It’s enough to turn a woman to shoes.

As a rule contemporary literary prizes don’t much interest me and generally I pay no attention, currently the Booker list is a mystery to me (though I do know it’s out there because I’ve been skimming over several posts about it). This isn’t a stand or anything; it’s just that at the moment I don’t get very excited about these lists long or short. However a (very disappointing) visit to Waterstones and the inauguration of The Green Carnation prize are making me reassess how I feel about prizes generally, and niche prizes in particular.

The Green Carnation is a prize for fiction or memoir written by gay men partly organised by Simon Savidge from Savidge reads. He’s rightly excited about this, and though again in all honesty this might be another long list that doesn’t hold a lot of interest for me I think it’s important because it seems to me it’s getting harder than ever to find books outside of our comfort zones.

Now let me start complaining. My financial status over the last couple of years has left a bit to be desired so for books I’m mostly dependent on charity shop finds, and the kindness of publishers who are happy to support a blog like this (to whom I owe a great deal of happy experiences with the postman), but when I can I want to buy books. From a bookshop. That I’ve browsed for. It’s been one of the great pleasures in my life for as long as I can remember shopping and so I resent the state of provincial bookselling as it exists for me.

In my city we have a few charity bookshops which are pretty good, we have an average W H Smiths, two Waterstones, and that’s about it. It’s not very inspiring and in reality it means Waterstones. I’m still waiting for their improvements to appear (which will presumably be after the clearance 3 for 2 they have on at the moment). I would be a lot happier about this if it wasn’t for the fact that both my local branches, neither large to start with, have been steadily cutting down on shelf space. Because of the aforementioned offer and in proud possession of some actual cash I went to buy some books.

This was my wish list: Any of the new Bloomsbury Group titles – ‘Mrs Arris goes to Paris’, ‘Mrs Ames’, ‘Let’s Kill Uncle’, and ‘Henrietta Sees it Through’. Any or all of these would have done. None in stock. The River Cottage ‘Hedgerow’ book (featured heavily in ‘The Guardian’), not only not in stock, but no plans to get it in either. Capuchin’s new release of ‘Highland Fling’ – out of stock on amazon, and no I didn’t really expect to find it, but still it’s Nancy Mitford for heaven’s sake – it will sell. Wilkie Collins – I was looking for ‘The Dead Secret’, ‘Man and Wife’, or ‘Poor Miss Finch’ – none available, presumably all space taken up by the three different editions of ‘The Woman In White’. Anything by John Cheever, anything by Alice Hoffman. Gladys Mitchell’s ‘The Mystery of a Butchers Shop’.‘The Hurricane Party’ by Klas Ostergren – part of the Canongate myths series, or for that matter ‘Girl meets Boy’ by Ali Smith in the same series, neither in stock. And that would be where I gave up, because not only were none of the books I wanted available, there was nothing tempting that I didn’t already have.

I can’t help but feel that off a list of currant books with everything from classics to your actual contemporary fiction I should have been able to find something. In the end I hit amazon, got two of the Bloomsbury Group titles, ‘Boy Meets Girl’ and Collins’ ‘Hide and Seek’. I’m pleased with this lot, I spent the same give or take as I would have off line but it’s not how I wanted to do it.

Which is where I come back to ‘The Green Carnation’, when bookshops can’t inspire it’s left to the internet which I find brilliant when I know what I want, but frustrating when I don’t, which in turn is why I read so many blogs, and why it seems a few more awards, a few more ways of bringing new and old books to our attention are needed. I hope ‘The Green Carnation’ is a successful enterprise and I hope it gets some attention offline as well as on – I want a utopian idyll of vibrant bookselling back on the average high street, and I want it soon please, before I start buying shoes!

The Water Beetle – Nancy Mitford

Nancy Mitford fascinates me, (and a whole lot of other people obviously) at her best she (and her sisters) cast a spell of glamour, wit, and scandal which pretty much reduces me to a schoolgirl crush. At her worst she seems a ridiculous snob but I’m not sure that that doesn’t add to the glamour as well. In real life I don’t care for nicknames and find myself struggling to use them, I avoid wherever possible social circles as incestuously involved as Mitford’s clearly was, yet she makes it sound sophisticated and possibly even fun which is quite a gift. All of which is why I’ll pick up any Mitford thing that comes my way and at least give it a once over.

So it was with ‘The Water Beetle’ which I picked up for the princely sum of a £1.50 and which I thought would make a good stop gap whilst I wait for Capuchin’s reissue of ‘Highland Fling’ to appear. Getting ‘Highland Fling’ is proving to be a bit of a trial, amazon are currently sold out and neither local Waterstones has a copy (which is more especially annoying as the larger of the two branches in town is getting back to its bookselling routes by pitching about 15% of its floor space over to Paperchase. I like stationary but I prefer books, my stationary buying needs are well catered for in Leicester, my book buying needs aren’t and I fail to see how less book selling space is going to improve a bookshop. And it occurs to me that this is part the reason I called myself desperate reader. Hmmph.)

Slightly distracted from my point now but I’ll get back to it yet... so here I am patiently (ish) awaiting a means of purchasing a long anticipated book and looking for ways to while away the time, both factors which pushed me towards ‘The Water Beetle’ an assortment of Mitford essays which with one or two exceptions have aged remarkably badly. She gives a fascinating account of a visit to Russia in the 50’s and what Mitford fan could fail to be excited by ‘Reading for Pleasure’ an account of Nancy’s reading tastes, but the rest of the collection is Nancy as a woman of a her class and time – a Francophile to boot, I’m not so very pro French - the result of years in the wine trade rendered hideous by customers who don’t know what they’re talking about (no reason why they should) but who refuse to believe that I do. (People I’ve wasted the best years of my life on learning this stuff, I’m not just making it up, and if you persist in doubting me one day I’ll snap and use the ‘Oxford Companion to Wine’ in a way Jancis Robinson could hardly approve.)

Again – where was I? Ah yes, Nancy Mitford reading like a parody of Prince Philip – and this is the thing, I can’t warm to the woman in these pages, she put my back up more often than not, yet still I can’t resist her because even when she’s repellent she manages to be fascinating. I could only recommend ‘The Water Beetle’ to hard core enthusiasts but I would still recommend it. I plan to keep my copy with the various collections of Mitford letters I’ve amassed as a reminder of the other side of the women so carefully edited and presented in these anthologies, I rather think it’ll help me read more between the lines.

Finally has anyone read ‘Highland Fling’ yet – and if so what’s the verdict?

Home At Last

After a long three days being trained, and a longer three nights away I’m finally home. Training itself turned out to be pretty good, using trains turned out to be horrible – it took me an epic five hours to get home tonight. I’m not going to talk about trains as it will probably make me break down and cry at this point (I wonder what it’s like to be chauffer driven?). Nor am I going to talk about phones (much) mine broke down on the trip home so I am now back with my old reliable one. Wondering how well the conversation is going to go when I demand a replacement versus the repair O2 will try and fob me off with.

In short an annoying end to an otherwise productive day, meanwhile I’m half way through Maria Edgeworth’s ‘Belinda’, have come home to Kingsley Amis’ ‘Everyday Drinking’ which is both apt and amusing, and have suddenly realised that a postal book group book has not only not been posted on as it should have been, it’s not been finished either, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg (bookberg?). Really I don’t have time to work...