CHRISTMAS ROUND-UP Part 2: What's in our sights?

More of our guests tell us what they're planning to read next - and our final round-up, or rather the first of 2020, will appear next Monday.

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Paul Magrs:  All I can think of is the fact that there's a new Anne Tyler out early next year! It still feels like a huge treat - and the fact that her last two have been so wonderful adds to the anticipation. Next year marks exactly thirty years since I read my first Anne Tyler. She had just won a big award for Breathing Lessons and I was with my first boyfriend Gene in the middle of 1990. He was in the UK for a year and started me off reading Tyler and Armistead Maupin, Margaret Atwood, Carson MacCullers and Amy Tan, among others. He gave me If Morning Ever Comes and I was hooked forever.

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Graeme Fife:  In a deluded time, as we confront an indefeasible 

tangle of misprision, misleading promise and fantasy arithmetic, exacerbated by the dumb stupidity of prime nitwits posing as keepers of wisdom, it seems a very apposite choice of reading to turn to Don Quixote. Misconceit and misadventure, tilting at windmills, forlorn escapades in a bonkers scenario? Bullseye.

The Road to Wigan Pier next, another apt read against the current backdrop of blurred reality. Orwell’s unflinching truth-telling and masterly prose. And Lara Maiklem’s Mudlarking for the stories attached to the vast gallimaufry of trouvailles washed up by the waters of old Thames.

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Linda Newbery:  Here are two enticing writers I feel ashamed to have neglected till now. In recent months I've read two novels by Jane Rogers, Conrad and Eleanor and the earlier Mr Wroe's Virgins, both of which confirm her as a writer of exceptional talent and versatility. Her new novel, Body Tourists, promises to be very different again. Ann Patchett, for some reason, I haven't read at all, but have seen such glowing reviews of her work from people whose judgement I respect that I'm going to plunge in with her latest, The Dutch House.

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Pippa Goodhart: Awaiting when I have time to snuggle by a fire and wallow in these book treats are: Mr Godley’s Phantom by Mal Peet. Mal Peet was a writer of such fresh, fun, sometimes shocking skill, who died too young. Here’s a new book, his last, glinting with gold on its cover and promising a ‘part ghost story part crime thriller’. And: a second-hand copy, bought from wonderful David’s Bookshop in Cambridge, of Daphne Du Maurier and Her Sisters by Jane Dunn. The sub-title is The Hidden Lives of Piffy, Bird and Bing. Lots of photos of posh Edwardians. Yum!

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Linda Sargent:  Fifty years ago when I was a “young adult” there were few books aimed precisely at my age group and consequently I read mostly from the adult shelves of our tiny village library. Among my favourite authors were Mary Stewart, Jean Plaidy, Mary Renault (must re-read her too), and Elizabeth Goudge. Recently I've been tentatively re-reading some of Goudge’s books, and have unearthed my battered paperback of Green Dolphin Country, first published in 1944 and set in the Channel Isles and New Zealand. At fifteen I was captivated, hoping that one day I might visit both places, but as is so often the case, travelling vicariously through strongly crafted stories can be almost as satisfying and Goudge’s vivid and detailed descriptions never fail here. And while there may be some aspects of her writing that feel a little out of step with modern sensibilities, as a friend of mine remarked, we should perhaps approach this body of work in the same way as we would that of – say – Dickens, Trollope et al, writers who, like Goudge, are products of their times. Meanwhile, I look forward to my travels in Green Dolphin Country ...

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Celia Rees:  I intend to read books I already have. If I don’t like the book, it goes to Oxfam; if I do like it, I’ll read then take to Oxfam. Slow speed de-cluttering. I’m starting with The Muse by Jessie Burton. I bought this because it had a pretty cover and sounded interesting. Next, The Raven King by Marcus Tanner. I loved the title and knew nothing about Matthias Corvinus, fifteenth century king of Hungary and his fabled lost library. Finally:Now All Roads Lead to France – The Last Years of Edward Thomas, by Matthew Hollis. I love Edward Thomas’ poetry, but I haven’t read this because I know what happened to him and it will make me sad.

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Paul Dowswell:  Having greatly enjoyed Craig Brown’s Princess Margaret hatchet job Ma’am Darling, I think I might have developed a taste for royal biogs. Edith Sitwell’s Victoria of England is sitting in a pile by my bed and a cursory glance through the pages suggests it will be a fascinating read.

As a long-time writer of non-fiction I have a deep admiration for Bill Bryson – his History of Nearly Everything was excellent. So his recently published The Body looks unmissable.

Finally, I have just spent a week touring Italian schools and the people I was with have been working with the YA author Melvin Burgess and tell me he is brilliant. So I must give one of his a read.

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Michael Lawrence: Ever keen to read about photographers and painters, having been both in my time, one of my 2019 reads was Francoise Gilot’s Life with Picasso. She was with him for ten years and in the book details his working methods along with some descriptions of him that did not please him, for it’s said that he never spoke to her again after its publication in 1964.

I also re-read, for the first time in about 40 years, Emile Zola’s novel The Masterpiece, published in 1886, which is full of information about the lives and difficulties of the Impressionists, and in particular Zola’s friend from childhood Paul Cézanne who (guess what) ceased to speak to Zola after its publication.

The book that I’m most looking forward to is a debut novel, The Age of Light  by Whitney Scharer, given to me by my friend Julia Wills. I’ve only read the opening paragraphs of the prologue so far (I’m saving this book for just the right mood – mine, that is), which are so beautifully written that I might have wanted to read on even if it hadn’t been about the youth of American photographer Lee Miller, whose work I’ve always admired.

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Adele Geras:  Like millions of other readers all over the world, the book I’m most looking forward to next year is The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel. That’s coming in March and I have pre-ordered it.

Other than that, I am excited about Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (recently reviewed here as the choice of Orb's Bookshop of Aberdeen) by Olga Tokarczuk, the Polish writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. I was attracted to it for its title, which is a quotation from William Blake and I downloaded a sample of the book on to my Kindle. I liked what I read very much and bought the book. This feature, which isn’t much talked about, is one of the things I love about reading on Kindle. It prevents a lot of terrible mistakes. I have sampled quite a few dreadful books and saved myself a lot of money! Merry Christmas to all our readers and hoping for lot of wonderful books in the New Year.

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Guest review by Michael Lawrence - SHAKESPEARE AND COMPANY by Sylvia Beach

"Authentic or not, Mr Whitman’s shop filled both a gap and a need, not least for cold hard-up souls like me, eager for words they could understand and a spot of free warmth in which to pore over them."

 Between 1995 and 2015 I published a number of stories and forty-something books for children and teenagers. One of the books - Young Dracula - inspired five CBBC-TV series of that name; a series I didn’t like and which earned me little more than a fleeting ‘originator’ end credit and a handful of beans. While I enjoyed writing many of my books, others were such a tussle with editors and their various chippers-in that frustration and out-and-out rage became the order of many a day. When the new head of a certain publishing house informed me that my new ideas were ‘very funny with strong narrative voices but a little quirky and out-there at a time when we are looking for something a lot more obvious’ I knew it was time to move on. I’m still moving. Still writing too (it’s hard to give up), but not for children.

If we’d been of a similar generation, Sylvia Beach is someone I would very much like to have known. She preceded me by quite some way, but the bookshop described in this memoir - the name of it at least - had some relevance for me early on.

At the tenderish age of twenty-one I was a freelance photographer in London, taking pictures for the Financial Times, publishers, advertising agencies and so on. That meant a lot of snaps of politicians, pop stars, cereal packets, and women in various states of undress. But this was the so-called Swinging Sixties and I was bored with the parties and zipping round town in taxis just before dawn, so I handed the keys to my balconied flat in Pimlico - along with all my furnishings - to a BBC makeup girl of my acquaintance and hightailed it to Paris to try my hand at writing while starving. (I turned out to have a real gift for the second of these.) While renting an icy garret at the top of the Hotel Novelty at Odéon, I made frequent visits to the Shakespeare and Company bookshop on the Rue de la Bûcherie near Notre Dame. There I discovered treasures banned in England, such as Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, The Black Book by Lawrence Durrell, and Maurice Girodias’s Traveller’s Companion series. I also met a French composer who wanted help with a letter to the Dean of St Paul’s to offer him a piece of music he’d written in honour of Winston Churchill, who’d just died.

But this wasn’t Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company. Sylvia, a New Jersey expatriate, opened the original Shakespeare and Company – a lending library as well as a bookshop – on the morning of November 19th, 1919. Specialising in books written in or translated into English, in no time her shop became an essential meeting place for visiting English-speaking authors, some of whom used it as their Paris mailing address. The shop more usually associated with Sylvia was in the Rue de l’Odéon, but her first Shakespeare and Company was situated just round the corner in the Rue Dupuytren. When I came across the address of that shop some twenty five years after my impoverished sojourn at the Hotel Novelty my jaw hit my chest. The Novelty was at 10 Rue Dupuytren. Sylvia’s first shop was at number eight – right next door. It was like finding the bones of old Will himself in your sock drawer.

It was from 8 Rue Dupuytren that Gertrude Stein is said to have borrowed around seventy books in the two years before the shop moved to those larger premises. It was at number 8 that Sylvia, with no previous publishing experience, volunteered to produce the first edition of Ulysses in book form, in the process becoming James Joyce’s most vigorous champion. At that shop and its successor she entertained, in one way or another, many writers of contemporary or subsequent legend - Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Maddox Ford, Ezra Pound, D H Lawrence and many others. There ought to be a commemorative plaque on the wall of 8 Rue Dupuytren, but there isn’t. There’s no indication whatsoever that the original Shakespeare and Company was housed there.

Sylvia ceased trading in 1941 after refusing to sell an officer of the occupying German forces her last copy of Finnegans Wake from her window display. Shortly afterwards she found herself in an internment camp, where she was held for six months. Almost exactly a decade after she shut up shop for the last time, an American bookseller called George Whitman adopted the name Shakespeare and Company for his own shop in the Rue de la Bûcherie, apparently with Sylvia’s blessing. The by-then celebrated banner gave George’s establishment a ready-made pedigree which to this day draws literary pilgrims by the planeload, many believing that they’re visiting the shop associated with all those famous writers of the past.

Authentic or not, Mr Whitman’s shop, now run by his daughter – Sylvia Beach Whitman – filled both a gap and a need, not least for cold hard-up souls like me, eager for words they could understand and a spot of free warmth in which to pore over them.

Some of the above is covered in more detail in my memoir Milking the Novelty, a copy of which, I’m happy to report, has found a place in the Rue de la Bûcherie Shakespeare and Company archive.

Shakespeare and Company is published by Bison Books.