All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot

I've been a big fan of British/PBS television series for years, but somehow, I missed watching All Creatures Great and Small. I guess I was the wrong demographic when the original series came out in the 1980s -- it was something my grandparents watched, and definitely Not Cool Enough. I've shelved the series of memoirs at the library often enough to know them by sight, and I'm quite sure I'd have never got round to reading or watching it until the new series reboot started a couple of weeks ago. 

But I'm always looking for good audio books for my daily walks and I was able to download the first in the series a couple of weeks ago. If you're not familiar, it's the memoirs of a young country veterinarian in Yorkshire as he navigates his way in his first job as an assistant vet in a rural practice in the 1930s. Young James Herriot (the pseudonym of James Alfred Wight) is newly qualified and desperate for a job. He had always planned on working with small animals, but James jumps at the chance to work for the dashing yet slightly eccentric Sigfreid Farnon, who has recently purchased a practice in Yorkshire. 

The book is a series of short chapters, each detailing amusing, poignant, and sometimes sad stories of his work in his first year as a veterinarian, treating cows, horses, various livestock, and sometimes pets. The reader is introduced to some colorful local Yorkshire characters, farmers and gentry, including Mrs. Pumphrey and her spoiled but loveable Pekingese, Tricki-Woo; and also some possible love interests, including the beautiful Helen Alderson. 

The audiobook is beautifully narrated by Christopher Timothy, and I didn't realize until I was nearly finished that he played James Herriot in the original series! He does a great job with the accents different voices, and I liked it so much I listened to the entire book on audio instead of rushing through it and reading the print volume which I got from the library as a backup. I often have a print or e-book copy of an audio and alternate. Often, I get really caught up in a story and wind up reading the print copy instead of taking the time to finish the audio. But I liked the audio so much I forced myself to be patient and listen. I was a little surprised that he didn't use a Scottish accent for Herriot but maybe that was too much for an entire audio? In the new series Herriot is definitely using a Scottish accent, but it makes sense as the actor is in fact from the Highlands. 

Nicholas Ralph as James Herriot, with an adoring co-star.

And about the new series. . . well, it's beautifully filmed and I love seeing all the animals, but I already have some quibbles since I'd read most of the book before I started watching. We've only had three episodes air here in the U.S. but I'm already annoyed with some of the changes they've made, both with the plot and the characters. I'm sure I'll watch all eight episodes, but I'm already hoping that the original series didn't make as many changes. I did love the book and am already on the library waitlist for the next in the series. It's perfect reading for difficult times and I suspect I may finish all the books in the next few months.

Pomfret Towers: A Comfort Read Set in Downton Abbey (Plus a Bad Book Cover)

Nice cover on this Virago Modern Classic edition. It reminds me of a vintage travel poster. 

I started reading Angela Thirkell's Barsetshire series last fall, when I was in dire need of a comfort read. Beginning in 1933, Angela Mackail Thirkell (sister of Denis Mackail, who wrote the charming Greenery Street) wrote 29 novels set in the fictional county of Barsetshire, the same county as Trollope's novels. So far I've read five of the first six and have found all of them mostly delightful.  If the words "English country house party in the 1930s" pique your interest as they do mine, then this is quite possibly the book for you.

Pomfret Towers is #6 in the series and was published in 1938. The story begins with an invitation to a weekend house party. (I kept imagining it set in pre-war Highclere Castle AKA Downton Abbey, which I just visited in the UK; I'll post about it soon). The elderly Lord Pomfret is having a group for the weekend and is looking for some young people, so he invites Guy and Alice Barton, the young adult children of one of his tenants. Mr. Barton is a successful architect and his wife is a successful writer of historical novels. Guy works for his father and Alice, shy and delicate, is terrified of the idea of spending a weekend with a lot of smart and fashionable people. She warily accepts after Lord Pomfret tells her to bring along her friends Roddy and Sally Wicklow. Rowdy works for Lord Pomfret's agent, and Sally is a quintessential country girl who loves dogs and horses and is quite jolly. 

The house party gets under way and Alice is taken under the wing of the beautiful Phoebe Rivers, a sort of cousin to Lord Pomfret, who is visiting with her brother Julian, a rather spoiled artist-type, and their overbearing mother, Hermione, another novelist. Mrs. Rivers' primary purpose in the visit is to get Phoebe paired off with Lord Pomfret's heir apparent, Giles Foster. The house also party includes Mr. Johns, one of the partners of Mrs. Rivers' publishing firm, who is not convinced that the income from her books is worth the trouble of putting up with her. 

Most of the story is taken up with the possible pairings-off between the various young people and the chagrin of Mrs. Rivers when these silly youths don't follow her wishes. There are also some very funny bits about writers and publishers. Our omniscient narrator gives us some of Mr. Johns' more amusing thoughts, as well as Lady Pomfret's steadfast secretary Miss Merriman, in whom the unbearable Mrs. Rivers has met her match.

. . . [Mrs. Rivers] was forced to fall back on the interesting subject of herself and tell Miss Merriman how many signed photographs she gave away last year. If Miss Merriman had had real tact she would have asked whether Mrs. Rivers could possibly spare her one, but she merely remarked that she must get one of Mrs. Rivers' books from the library as soon as she had time to do some reading, and that Lady Pomfret had had Mrs. Rivers' last book on the [waiting] list ever since it came out but hadn't got it yet. Whether Miss Merriman knew how annoying this was to Mrs. Rivers, who have liked the libraries to buy enough copies for all the subscribers, we are not in a position to say. (p. 129)

I really enjoyed this book -- it was light and funny, if a bit predictable. It was pretty easy to guess who was going to end up with whom, though there were some amusing minor plot twists. Also, in previous Thirkell books there have been occasional racist remarks which made me uncomfortable (though I do realize anti-Semitism was pretty common among the middle and upper classes during that period); this book, thankfully, didn't have any that I remember. 

And now for some alternate book covers! 

This cover is from the 1980s. Is that supposed to be Deborah Kerr? Whoever she is, she looks far too old and glamorous unless she's supposed to be Mrs. Rivers. And what is that bizarre cord wrapped around her shoulder and bosom? is she being lassoed by the guy hiding in the bushes? It's all very strange.

I suppose this one is better, it's the Moyer-Bell edition from 2007. Their covers are generally good (though I have found some egregious typographical errors in the text). I don't know enough about fashion history to know if this dress is period-appropriate. I don't have this edition so I don't know the source of the cover image.

The original cover. I do love how it explains Thirkell is the "author of 'August Folly' and other delightful novels.' Even her own publisher thinks her books are delightful, so it must be true!

Anyway, of the five Thirkell novels I've read so far, this was definitely my favorite and I'm very much looking forward to the next 24 (!) books in the series. I already own about a dozen in Moyer-Bell editions that I picked up at Half-Price Books back in Texas, though there are a few volumes in the series which are difficult to find and can be pricey.

After considering, I have decided to count this as my Classic by a Woman Author -- Thirkell wrote this book eighty years ago and it's still in print, so I'm calling that a classic. That makes ten books read for the Back to the Classics challenge, only two left to go!

The 1938 Club: The Baker's Daughter by D. E. Stevenson

I was really struggling to find a book to read for The 1938 Club Readalong, hosted by Simon at Stuck in a Book and Karen at Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings. It seemed I'd read all the best books already (including the P. G. Wodehouse classic The Code of the Woosters, which I finished just days before the readalong was announced). Nonetheless, the librarian in me refused to give up and I kept hunting; I finally and came up with not one but three books from 1938 that I wanted to read. 

The first book I read was The Baker's Daughter by D. E. Stevenson. I'm thrilled that Sourcebooks is reprinting her works, I just wish they would published more than two a year! The Baker's Daughter just came out in January, (though I was actually able to get my hands on a different edition from ILL, as I just can't bear to buy another book right now). Anyway, alight charming book by Stevenson was just the thing.

The setup: set in the 1930s, Sue Pringle is in her early 20s, living with her stepmother, younger brother, and curmudgeonly father, the baker, in a small town in Scotland. Her late mother's parents own a successful grocery shop and would love for Sue to come and live with them, as she doesn't much get along with her stepmother. One day, while visiting her grandmother at the shop, a customer has an unusual request -- not just groceries, but an actual cook. The customer is the Mrs. Darnay, wife of an artist who's just left glamorous London rented a cottage so he can paint in the wilds of Scotland. Sue, bored with her dull life, is intrigued by the idea of an artist, jumps at the chance and agrees to take on the job. After Mrs. Darnay suddenly does a runner back to London, Sue takes pity on Mr. Darnay, and stays on to keep house for him and keep him from starving, as he's so absorbed in his work. Naturally, one thing leads to another, and Sue finds herself falling in love with the reclusive artist. 

This was a quick, light read, and if you've read Miss Buncle's Book or any of Stevenson's other novels, you'll find few surprises here. It's a charming little novel with a fairly predictable outcome, though there were some interesting twists along the way. I liked the characters, especially Sue's grandparents, and I liked how Stevenson really seemed to appreciate Scotland, with nice descriptions of the scenery. She also gave the characters depth and color without making them too stereotypical.

However, there was an attempt at one plot twist that I thought was really unnecessary, and a weird anti-Semitic remark that kind of came out of left field, with a reference to Hitler. I'm not sure if Stevenson was criticizing what was happening politically in the late 1930s, but it seemed really incongruous to the storyline. Also, the ending was kind of abrupt. But overall, it was a very enjoyable book and a perfect comfort read if you like middlebrow women's fiction from that time period. 

There are two other Stevenson reprints by Sourcebooks I haven't read yet, Celia's House and The Listening Valley. My library actually owns both of them but I'm rather torn, I don't know if I should read them now for free or read up more of my TBR shelves now and save those for later, since I can actually buy them from Sourcebooks later. Bloggers, have you read any other books by D. E. Stevenson? Which do you recommend? And are you enjoying The 1938 Club?

The Blue Castle by L. M. Montgomery

Okay, quick survey. . .  what is the worst cover of a book you've read so far in 2014?

And how does it compare to this one:

Honestly, is this not the CHEESIEST book cover you've ever seen????  (Unless, of course, you are a regular reader of paperback romances, or the illustrator of this cover, in which case I apologize in case I've offended you. )

And my next question is this:  I know that book covers will attract readers to books, but have you ever been so put off by a book's cover that you actually refused to read it?  I ask this, because I bought this book more than six years ago after reading rave reviews by some of my favorite bloggers.  However, I could never bring myself to read it because I was too embarrassed.  Seriously!!

I finally decided I'd give it a try the other day -- I honestly wanted something from my TBR shelves that was short, and that was the complete opposite of Moby-Dick, which I had just finished, after six weeks of listening to the audio in the car.  I had also started reading a Zola novel which just wasn't doing anything for me.   

This is the story of Valancy Stirling, who lives somewhere in Canada with her mother and aunt, and is completely cowed and browbeaten by her entire extended family.  At twenty-nine, she is an old maid, and her family will never forget it.  When I  actually started reading it, I still didn't crack my lousy mass-market paperback -- I read the first chapter or so via the e-book version from Project Gutenberg Australia.  

I was pretty much hooked when I read this paragraph in Chapter I:

Aunt Wellington, of whom Valancy stood in abject awe, would tell her about Olive's new chiffon dress and Cecil's last devoted letter. Valancy would have to look as pleased and interested as if the dress and letter had been hers or else Aunt Wellington would be offended. And Valancy had long ago decided that she would rather offend God than Aunt Wellington, because God might forgive her but Aunt Wellington never would.

Things get very interesting when something absolutely life-changing happens to Valancy.  Without telling her family why, she decides to take matters into her own hands and live her life the way she wants, without giving a fig about what other people think.  This completely shocks her family and most of the population of her small town, and the reactions of her family members are pretty hilarious.  I don't want to give too much away, but this part of the book is full of wry observations and some laugh-out loud moments.

This book was written by L. M. Montgomery, the beloved writer of the Anne of Green Gables series.  I discovered Anne fairly late in life -- I never read it as a child because I somehow got it confused with Pollyanna, and I assumed Anne would be a sickly-sweet goody two-shoes.  I never read Heidi either.  Still haven't.  (If there are any Heidi and Pollyanna fans out there, please tell me if I should reconsider). The Blue Castle is Montgomery's only book meant for adults, and it does remind me a bit of what Anne would have been like as a grown-up, though I can't for a minute imagine her as browbeaten as Valancy is in the beginning of the book -- so, really, Valancy is like Anne after she takes charge of her own life.

Anyway, this book is funny and charming, and there's a nice little love story, though the ending is a bit unrealistic.  But it's a fun fast read, just over 200 pages in most editions.  It's a great summer read if you can get past the horrible cover.  Clearly, the publishers never actually read it, because the couple on the front look nothing like Valancy and the love interest.  I only wish I'd bought a later edition with this cover:

or even this one: 

(Also cheesy, but not nearly as bad as the first one.)

Or even this one:

This one's better, but to be fair, Valancy's mother and aunt would faint dead away before they let her near a window with this much skin showing.  And don't get me started on the makeup -- this book was published in 1926.   

Anyway -- what books repelled you before you even opened the covers?  And has anyone actually read Pollyanna and liked her, or does she make your teeth ache?  

No Fond Return of Love by Barbara Pym

In honor of the centenary of Barbara Pym's birth, Thomas at My Porch and Amanda at Fig and Thistle have organized Barbara Pym Reading Week!  If you have not Barbara Pym, you are in for a treat.  I've now read four of her thirteen books and am just starting a fifth, and they have all been delightful.  

My fourth foray into Barbara Pym's world was No Fond Return of Love.  This is the story of three people who meet while attending a weekend conference on indexing in the late 1950s or early 1960s.  Two of them, Dulcie Mainwaring and Viola Dace, are thirtysomething women who have been disappointed in love; the third is a handsome scholar, Aylwin Forbes, who has recently separated from his wife.  Aylwin and Viola actually have a bit of history, though nothing's really happened, and Dulcie develops a bit of a crush on Aylwin.  

Viola and Dulcie become friendly and as their friendship develops, so does Dulcie's interest in Aylwin. In fact, she almost becomes a bit stalkerish.  At the time, it would probably have been considered just an eccentric crush, but nowadays I think one would be worried.  Dulcie begins to track down Alywin's ex-wife, the parish of Alywin's brother, a clergyman; and the somewhat shabby seaside hotel where Alywin grew up.  There are a lot of moments which are almost painfully awkward to read as Dulcie snoops about him and Viola, still getting over her crush, indulges her.  

Still, it's all very delightful.  We also get a bit of insight into a younger crowd as Dulcie's twentyish niece Lucy moves in with her while she starts a secretarial course in London.  There are also the usual cast of clergyman's wives and do-gooder churchwomen that seem to inhabit all of Pym's novels, and lots of discussion of the food and drink of the period.  I will be forever curious about Cauliflower Cheese from having read Barbara Pym, and though I am lactose intolerant and cauliflower is far from my favorite vegetable, I will probably try and make one soon since I recently ordered this:

It should arrive in the next month or so, and hopefully I'll be able to make all the recipes mentioned in the books.  

Though Barbara Pym is often compared to Jane Austen.  I don't know if I'd say that exactly -- her heroines are older, more jaded, and a little more worldy than Austen's.  However, if Jane Austen traveled in time to the 1950s, still unmarried and fortyish, without aristocratic connections, I can definitely see her writing books very much like No Fond Return of Love and Excellent Women.  They have a similar wry humor and sneaky observations.  

When I opened this book I was hooked from the very first page, with this sentence:

For what could be more peculiar than a crowd of grown-up people, most of them middle-aged or even elderly, collected together in a girls' boarding school in Derbyshire for the purposes of discussing scholarly niceties that meant nothing to the rest of the world?

This cracked me up because for the three of the past four years, I've spent  a long weekend at the Annual General Meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America, surrounded by about 500 Janeites, discussing her works and her world, from its broad themes to absolute minutiae.  I'm quite sure most of my Janeite friends would love Barbara Pym, if they don't read her already.  

Who else is reading Barbara Pym this week?  Which are your favorites?  And who has a good recipe for Cauliflower Cheese?

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

You know what I just love about reading?  When you find a book and you get so into it that you can't stop reading it, and it's just as wonderful as you hoped -- and then, you find out that this author has written a whole bunch of other books.  And then you want to rush to the library or the bookstore or online and order all of them, right now!

Well, that's how I felt about Excellent Women by Barbara Pym.  It was short and charming and I loved the main character, and it really made me think.  It's British domestic fiction, but it's not at all cutesy or twee.  Why did I wait so long to read this book?  I bought it more than two years ago, and though I didn't finish it in time for Virago Reading Week, I'm so glad it was a the top of my TBR list.

But now that I've been babbling, I suppose a brief description would be an order.  So.  Set in in London in the 1950s, Mildred Lathbury is a thirtysomething spinster, a clergyman's daughter and "excellent woman" who spends a lot of time volunteering at the local vicarage and generally doing good works.  She lives alone in a small flat, in what seems to be the verge of genteel poverty -- she only works part-time and doesn't seem to get much to eat.  Mildred's life gets shaken up when some new people move into her building, a young couple called the Napiers.  The wife Helena is an anthropologist and her husband arrives later, a rather dashing young naval officer who'd been posted in Italy.  Mildred gets slowly sucked into their somewhat tumultuous marriage, sort of acting as a go-between.

Mildred's other best friends are the Malorys: Julian, the parish vicar (whom, it is generally believed, is a perfect match for Mildred) and his sister, Winifred, who lives at the parish and keeps house for them.  Winifred and Julian decide to convert their attic into a flat to let, and things get interesting when an attractive young widow, Allegra Gray, moves in.  Her late husband was also a clergyman and she has definite ideas about how things should be run so things in the parish get complicated as well.

The novel doesn't have a whole lot of action, but the characters are so well-drawn I was quickly sucked in to the minutia of life in 1950s England.  Pym has been described as a modern-day Jane Austen but what really struck me was that Mildred didn't really remind me so much of one of Austen's heroines as much as Austen herself -- I think if Jane had been living in 1950s England, she would have been very much like Mildred: unmarried, a clergyman's daughter, quietly and wryly observing the lives of the people in her parish.  Though Excellent Women is set in London, it definitely had a the feeling of village life to it.

I grew to love Mildred and her observations, and now I want to read everything by Barbara Pym -- but now I'm annoyed at myself for waiting so long to read this book.  I'm also annoyed that I'm in the middle of the TBR Dare and I am not allowed to check out books at all.   So I'll have to wait until April, but luckily my library has ten more of her books, though I can definitely see myself wanting to own all of them.  

Mariana by Monica Dickens

I first encountered this book at BookPeople in Austin, Texas (probably the world's best independent bookstore). One of the coolest things about this store is that it has an entire section just for classics.  Joy of joys! Well, whilst browsing several months ago, I came across this volume shelved next to (gasp!) books by Charles Dickens. Who was this upstart Dickens, with her book on the shelf next to my beloved Bleak House and Oliver Twist? Who had the nerve to call herself Dickens???

Um, actually, his great-granddaughter, that's who. And a darn good writer in her own right, though nothing like the wordy, flowery prose of the beloved (and sometimes reviled) Charles. After purchasing it, I soon realized it was the second book from the marvelous Persephone imprint -- I already owned Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, which was waiting patiently on my to-read shelf.

Sadly, Mariana languished on the shelves for several months until a few weeks ago when I needed something comforting during a nasty ear infection. And it was an excellent comfort read, but despite the beautiful cover, this isn't the chick lit I was expecting. The story begins with a young woman, Mary, who is alone in a country cottage during World War II. She's just heard on the wireless that a British ship has been sunk -- the ship on which her beloved husband is sailing. She is in a state of complete panic because there's a terrible storm and all the phone lines are down, and she can't even walk into the village to try and contact anyone. She is utterly alone in her terror and misery, with no company but a little dog until the following morning.

The book then begins to flash back to Mary's childhood. She's never known her father, who died in the Great War, but she spends idyllic summer's at the family home in the country, surrounded by her loving grandparents, aunt, uncles, and cousins. She has an incredible crush on her cousin Denys, her first great love. The book then follows Mary through her childhood, adolescence, and life as a young woman growing up in London with her mother, a dressmaker, and her hilarious uncle Gerald, a somewhat ne'er-do-well actor. Mary struggles in school, flunks out of drama college, and learns dressmaking in Paris. We also follow Mary's love life -- the prologue never gives the husband's name, so I breathlessly followed the story to figure out which of her men could be lost at sea.

This is a really nice coming-of-age-story set during the inter-war years, one of my very favorite periods. It's touching and sometimes absolutely hilarious -- Mary gets into some really amusing scrapes. Her time at drama school is particularly funny. This book is loosely based on Monica Dickens' life, and what I also find very interesting is that Mariana was first published in 1940 when she was only 24! She never set out to become a writer, but sort of fell into it -- her first published work is One Pair of Hands, which is the story of her life working as a domestic (after she'd been a debutante!). I was so intrigued by this, having worked as both a professional pastry cook and a writer, that I instantly requested One Pair of Hands from my library. (Review to follow soon).

For all you Persphone fans, and for those who are just intrigued, please do yourself a favor and find this book. It's one of the Persephone Classics that are readily available here in the US, so if you can't find it in your local bookstore, it's easy to find online.

Blogging Sick Leave and Comfort Reads

Sorry to have been away from the blog for so long, but, unfortunately I've been nursing a nasty ear infection for the past week.  I've managed to read a few comforting books, though I've been a little too foggy to put together enough coherent and insightful thoughts to write an actual book review.  (Though I have been gratefully reading lots of other brilliant and clever postings!)  Hopefully, I'll spend the holiday getting caught up and start posting again soon.

In honor of my little sick leave, I'm posting a short list of some of my favorite comfort reads (in no particular order):

1.  Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone. The book that made me fall in love with the wizarding world.  It will always be my favorite of the entire series.

2.  The Chronicles of Narnia.  My favorites are The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Horse and His Boy.  Though Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader are awfully good. . .  . okay, pretty much the whole series except The Magician's Nephew and The Silver Chair, both of which I found to be dreary and depressing.

3.  Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. [Spoiler alert!] Elizabeth realizes Mr. Darcy isn't such a horse's ass after all, they fall in love, and all is right with the world.  Sigh.

4.  Persuasion.  See #3 and substitute Anne Eliot and Captain Wentworth for Lizzie and Darcy.

5.  Danny, the Champion of the World, by Roald Dahl.  By far my favorite Roald Dahl book, and curiously, one of the few without magic.  I love the relationship between Danny and his father.  The great pheasant caper is pretty cool also.

6.  A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith.  Poor Francie Nolan's life is so terrible, so why is this story so comforting?  

7.  To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.  My favorite parts of this book are about the minutiae of life in a small town in the South.   This book just gets better as I get older.

8.  The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare.  One of the best historical juvenile books ever.  It even makes me want to go back to Colonial Times -- and I don't do so well without running water.

9.  Ozma of Oz by L. Frank Baum.  Dorothy's back in Oz after a shipwreck with a talking chicken. There are also trees with lunch boxes and dinner pails growing on them, a Hungry Tiger, and a princess with multiple heads -- what could be better?  How about Dorothy standing up to the princess who wants to trade heads with her -- "I b'lieve you won't!!"  You go, Dorothy!

10.  Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier.  Is it weird that a creepy gothic novel is comforting?  A young woman marries a much older widower who brings her back to his big scary mansion, complete with a creepy housekeeper who's obsessed with the first wife -- sounds comforting, right? Still one of my favorites.

So, bloggers, which books do you turn to when you're sick or cranky?  Childhood reads, mysteries, chick lit?  I'd love to know what other people find comforting.