I have read several books too, although perhaps not as many as I’d have liked. Here are my brief (and possibly distorted by the passage of time) thoughts on some of them.

Ali Smith – There but for the

I really liked this. The use of language was extremely clever. Some of the characters’ expressions have stuck firmly in my head. My other lasting impression, though, is that although it was a stunning book in many ways, it was primarily ideas-driven, and so I felt a detached admiration rather than any real engagement. I also remember feeling confused when I finished it, so perhaps the detachment came from having found it too cryptic.

Kazuo Ishiguro – A Pale View of Hills

Another elliptical novel. A very slight book in which the last few pages threw doubt over everything I had just read, in a delicious and disturbing way (it reminded me of Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger in that sense). I’m not sure if Ishiguro quite nailed it with this novel, in the way that he did with The Remains of the Day and the The Unconsoled (which I must re-read soon). Saying that, the mood that Pale View created and left me with was strong and unique.

Hilary Mantel – Giving Up The Ghost: a memoir

An unusual, visceral, sharp and insightful book, written with inventive use of language and imagery. Mantel’s story begins as she and her husband are selling their house, Owl Cottage, and in the process will be saying goodbye to its resident ghost. She looks back to infanthood and childhood, remembering herself as a young girl and using the present tense; and then moves through her often painful and challenging experiences of adulthood. It concludes with an especially moving exploration of the ghosts of unborn children. I liked the book very much, but I think it suffered a little from what Mantel explains as ‘learned secrecy’ (“Once you have learned the habits of secrecy, they aren’t so easy to give up.”) She recalls events such as her battle with illness with candour and fullness; but other things are consciously skipped over, creating a sense of unevenness.

Haruki Murakami – What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

In a sporadic diary form, Murakami writes about the build-ups to marathons and triathlons he is going to be taking part in; about his reasons for running; and about how it relates to the process of writing novels. It’s not a memoir, but there are bits about his life connected to running (he gave up running a bar to concentrate on writing, and took up running at around the same time). I devoured it in a few days, but I downloaded the book because I recently started running, and was very interested in what he had to say about being a writer who runs. I’m not sure what anyone who isn’t interested in running would get out of reading it, as I’m not sure it is a remarkable piece of writing in itself. There were moments when I struggled to relate to it, whilst being impressed/concerned by his capacity for self-discipline and perseverance. For example, he once ran an ultramarathon of 62 miles in one day, and a marathon in the blazing heat of Greece.

At the moment I’m reading My Antonia by Willa Cather, which I’m really enjoying. I’ve never read anything by her before. My resolution not to buy new books has been forgotten, but I blame the Kindle for this. I’ve grown to love it. It’s just too easy to buy new ebooks for it, though. One of them is a new short story called I’m Starved for You by Margaret Atwood, which I’m looking forward to.

One of them was a novella I read on the Kindle, Anita Brookner’s At the Hairdresser’s. It’s part of a series called Penguin Shorts, which consists of short works published exclusively in digital format. It breaks this year’s resolution to only read books I already have, as I downloaded it a few weeks ago. But part of my brain seemed to think it didn’t count, because it was an ebook, it was cheap, and because at that particular moment I really, really needed to read Anita Brookner.

I read two of Brookner’s books, Leaving Home and The Rules of Engagement, some years ago. I found her style relentlessly intense and focused, and her analysis of the minds and lives of lonely, reserved women piercingly accurate and resonant. I don’t think I’ve ever read anyone else like her. At the Hairdresser’s satisfied my Brookner craving. It’s narrated by Elizabeth Warner, an older woman living alone in a basement flat in London, who, stuck at the hairdresser’s one day when it is raining heavily outside, is driven home by a young man who runs a car service, Chris. Her experiences from then onwards cause her to decide to make some changes to her life. The plot is very predictable, but Elizabeth’s musings on her past, and the ways it has influenced her present, are sharp, frank and often sad. It’s been said of Brookner that she writes the same book over and over again, with the same protagonists. This might be true, but because she is an expert at what she does, and because I am fascinated by her subject matter, I don’t mind, and will gladly return to reading her again and again.

Another book I finished was (a library copy of) another recently published book, The Coward’s Tale by Vanessa Gebbie. It took me quite a long time to read, and not for any negative reasons. It is a rich book, precisely written, and full of poetic and apt description. Its presentation of characters is warm and completely without judgement. It never once flags or loses its way, and so deserves to be read with care. It is set in a former mining town in Wales, and explores the tragic legacy of an accident that happened in the Kindly Light pit. The stories of the town’s surviving inhabitants, idiosyncratic, semi-mythical and shot through with almost unbearable sadness, are related by Ianto Passchendaele Jenkins, a beggar who sleeps on the steps of the town chapel. His stories are gobbled up by Laddy Merridew, a young boy who has been sent to live in the town with his gran while his parents are having problems.

The novel is (perfectly) structured around these stories, which Ianto will tell to Laddy and any other curious bystanders if they provide him with food (mainly toffees) and drink (coffee with two sugars). At the beginning of each story, I felt I needed to settle down in a comfy place with a big cup of tea and give it my full attention, because I was going to be in for a cracking (but heartbreaking) journey each time. In the interludes between stories, we find out some of what goes on in the present-day town, and learn Ianto Jenkins’s own sad story. Essentially, The Coward’s Tale is, like the feathers that one of characters keeps trying to make out of wood shavings (for his own important reasons), beautifully crafted, fragile and special.

So, two very good reads to start the year. I’m now currently reading and enjoying Hilary Mantel’s memoir Giving up the Ghost (on the Kindle), and Ali Smith’s There but for the (I only got it for Christmas, but couldn’t resist diving in.)

There were two books that I really, really loved: Repeat it Today with Tears by Anne Peile, and The Weather in the Streets by Rosamond Lehmann. And there were several others I really liked, the best of which were Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima; The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim by Jonathan Coe; A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan; The Shaking Woman, or, a History of My Nerves by Siri Hustvedt; and The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund De Waal.

Once again, I didn’t go to the theatre very much this year. Most of the productions I saw were good, but none of them stand out as being particularly special. I think it’ll be a similar story in 2012, because my job situation has (once again) become shaky and complicated, and I won’t have a budget for theatre in the near future at least.

All is not lost though, because this means that, in theory, I’ll have both the time and the impetus (i.e., no money) to work on the reading resolution I’ve made: in 2012, read only books that I already have on my shelves. There are many, including this lovely little pile I got for Christmas, and the others I will soon be acquiring thanks to a gift card.

Alcestis and The Night Circus were surprise presents from a friend (I know little about either); two Julian Barnes books - I've never read him but have been meaning to; and Ali Smith's There but for the, which I'm *really* looking forward to

I’d also like to use the library more, so if I have a sudden burning need to read a particular new (or old) book, I’ll do my best to get it from there rather than buy it. Hopefully I’ll be able to stick to this. I made some resolutions at the beginning of this year, and it seems I’ve actually stuck by them: I grew tomatoes from seed (proof below); and I read (a few) more books and saw (a few) more plays than I did in 2010. The other reading resolution I have is to read a lot more non-fiction. I’m being drawn towards it more than I am to fiction lately. The De Waal and Hustvedt books mentioned above were excellent reads.

Grown by me, honest!

At the moment I’m trying to cram a bit of end-of-year reading into my last bit of precious free time before going back to work, and relaunching what I’m sure will be a lengthy and arduous assault on the job market. I’ve just started Vanessa Gebbie’s The Coward’s Tale, which was a little slow to get into, but is gradually working its spell on me. Although this is Gebbie’s debut novel, I’d actually already heard of her, as I read one of her short stories, The Time it Takes, when it won a writing competition in 2005. It’s clever, powerful, and stuck with me. Anyway, I’ll be settling down with The Coward’s Tale this evening, probably with a nice cup of tea brewed in my amazing new teapot.

Amazing new teapot

Tori releases a new album every few years, without fail. This year it was Night of Hunters, a commission for Deutsche Grammophon, which consists of songs based on works by classical composers. It’s heavily conceptual (not unusually for Tori). It charts the psychological process of a woman during the demise of a relationship, and features Tori’s niece (Kelsey Dobyns) and daughter (Natashya Hawley) as the Fire Muse and a shapeshifting animal. As with previous albums, I probably don’t understand the concept as well as I could do: I just sort of accept it, and then listen to the music for what it is. And NoH is what I’ve hoped each album since Scarlet’s Walk would be: beautiful, complex, strange and dark. The classical element just adds to it. It’s exactly my cup of tea.

The Royal Albert Hall gig featured a lot of the tracks from NoH, with the deliciously angry, Alkan-inspired Shattering Sea as the opener. The Apollon Musagete Quartett, who play on the NoH album, were a perfect accompaniment. They also breathed new life into older songs such as Cruel and Precious Things, which were intense, theatrical performances (I loved the lighting effects throughout – although they were perhaps a bit too enthusiastic during Precious Things). Tori even let the AMQ take the spotlight with their own composition, A Multitude of Shades, telling us that “When I heard this, I knew you’d understand.”It was part eerie strings, part Irish jig, and very good indeed.

Some NoH songs came to life in a way that they hadn’t yet, for me, from listening to the album. Star Whisperer (based on Schubert) in particular was epic, satisfying genius. I also loved Tori’s choice of songs for the second encore: her captivating take on Smells Like Teen Spirit, the rarely-played Siren, and the utterly joyful Big Wheel. Tori’s performance was consistently strong throughout the show. She was energetic, clearly pleased to be there, and determined to put on a show that did justice to such a vast, stunning venue.

I’m confused as to what I really think of ebooks and ereaders. I’m impressed by the technology of the Kindle, especially the screen, because it doesn’t even really look like a screen. I like the built-in functions, probably because not having to walk over to a shelf to pick up a dictionary, or get a pen to make notes, suits my inherent laziness. I also like the idea of being able to take hundreds of books with me when I travel, should I so wish. But I certainly haven’t given up hard-copy books. The thought of getting rid of all my books, and keeping all of them on one slim device, makes me uneasy. It brings to mind disasters of the iTunes variety: in the past I’ve accidentally deleted entire libraries of music, and not been able to get back some of the tracks I bought. There’s also the simple fact that I love books as objects (some more than others). And there is something a bit odd about not being able to see how many pages you have left. A percentage tracker at the bottom of the screen is not really the same.

At the moment I haven’t been able to decide what the Kindle’s place is, so I seem to just be treating it with a sort of tentative delight, as if it were a novelty pet. I’m making sure my non-digital books aren’t abandoned by tackling three of them at the same time. There’s Colette’s Chéri and The Last of Chéri, which I’ve wanted to read for ages. It’s definitely living up to expectations. I love the precision and complexity of the characterisation, and the way that the persistent sadness of Chéri and Léa’s separate suffering contrasts with the frivolity of their environments.

I’m also about halfway through Scarlett Thomas’s Our Tragic Universe. I find that I’m often thinking, when I’m reading, that I shouldn’t like it, because it sometimes seems so technically flawed. For example, the protagonist, Meg, is a novelist. She spends a lot of time trying to redraft her current novel, and we get long passages about the numerous ideas she’s had for it, all based very closely on events in her real life. It can seem very rambly. And yet, I don’t actually think it is flawed. I think, as with The End of Mr Y, Thomas is laying out carefully placed clues that are leading to some sort of bafflingly clever and unconventional revelation. I think her style is highly original, and I’m always glued to her every word, because I can relate to, but am also fascinated by, her narrators.

And there’s Katherine Mansfield’s Selected Stories, which are temporarily on hold while I finish Chéri. I’ve been in a bit of a reading slump recently, but it seems that reading several books at once is a good antidote, especially when they’re as diverse as these four.

It begins with an imaginative scene set in a restaurant. Six women gather to celebrate the main character, Marlene (Suranne Jones)’s promotion to managing director of ‘Top Girls’, an employment agency. The other women are all from different historical eras: Dull Gret (Olivia Poulet), Lady Nijo (Catherine McCormack), Isabella Bird (Stella Gonet), Lady Griselda (Laura Elphinstone), and Joan of Arc (Lucy Briers). They tell stories about the hardships they have been through, as well as their achievements. They get drunk and raucous, and don’t listen very attentively: there’s a lot of interruption and talking over each other.

The action then moves to the garden of a contemporary rural house. A teenage girl, Angie (Olivia Poulet), and her younger friend Kit (Lisa Kerr) are playing together. Angie tells Kit she’s going to go away, to London, to visit her aunt Marlene. She changes into a floral dress. Angie then turns up at ‘Top Girls’, where Marlene works with her colleagues Win (Catherine McCormack) and Nell (Laura Elphinstone). Marlene is not exactly thrilled to see her. Angie adores her aunt: she says that the day Marlene last visited her and her mother, Joyce, was the best day of her life. The scene ends with Marlene telling Win that Angie is stupid, and that there is no hope for her.

The final scene jumps back in time to the previous year, when Marlene visits Angie and Joyce. She gives Angie the floral dress as a present. Political and class issues previously hinted at in the Top Girls office are brought out into the open. Marlene voices her support for Thatcher; Joyce is horrified by this. It’s also revealed (*spoiler alert*) that Marlene is Angie’s real mother: Marlene left her with Joyce in Norfolk so that she could go and pursue her career in the city. The play ends with Angie coming downstairs, possibly sleepwalking. Marlene tries to speak to her, but Angie just repeats the word ‘frightening.’

The eighties, and the class divide, were well evoked through costumes. Marlene, Win and Nell all wore the latest power-dressing fashions. Joyce’s clothes and kitchen were in shades of beige, brown and orange, suggesting that there was no progression in her world from seventies’ styles. And yet, although the sets and costumes were realistic enough, I nevertheless felt that there was a sort of coldness about them.

Whether intentional or not, though, this sort of starkness around the edges only helped to reinforce the fact that Top Girls is not meant to be the kind of story- and character-based play in which you become immersed: it’s meant to be alienating and thought-provoking. The first scene, after all, is about as unrealistic as they come; and the fact that the seven actresses (except Suranne Jones) play multiple roles suggests that the characters are meant to be seen more as illustrations of a particular message than as individual people. Saying that, Churchill (and/or the actresses and director, Max Stafford-Clarke) manages to encourage empathy as well as social and political commentary. All of the performances were engaging and convincing, so that I did worry for Angie, and was fascinated, but ultimately deeply unsettled, by Marlene’s single-minded self-interest.

In the introduction to my copy of the play text, it is noted that no woman playwright is included in the 1982 edition of Benedict Nightingale’s An Introduction to 50 Modern British Plays. Only one is featured in Methuen’s 1986 Landmarks of Contemporary British Drama – Caryl Churchill, for Top Girls. It is telling that it took an overtly political play, rather than one exploring domestic or psychological worlds, to break into the history books. Thankfully it is also a play that questions the alarming ramifications of defining success and emancipation for women as individual achievement in traditionally male-dominated workplaces. Churchill condemns such success as meaningless if it means that those who do not fit into this mould are discarded along the way. She knows that feminism is about more than women’s rights; it is essentially about human rights; and that many people would do well to realise this. It’s a point that is still frighteningly relevant today.

Like The Red Shoes, it is based on a fairy tale, this time The Girl Without Hands. A man (Stuart Goodwin) unwittingly gives away his daughter to the Devil (Stuart McLoughlin); but the Devil can’t take her because her soul is too pure. He follows her throughout her life, waiting for her to become corrupted enough to go with him.

The daughter is played by three different actresses, each representing a different stage of her life. Firstly, there’s the Girl (Audrey Brisson), who is covered in mud and whose hands are cut off by her father at the demands of the Devil, as part of his failed attempt to ‘dirty’ her enough to take her.

Then, the Wild (Patrycja Kujawska), who flees from her father and lives in the woods. She finds a pear tree whose pears kindly lower themselves from its branches enough for her to take them, unaware that they are royal pears which must be counted each day by a Prince. Thankfully, instead of punishing her for stealing pears, the Prince falls in love with the Wild, marries her, has a child with her, and even gets a dangerous and unwieldy-looking pair of metal hands made for her. The Prince becomes King and goes off to fight in a war. The Devil turns up and interferes again, this time by intercepting the King’s letters and convincing the King’s mother that she must kill the Wild and cut out her eyes and tongue. Instead, the King’s mother kills a deer, and tells the Wild to leave and save herself.

The Wild then becomes the Woman (Eva Magyar). She and her child return to wandering in the wilderness. She finds her voice (after not having spoken at all so far), and grows a new pair of hands. The Devil appears for a final attempt to take her, but she is too strong. She fights him off for good. She comes across the battered, grief-stricken King, who has been looking for them for years; and they are happily reunited.

It’s a highly allegorical story. I sometimes feel with Kneehigh that the story and characters are secondary to everything else: they are just a base from which to showcase the physical, comical and musical talents of the multi-talented cast, and that is why they always turn to fairy tales and other adaptations: they are concerned with interpretation rather than creating original stories. I don’t necessarily mean this as a negative thing. In the case of The Wild Bride, I found the story satisfying, in the sense that it was well-structured, with a clear arc, a witty script, and the oppression, perseverance and final liberation of a woman as its main theme.

The first half was particularly well-paced and engaging. It was set mostly to blues songs, performed masterfully by Stuart McLoughlin (who was the narrator as well as the Devil) and the musician Ian Ross. All of the small cast played multiple parts: Stuart Goodwin put in perfectly-pitched comic performances as the Father and the Prince/King; Audrey Brisson was the King’s mother and also a beautiful singer; Patrycja Kujawska played the violin. The two women not playing the main character remained involved at all times, sometimes as the Girl/Wild/Woman’s ‘helpers’ – warding off the devil, assisting with costume and prop changes – and perhaps acting as echoes of her past and future selves.

Kneehigh also outdid themselves in their ideas for props and sets (no mean feat). The pear tree was made of light bulbs, which The Wild unscrewed with her mouth. Severed hands were suggested by dipping the Girl’s hands into red paint; then, as the Wild, they became red painted stumps on the ends of bandages, changing to healed, skin-coloured covers for the Woman. The King’s mother was actually a painted portrait of a lady, with holes for Brisson’s hands. Kneehigh’s very visual style is, after all, so well suited to fairy tales, with the vivid and often gruesome imagery that abounds in them.

After a week of seeing the same grey, closed images at work and on my commutes, being reminded of what can be achieved with the use of imagination and skill opened my eyes and left me feeling a little changed, especially after the first act. And I think that’s a mark of good theatre.

As for the title story, and the most famous one, The Turn of the Screw - I’m not sure that I liked it as unequivocally. Parts of it were very good, such as the lucid dialogue and the portrayal of the creepily angelic children; but it felt like I had to trudge through a lot of dense, difficult prose to get to them. Perhaps it was just the mood I was in, and I should try reading it again. Despite this, I do think that James is my kind of writer. I must read more of him soon – the only other book I’ve read of his is The Portrait of a Lady.

I’m now reading the Selected Stories of Katherine Mansfield, and enjoying them. The first two, Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding and The Woman at the Store, expose the secret unhappiness of two married women. Something Childish but very Natural and The Little Governess are rather dark and satirical, setting up ultra-naive or idealistic characters to meet an inevitable moment in which they realise that life is not going to be nearly as peachy as they thought.

The settings for the stories so far are quite diverse. As well as happening in various different places (Germany, New Zealand, London, and France) travelling is a prominent feature: The Little Governess, Something Childish but very Natural and An Indiscreet Journey all include train journeys. I’m looking forward to finding out where else Mansfield will go. There are thirty-three stories in the collection. I’ve only read eight, so it should keep me busy for a while.

*

On Saturday I was lucky enough to catch the Hilary Mantel Culture Show special on TV. I’d seen interviews with her before, but none so in-depth as this. She spoke with great intelligence, wit and honesty about her whole life, and her writing. When the interviewer commented on the apparent orderliness of her house, wondering if she really lived in such a conventional way, Mantel insisted that she did. She said there is so much ‘excitement’ in her head that she needs the external environment to be as ‘bland and boring’ as possible. She extended this to her interactions outside the home – she tries to avoid too much conversation because it would impinge on her busy internal life.

She also spoke eloquently about her experience of illness. At 27, she had a hysterectomy as a consequence of endometriosis, which was left undiagnosed for many years because doctors dismissed her as simply being neurotic. She said it robbed her of the leisure to choose whether or not to reverse her earlier decision that having children didn’t matter to her.

Mantel took up writing because she knew she was not well enough to continue with her previous intention to be a lawyer or politician. She thought she was suited to writing because she always saw the things behind things, especially in the convent where she went to school. She wants her writing to be like the way she views life, as inherently unpredictable, and not what it seems. She doesn’t want the reader to know what the next sentence is going to be; or to know whether to laugh or scream. From what I’ve read of Mantel, I think her novels definitely have this quality: Beyond Black and Vacant Possession were characterised by dark humour and often made me feel unsettled – but in a good way.

It was refreshing, moving and heartening to watch. It seems that such sensitively made programmes, which paint a full picture of a fascinating life and mind, are rare.

Some of the pupils at the school are witch-orphans (although few people know which ones), so it’s likely that some of them might be witches too. The note sparks a flurry not only of speculation as to who the witch might be, but also strange occurrences that appear to be the result of witchcraft. For example, the hall is suddenly filled with a huge flock of birds, and later, the shoes of everyone in the school; the deputy head, Mr Wentworth, suddenly disappears (although turns up again); and a know-it-all called Simon Silverson seems to be under a spell because everything he says starts to come true.

At first it seems that Charles Morgan is behind it all. He has secret magical abilities. He’s an unpopular student because he has a habit of giving people “blank, nasty looks.” He hates most of the people in his class, which makes it easy for him to bewitch them. But he has little control over his powers. When Mr Wentworth vanishes, Charles is convinced that he is to blame: he believes he has the Evil Eye. He burns himself with a candle, hoping that the pain it causes will stop him from performing malicious magic, repeating to himself: “It hurts to be burnt.”

He’s not the only one with a secret. Nan Pilgrim, also unpopular and descended from a famous witch, is accused by the popular girls of being a witch: wrongly, she thinks; but then she discovers that she can ride a broomstick. Nirupam Singh can also do magic. And Estelle, a barely-tolerated hanger-on of the popular clique, turns out to be the daughter of an escaped witch.

When Mr Wentworth’s son, Brian (also unpopular) disappears, a Divisional Inquisitor is called to the school. The secret witches flee. They acquire a spell which they believe to be their only hope. It summons Chrestomanci, who appears in an immaculately-groomed but confused state. Back at the school, he pretends to be the Inquisitor, and then reveals, using the real Inquisitor’s witch-detector, the class witch. There is more than one, of course; many more, in fact. Everyone is a witch, except for four people.

Chrestomanci doesn’t leave things this way, thankfully, or the book might’ve had a horrible, massacre-esque ending. He asks careful questions about the history of their particular world. He eventually deduces that the fabric of it hinges on one historical figure: Guy Fawkes. In their world, Fawkes succeeded in blowing up the Houses of Parliament – without killing anyone, because he did it at night, thinking that he would just test if the fuse would light.

But he did it in Witch Week – the week between Halloween and 5th November, making it “a much worse explosion than it should have been.” Nan, to whom Chrestomanci has assigned the task of explaining to everyone the origins of their world, describes how different worlds are made. Both outcomes of big historical events happen, but both can’t exist in the same world, so it splits and becomes two separate worlds. In the case of smaller events, though, a split doesn’t happen; instead, “other worlds where two things can happen spread out from our own world like rainbows.” When Fawkes succeeded in blowing up Parliament,

this whole stripe of the rainbow, where we are now, and all the magic anywhere near, got blown out of the rest of the world, like a sort of long coloured splinter. But it wasn’t blown quite free. It was still joined to the rest of the rainbow at both ends. And that’s the way it still is. And we could put it back if only we could make it so that the explosion never happened.

Earlier in the story, Simon Silverson is re-bewitched so that nothing he says comes true. He has consequently been refusing to speak. But on Charles’s insistence, everyone yells, “Say what Guy Fawkes did. SAY IT, SIMON!” And Simon says it. Their world is restored to what it should be: one with many similarities, but also differences – like “dreams that are like your usual life, except that a lot of things are not the same.” The most important difference is that in this world, when the note SOMEONE IN THIS CLASS IS A WITCH appears, everyone wants to be the witch, instead of fearing for their lives.

*

I feel like I had to write a long synopsis of Witch Week because without attempting to summarise it in a vaguely ordered and complete way, I wouldn’t even know where to begin to say what I thought of it. It is structured in a similar way to Howl’s Moving Castle: there is a tangle of characters and events which become more and more desperate and chaotic, until, at last, Wynne Jones untangles them and ties them all up in a beautiful little bow. The untangling in Witch Week is more impressive than in Howl’s. The Guy Fawkes explanation is very clever. It is also unexpected, and welcome, because the world, in all its horror, is depicted so matter-of-factly. There’s no hint up until then that it might ever be fundamentally changed.

I also liked the idiosyncratic details. Class 2Y have to write journals. Charles writes his using a secret code: “I felt hot” means that he is thinking of the time he witnessed a witch-burning. The popular girls go through various ridiculous fads, including knitting very white things. Estelle’s knitting is always grey: she can never keep it clean enough to be one of the real in-crowd. Wynne Jones is very good at pinning down the particular agonies and absurdities of school, especially for a child who is a bit strange and on the outside of things. This it what makes me love her books, I think: although they are mind-bogglingly complex, skilful and imaginative in terms of creating plots and worlds, they are also down-to-earth, funny, and very wise.

I’ve still only read four (and a bit – I’m reading The Magicians of Caprona now) of her books, but I’ve been surprised at how different they all are, even within the same series. And yet, the similarities are a constant – like Chrestomanci’s worlds themselves. It reminds me of Wynne Jones’s remark that “each book is an experiment.” She might have tried to do something different every time, and she probably succeeded; but I hope that every time she also retained that unique core.

• Diana Wynne Jones – Witch Week and The Magicians of Caprona – bought at the lovely Barter Books in Northumberland, on a trip up there for a wedding a few months ago. They’re both part of the Chrestomanci series. I’ve read Witch Week already, and have started Magicians. I’ll hopefully write a post about them soon.
• Yukio Mishima – Runaway Horses – the sequel to Spring Snow, which I read, liked, and wrote about here.
  
• Anne Peile – Repeat it Today with Tears – I borrowed this from the library, and liked it so much that I had to get my own copy.
  
• Ovid – Metamorphoses – Bought this because Anne Peile mentioned Ovid in an interview I read with her online. And because I felt like I should have read it by now. Hopefully it won’t become one of the classics that just sits on my shelves unread for years. It’s good to have good intentions, though.
  
• Penelope Lively – City of the Mind, Moon Tiger and Family Album – I’d been meaning to read the first two of these, and then I saw that Book People were selling these three as a cheap, tasty package, so I snapped them up.
  
• Ursula Le Guin – The Earthsea Quartet – snaffled a copy on BookMooch. Read Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness ages ago and liked it a lot. Earthsea has been on my radar for a while and I’m glad to finally have it.
  
• Goethe – Faust – I think I bought this after watching Government Inspector. When I was writing the review of it, I was reading about The Master and Margarita, which the play reminded me of, and saw that it was heavily influenced by Faust, which I don’t think I’ve ever read. So I bought it. (Not sure you need or want to know all this, but it’s nice to remind myself that I don’t always buy things on a whim).
  
• T.S. Eliot – Four Quartets – a work I’ve mentioned twice on this blog, but never yet read in its entirety.
  
• Orlando Figes – Natasha’s Dance: a cultural history of Russia – I’ve been wanting to read this for ages. I finally put myself out of my misery and bought it. I’ve been dipping into it already, but my intention is to read it alongside Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, and maybe even War and Peace.
  
• Siri Hustvedt – A Plea for Eros and What I Loved – bought because I really liked Hustvedt’s The Shaking Woman. I’m looking forward to these.
  
• Oliver Sacks – Migraine – also bought because of The Shaking Woman, although I’ve actually been keen to read Sacks since Hilary Mantel fervently recommended him. A first glance through the book suggests that it’s rather technical and daunting, but I’ll try and give it a proper chance soon.