Reader is dead, long live Reader

Along with half the world's geeks, I was dismayed to find that Google was "powering down" (how's that for a euphemism for "killing off"?!) Google Reader.

You can read their justification here: Official Google Reader Blog | Powering Down Google Reader

I have been playing around with numerous alternatives - I was very Reader dependent, using it to manage all my online reading - and have finally landed on one which has all the functionality of Google Reader and more, plus a really really pretty interface. Feedly seems to be build on the Reader API and, on the upside, it's easy-peasy to import your blog subscriptions across. Unlike NetVibes.

Check it out if, like me, you are dreading Reader-cold-turkey come July...

Guilty pleasures: noble highway men and quivering lower lips

Image uploaded to Flickr by paul nine-o

Thanks to my love of free ebooks, and my recent discovery of what is possibly my spiritual ebook home – girlebooks.com, which specialises in women authors and includes many of my teenage favourites, like Anne of Green Gables,  as well as lost Victorian classics, like The Shuttle – I have found a new guilty pleasure... Georgette Heyer.

I am reading The Black Moth, her first novel , published in 1921.

Noble highwaymen, sinister Dukes, duels, wrongly outcast Earls, debts of honour, more duels, kidnapped maidens with sensitively quivering lower lips. Love it.

Deceptively simple, but absolutely captivating. I am totally losing myself in the book on the Tube, and keep having to hastily jump up when I get to my stop. Which is definitely a sign of a good read.

And with such a wealth of period detail which suggests research of an academic level.

Can’t wait to start on the Regency series.

Reading List

It was a good Christmas for books, thank you friends and family.

I have already rampaged through P.D.James's murder mystery sequel to Pride and Prejudice, Death Comes to Pemberley. Despite steering clear in general of 'sequels' and other related imaginings as not possibly anything other than second-rate cash-ins that toy unforgivingly and insensitively with the themes of the original, I risked this one - I think due to the genre shift, it seemed safer that my impression and interpretation of the original would remain intact. Brilliant read, although I could have managed without the didactic digression on the history of the jury system and judicial appeals...

The Vintage re-release of Westwood is also a thing of beauty and a joy forever: a lovely matt paperback with lustrous thick cream pages and a evocative front cover. With Stella Gibbons's best known novel Cold Comfort Farm being one of my standard rainy day / 'mean reds' books, I naturally expected similar scouring literary satire and witty, quotable lines. Not so. This is maturer, sadder - as cynical, yet bittersweet and melancholy. Perhaps because it is a later-life novel, perhaps influenced by the impact of the Second World War. Beautiful reflection on infatuation, love and the intersection of seemingly unconnected lives.

Guardian Style has already been dipped into post-prandially over quite a few dinner tables. Finally, I know how to spell Gandhi (never Ghandi) and what the singular form of referendum is.

I am plunged into Claire Tomalin's biography of Jane Austen right now. I love her. Claire Tomalin, I mean, although, of course, also Miss Austen. Her biography of Nellie Tiernan (The Invisible Woman) was, for me, the first to open my eyes to alternative insights to the myth of Dickens, National Treasure. Already, the Austen novels' emphasis on money, class and power is becoming beautifully contextualised and Jane's only just been born.

Back to the sofa, I think, to pick up where I left off...

This week on t'internet of great wonders

[ eastbourne november 2010 by Mr Boniface, on Flickr ]

Another lazy post as I have been busy busy busy this week - reading up on New Women novelists, doing a spot of freelancing as a digital publishing consultant, looking for part-time work and sourcing loveliness for my vintage shop on Etsy...

Here are some things that caught my eye on t'internet of great wonders:

Eerie and ethereal, traditional Chinese painting crossed with photography | Storque: This Handmade Life

The splendid Jo Shapcott reading her poems and talking about On Mutability | The Thought Fox

This made me come over all nostalgic for Japan, as these could almost be the streets behind my old apartment in Nishi Kokobunji | Hilda Grahnat

Man, I am so out of my era ... I wish I lived in a Merchant Ivory film | Design*Sponge

Freesias. My favourites. Just so you know. | Design*Sponge

Gorgeous celebration of colour, just what the doctor ordered on this gloomy, rainy January day | Craft Cargo Cult

Compare and contrast: beautiful concept, juxtaposing Marilyn Monroe and John White Alexander's 'June' | Miss Moss

Beautiful close up photographs of details on vintage clothes. Lots of lace and silk ribbons | Dear Golden

Enjoy!

[http://thisbutterflymind.blogspot.com]

My new baby

Meet my new baby:

Possibly the most appropriate leaving present ever?

I am already smitten...

I wonder if it will alter my reading habits at all?

[http://thisbutterflymind.blogspot.com]

Weekend loveliness

Image via chad_loves_laura on flickr

Or, what I read on the internet this weekend... a lazy post, I suppose, but I have some lovely stuff to share

Decals that make your iphone look like a retro polaroid camera | Design*Sponge

Wonderful eccentricity of Parisian ladies | LifestyleEtc

I want this. Vintage 1950s Still Life dress | Dear Golden

Mid-Century home deco is back. And folk. And beach. | HomeShoppingSpy

Love this snowballing Very Hungry Caterpillar Treasury, good collaborative marketing idea | Etsy

Abandon your resolutions, says Olive Burkeman: hear, hear, sez I | The Guardian

Rescued negatives lead to discovery of lost street photography master | This Handmade Life

I also:

• read P Curtin The Image of Africa and Conan Doyle The Sign of The Four
• ate superb Eggs Royale at The Ambassador on Exmouth Market
• re-watched The Young Victoria (sob)
• got a haircut (less is more, people...)

[http://thisbutterflymind.blogspot.com]

Attention, please?

I am finding at the moment that I have a really short attention span.

Maybe it's down too much multimedia multitasking, of which I am often guilty, juggling laptop and TV and iPhone. Maybe it's down to tiredness at the end of the taxing day. Maybe it's just that modern malaise of being time-poor with 'Wonder Woman' syndrome, i.e. trying to have it all and ending up doing too much.

Whatever the reason, I have a buzzing brain and a true butterfly mind - flitting from flower to flower and never settling for long - these days. And to think I used to be such a "reflector"...

Time to embrace slow and train myself back into mindfulness and thoughtfulness.

As a countermeasure, I am keeping a journal where I try to think critically and analytically about my reading, recording impressions, thoughts and feelings.

I think it's working. Recent books have included Peter Ackroyd's Dickens biography (hagiographic, overly strained prose), Jenny Uglow's History of British Gardening (interesting on liberation and self-expression of women and working classes via gardening), and Goodnight Mr Tom by Michelle Magorian (kids' classic, can't believe I never read it, moving and tough, emotionally honest). I certainly feel I am reading more deeply and responsively, and I find I remember the content better and more profoundly.

It hasn't stopped me reading several books at once though - currently Nights at the Circus, The Spirit Level (as Kindle eBook) and A Room with a View (on iPhone) - and the pile of material by the bed hasn't diminished any but it's a start.

Tales of empire

Uploaded to Flickr by zlandr

The Orange Prize marathon continues on, despite being overtaken by events - the Prize was carried by Barbara Kingsolver for The Lacuna. For once, I find myself wholeheartedly in agreement with a panel of literary judges. In the meantime, I have finished The White Woman on the Green Bicycle by Monique Roffey.

In exploring the politics of empire and the post-colonial turmoil of the British withdrawal from Trinidad through the portrayal of a marriage, Roffey turns to a predictable and not even uncommon trope for colonialism. And it has a strand of magic realism - groan - sprinkled throughout: the island is imagined as a voluptuous woman, shades of Garcia Marquez and shades of Hakluyt. Has imaging the colonies progressed no further in the occidental mind than the Elizabethans picturing America as Virginia, virgin land there for the despoliation? Has Said achieved nothing? Or is it all a clever ploy to depict the conflicted status of the non-native incomer, who feels Trinidadian but is not accepted by Trinidadians?

The writing is also a bit self-conscious: there’s a “creative writing evening class” non-linear narrative device which adds nothing, meaning that crisis comes too early and the second half is less savoured. At least, less savoured by me!

Having said that, on the whole, the writing was compelling if clunky: unsympathetic characters are well wrought and this was, for me, an affecting picture of the uneasy simmering tensions so typical of the multi-racial Caribbean. Perhaps more so because this happened to my family, with Jamaican independence, which promised so much and evolved into something quite different.

There was also a brief detour by way of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Annie Barrows and Mary Ann Shaffer - sadly, Shaffer died and the novel was completed by her niece, Barrows. You can tell, but it doesn‘t matter. This is a sweetly charming epistolary novel about love, loss and friendship set in the aftermath of the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands. Highly recommended if you need to feel optimistic and joyful. Unusual to read a modern novel in letters - I think Ella Minnow Pea was the last one I read - and I have been inspired to read Richardson’s Pamela because of it.

Oranges are not the only fruit?

Image uploaded to Flickr by Moriza

At work, our sort-of reading group is working through the Orange Prize shortlist.

I've steered clear of book clubs somewhat, reading from a list and to a prescribed time smacks of university days a little and can become joyless - reading to complete, not reading for pleasure.

Having struggled through a recent fiction dry spell – starting and abandoning unsatisfying novels and desultorily turning to a rather eccentric selection of non-fiction – I am embracing this structured project with gusto.

The shortlist is:

·         Rosie Alison - The Very Thought of You

·         Barbara Kingsolver - The Lacuna

·         Attica Locke - Black Water Rising

·         Hilary Mantel - Wolf Hall

·         Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

·         Monique Roffey -The White Woman on the Green Bicycle

The awards ceremony is next week, so we don't stand a chance of completing the list in time – which poses interesting questions about how our judgement of literary value might be affected by the announcement of the prize winner.

So far, I've raced through The Lacuna and dawdled through The Very Thought of You.

The Lacuna was stunning, powerful and passionate, with a strong political message about personal freedoms and public perception, and the morality of public crusades.  It's very thought-provoking on the theme of active participation vs. passive observation in history-making events, proposing, I think, that there is no such thing as passive observations of the times – as an observer, you too are implicated.

The Very Thought of You was nice enough, I suppose, as a historical romance. I felt it was a bit thin, the wartime setting was primarily backdrop and added little to the narrative's drive other than to propel the characters into a sudden conclusion, rather awkwardly, two-thirds of the way through the novel.  The prose style was also a little unsatisfying, relying largely on rhetorical flourish and purplish descriptive passages. There could have been an exploration of the issue of personal morality in wartime, and of the role of the voyeur in the events they observe.

Ah, I've just noticed that observation, of intimate personal catastrophes and sweeping historical events, seems to be a common theme here!

Interestingly, my tweet about the project was picked up by the Orange Prize marketing team:

·         Me: First hand-out of books for new reading group, reading Orange Prize list - I got The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver http://ht.ly/1MxqF

·         Them: Let us know how your reading group gets on with the shortlist :-)

Now that's how to engage your audience and contribute to the conversation.  Basic courtesy, maybe, but I certainly felt all warm and cozy - and appreciated!

Dirty literary secrets

This short piece on guilty pleasure books caught my eye a few days ago: have to admit I've been sheepishly reading but hiding the above on my commute this week.

John Sutherland describes reading as one of "only three private acts left" ...