HelenBrocklebank (mrstrefusis)

The world is a gloomy-doomy kind of place. Shut it out for at least 24 hours by reading @lissakevans My Name Is MacKenzie Bly*. Its hero, Philip Stephens is a priceless comic creation, an Adrian Mole for our times, yet even funnier and more endearing, and whose observations on life, adults, small town life an even pets are so exquisitely observed and so dry and deadpan every single page will make you laugh. I can’t think of another author who has Lissa Evans proficiency with character - in everyone of her novels, she is able to tell you exactly who someone is in just a word or two. She even does it with pets (eg Boiler the German Shepherd Cross or Iggy the unfortunate Guinea pig) Go and buy it now: cheaper than a good Easter egg and even more enjoyable. *no it isn’t PS. For the avoidance of doubt, I haven’t posted the funniest pages, just the ones I was reading when I put this up. I could show you more but it would be doing you a disservice, denying you the joy of discovering it yourself

February’s novel is a re-read. I liked Lawrence enormously as a teenager, and read him a lot at university - one of my tutors had been taught by Leavis and there is something hovering in my brain that suggests that could be the connection because even when I was at university, I think Lawrence was speedily going out of favour. Interestingly, throughout all the years I was hosting The Books That Built Me, not a single author chose a novel by Lawrence. It is a very long time since I last read Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Eight pages in, I’m not at all sure it wasn’t banned as much for its risqué content as for its leaden prose. Unlike The Odyssey, I fear I will have to set myself a number of pages to read a day, come what may, to get myself to the end. Some authors, beloved of one’s youth, disappoint in later life. Some novels, conversely, are even richer and better than they were at first reading. What authors work do you think gets better when you reread it when older? And does anyone else think Lawrence may not have survived the test of time (NB, am hoping to be proven wrong on this last point, and by the end of LCL, he will emerge triumphant … though I do dimly remember that LCL is a long way short of David Herbert’s best efforts).

The scent of citrus and of brittle pine Suffused the island. Inside, she was singing And weaving with a shuttle made of gold. Her voice was beautiful. Around the cave A luscious forest flourished: alder, poplar, And scented cypress. It was full of wings. Birds nested there but hunted out at sea: The owls, the hawks, the gulls with gaping beaks. A ripe and luscious vine, hung thick with grapes, Was stretched to coil around her cave. It doesn’t matter how idyllic Calypso’s island is, or how alluring Calypso, Odysseus just wants to go home and sits on the shore weeping all day until the Gods intervene… I’d put off reading The Odyssey, thinking it would be difficult (scarred from having to read more recent epic poems at school like The Rape of the Lock and Don Juan), and I’d read bits and also Cole’s Notes so I’d understand enough to enjoy Joyce’s Ulysses, but news that Christopher Nolan has based his blockbuster Odysseus film on Emily Wilson’s translation of Homer prompted me to give it a go. Friends, The Odyssey is bloody brilliant and Emily Wilson’s translation a stone cold triumph. It’s written in iambic pentameter but reads like prose every bit as luscious as Calypso’s island. Could the 2025 reading famine be behind me? was a fallow year for reading

I bought this copy of Roget’s Thesaurus 42 years ago and it might be the best £2.50 I’ve ever spent. If you’ve ever tried to look up a synonym or antonym online, you’ll know it’s not exactly an enriching process: go back to Roget. Improve your word power.

Hurrah for Jolly Jilly Cooper. I remember her telling me her next book would be about Feral Jackson and Rupert buying a football team when I hosted her Books That Built Me for the publication of Jump in 2016. She was the most adorable, funny, kind and generous guest - @sashawilkins_ brought her tiny dachshund lovely Lettice so Jilly would feel happy and relaxed. Jilly Cooper’s Books that Built Me were: Jane and Prudence, Barbara Pym; The Maltese Cat, Kipling; Some People, Harold Nicholson; the Pursuit of Love, Nancy Mitford; the Devil's Cub, Georgette Heyer (bonus ball, Tom Kitten and the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations)

The excellent bakers near me also sells books. Because man cannot live on bread alone.

100 years ago, in September 1923, the Hogarth Press, a private press run by Eliot's friends Leonard and Virginia Woolf, published the first UK book edition of The Waste Land in an edition of about 450 copies, the type handset by Virginia Woolf. So I went to Eliot’s final resting place in East Coker church to say a quiet thank you for the poem that opened a magical door to an enchanted world of books, myth, civilisations, all the fragments shored against my ruin

“Happy high status …. [is] a sort of everyday, ordinary superpower that the greatest performers, speakers and leaders channel effortlessly”. I ❤️ @vivgroskop - her brilliant books equip you with so many practical tools to help you be the person you need to be, and the encouragement and inspiration that tells you you can get there. Can’t wait for her to speak to @walpole_uk members at our breakfast at @allbright next month - everyone deserves to have a bit of this superpower in them. #happyhighstatus #vivgroskop

Holiday reading Summer 2023.

Maybe try some cornflour… #plotthickens

If you haven’t read Lessons on Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, I urge you to do so. Rather than me tell you why I think it is required reading, here is a bit from Sadie Stein’s excellent New York Times review which nails why it is such a brilliant novel (& also nails why ‘women’s commercial fiction’ is such a mixed blessing as a genre) “There’s a scene early on in Bonnie Garmus’s novel “Lessons in Chemistry” in which Elizabeth Zott, a redoubtable chemist thwarted at every turn by a hidebound 1950s establishment, is given career advice by a male colleague: “Don’t work the system. Outsmart it.” Zott, for her part, “didn’t like the notion that systems had to be outsmarted. Why couldn’t they just be smart in the first place?” The ascent of “Lessons in Chemistry” — a book whose success is the stuff publishing dreams are made of — begs the same question. The United States edition, with its bubble gum pink cover bearing a stylized woman’s face peering over a pair of cat-eye sunglasses, reads as overtly feminine, a light beach read for a day off. One can, of course, read any number of things at the beach. But some readers, at least, have been surprised to open it and find the story of Zott, a brilliant woman whose fetching chignon is secured by a sharp No. 2 pencil also intended to ward off sexual assault. Although she’s not interested in celebrity, Zott becomes the face of a cooking show through which she educates her viewers in chemistry, self-worth and agency. Ultimately, she triumphs through hard work and pragmatism, and by using the media available to women of her era to new ends. It is hard not to read “Lessons in Chemistry” and wonder if Zott’s creator has achieved something similarly subversive, offering readers more substance than some, at least, expected — and changing their lives in the process.” #elizabethzott #lessonsinchemistry

The Morgan Library… what a place #privatelibrary #library #books #newyork