got around to reading an essay about her in Twentieth Century Women Novelists, edited by Thomas F. Staley, which was published in 1982. (Hat tip to Dovegreyreader, who first alerted me to this book.) Granted that the piece — The Masculine World of Jennifer Johnston by Shari Benstock — was written when she only had five novels to her name, it deftly sums up her work as follows:

All of Jennifer Johnston's novels give the impression of time that has been stopped by the forces of history or of personal defeat against which the plot of the story races to bring what has been a non-story to some kind of dramatic climax. The act of the storytelling is itself an affront to the lethargy of the lives it describes, forcing actions upon settings and people who have resisted action for some indefinite period of time.

The Pocket History of Irish Writers adds that she is "skilled in building up and maintaining atmosphere" and that her novels are not saccharine.

Their tragedies convince; they have a limpidity of style, a naturalness of dialogue and a sure handling of plot. All these add up to an impressive achievement.

I have reviewed the following novels on this site:

• The Gates (1973)

• Shadows on Our Skin (1977)

• The Old Jest (1979)

• The Christmas Tree (1981)

• Fool's Sanctuary (1988)

• The Invisible Worm (1992)

• The Illusionist (1995)

• Two Moons (1998)

• The Gingerbread Woman (2000)

• Foolish Mortals (2007) 

• Truth or Fiction (2009)

• Shadowstory (2011)

That leaves me with just five more to read!

To find out more about Jennifer Johnston:

• chek out her Wikipedia entry

• visit the British Council website

• listen to her talk about The Gingerbread Woman on BBC iPlayer

English Heritage suspends London's blue plaque scheme because of funding cuts

If you have ever traipsed around London you may well have spotted the odd blue disc or two adorning the facade of certain buildings. These are part of English Heritage's blue plaque scheme, which commemorates "the link between notable figures of the past and the buildings in which they lived and worked".

Many of these plaques celebrate writers — the one pictured right, for instance, marks the building where Lytton Strachey, critic, biographer and founding member of the Bloomsbury Group lived between 1880-1932.

The scheme, believed to be the oldest of its kind in the world, has been running for 146 years. But today English Heritage announced it is suspending the scheme because of Government funding cuts.

This isn't the first time the scheme has been suspended — it was put on hold from 1915 to 1919 and 1940 to 1947 because of war-time cutbacks — so let's hope it is reinstated very soon. But I wouldn't hold my breath: the present Coalition Government is ruthless when it concerns anything to do with culture and the arts — dare I mention the closure of Britain's public libraries?

Over the years I have much enjoyed spotting these literary landmarks — here's a few I've sourced from my photographic archive.

Patrick Hamilton: 2 Burlington Gardens, Chiswick
I wrote about this plaque when it was installed in February 2011.

Sir Henry Rider Haggard: 69 Gunterstone Road, West Kensington
I have walked past this building thousands of times over the past 12 years and never noticed it until very recently — he is most famous for penning King Solomon's Mines.

George Eliot: 4 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea
It's not entirely clear whether this is an "official" plaque — it doesn't seemed to be referenced on the English Heritage site. I wrote about this residence when I happened to walk past it last year.

Oscar Wilde: 34 Tite Street, Chelsea

Charles Dickens: BMA House, Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury
Again, not sure this is an "official" blue plaque.

Ian Fleming: 22 Ebury Street, Belgravia
I wrote about this plaque last April.

Thanks to @MarDixon for alerting me to this story.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year, everyone!

Can you believe another 12 months has wizzed by?

I trust 2013 will be filled with lots of literary joy for you all.

Thanks for  your support over the past 12 months — and here's to another year of bookish goodness.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net