Too Near the Dead

‘But it will be all right in the end,’ said the Resident IT Consultant in a rare moment of trying to reassure me. I looked at him and pointed out that Helen Grant’s new novel, Too Near the Dead, is described as a gothic novel, and happy ever after isn’t necessarily a given. Besides, with Helen’s track record, did he really believe this?

I’d agonised about what reads as a wonderfully romantic and exciting mystery set in Perthshire, but which I knew would scare me senseless at some point, possibly without prior warning. After all, it starts with the heroine, Fen, lying in a sealed coffin, seemingly buried alive. It’s menacing, but quietly so. And that sense of unease didn’t leave me.

With Fen the kind of heroine who reads Jane Eyre as light entertainment when she’s scared of being home alone at night, you just know that something is coming for her. Will it be her fiancé James, an up-and-coming novelist, with whom she’s recently moved to this lonely spot in Perthshire? Can she trust him?

Fen is a copy editor with a London publisher, and she and James have bought a large Scottish house in the middle of nowhere, moving away from London. After Fen came into some money…

There is plenty in her own background to worry about. And what about the people in the nearby small town? Or the new house, or the old land on which it was built? It has a ruined chapel, and graves. You really can be Too Near the Dead.

It’s as though having placed her couple in the literary circles she moves in herself, and in a part of the country she also knows well, Helen Grant has been free to give the scary aspects of the story her full attention. Sometimes I wonder if this is advisable.

The book took longer to read due to needing to avoid it at bedtime; otherwise I’d have raced through it in a day. If you love gothic, this is the book for you. Even if you don’t, it could still be the book for you.

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Football Superstars

A friend tagged me on Facebook yesterday. At first I struggled to even know what it was all about, but gradually worked out that someone, not the friend, was offering a ticket to the match tonight. Why she even thought I’d want to watch football is another thing. Plenty of others did, however, so I will assume some lucky soul is now heading to Glasgow to see a blue and yellow team beat another blue and yellow team.

I’d seen comments about a match and tickets but not really grasped that there actually was a match and that people might want tickets to actually see it. Well, we’re all different.

And today I am looking at three books about football, for the younger reader. Although, between you and me, I could see myself doing the quiz book; at least the wordsearches, etc. Because I don’t know all that much about today’s football stars.

But there will be young fans who will adore these books. One is a quiz book, one is about a player by the name of Pogba and the last about another player called Agüero. They are all by Simon Mugford and Dan Green, and are full of facts and lots of cartoon style illustrations. If I was into football, they would suit me just fine.

If I was into football, I’d even know properly that there is a major championship going on. Hence the tickets and the match. I just hadn’t paid proper attention to discover that you could actually go to these matches. Here’s hoping that those who go will have a lot of fun.

Looking back

This. This is what I need. Charlotte Square, all lit up, nice and balmy, and late enough that it’s not ‘terribly busy’. I know. Not good for business. But good for me. Will anyone sit down for a chat?

The tea nook

We made our Book Nook debut yesterday, Daughter and I. It had been a long time coming. This second-hand bookshop in Stirling was due to open around the time of the first lockdown. Then it did open during the freer parts of last year, but we weren’t so fast on our feet. The bouncy Kirkland Ciccone attended. Every week, or so it seemed. So I felt that he might carry the place forward on his own.

But yesterday, we had cause to visit the street it’s in anyway, and decided the time had come to actually enter and have a look around. Daughter looked around a lot, as she had time to kill while I ‘visited’ the nearby barber shop…

And then, because this is almost more café with [lots of] books than bookshop with added tea, we had something to eat. Lunch bagel for Daughter and tea and cake for me. All the cakes bar one was chocolate, so I ordered the ‘much healthier’ carrot version. I should let them know that while chocolate is the nicest thing on earth to eat, some of us can’t.

Anyway. The china was rather nice, and so was the presentation of everything. Mark Twain marked – haha – our table. Even the carrot was suitably unhealthy, and I understand the bagel was acceptable too. We chose the table next to the YA section. Obviously.

I was sufficiently tired after the barber’s, so we mostly looked at the books from a distance and promised ourselves that the books will get more and closer attention next time. There are a lot of books. Although Daughter said she recognised most of them from our shelves at home, this might have been an exaggeration.

The whole shop is quite large. Airy. Very nicely decorated. It’s everything I’d have wanted to do myself, but have now been spared from having to do. Someone else did it for me, including painting the shelves a rather nice green colour.

A translation?

You need to say that title line out loud, and try to channel your inner Lady Bracknell as you do.

I was sent some information about a new book from Finland, Me and the Robbersons, by Siri Kolu, translated by Ruth Urbom. It was partly about the translation process, which was what I expected.

Only partly, because I had not realised that [English language] publishers need their hands held quite a bit before tackling a book in another language. This one happened because Daniel Hahn accompanied a group of UK publishers to Bologna and introduced them to people and to the general idea of translated books [for children].

It costs more to publish a translation. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but it makes sense. Maybe. The translator obviously needs paying, as does the original author. When dealing with smaller languages from countries keen to spread its literature around, there is often financial help, as there was in this case.

So that’s the production side of the foreign book dealt with. Have the idea, find the right book, get it translated and out there.

I’m so naïve that I imagined that might be it. The book goes to shops and libraries and all the rest, and is read like any other book. No. My source also mentioned a review by a child on a kid’s review site. The child mostly liked the book. But so much seems to have been made of the fact that it was a translated book, that the child focused on this. ‘The fact it had been written in a different language initially made me feel uncertain but excited because I had not read a translated book before.’

That would be because no one had thought to mention that some of the standard childhood classics which many children have read, are translations.

I’m wondering if adults ought to see if they can refrain from pointing out the different aspects of whatever they are offering, be it organic, home made, contains garlic, or has been translated.

Monsieur Roscoe On Holiday

I love Jim Field, the UK’s fifth bestselling illustrator. I also like languages and agree with him that children learn fast and that we should start early. So here is his bilingual picture book about Monsieur Roscoe, who is a dog, going on holiday with his goldfish. And everything is in both English and French.

Monsieur Roscoe has a great holiday and the goldfish looks as if he’s enjoying himself too.

But would I have read this aloud to Offspring when they were small? No. I never learned French, and I believe therein lies a small problem. Not with me. But there are many parents who didn’t, or who are anything but confident enough to tackle two languages on the edge of the bed. Many adults are not linguistically minded, and of those who are, French isn’t necessarily the first foreign language, the way it was.

Jim has a French wife and a bilingual daughter.

I am the witch who wrote to her child’s headteacher asking for the child to be excused French and to be allowed to replace it with Swedish, ‘because she will never have any use for French’. While Swedish has been far more useful, it was a mere ten years after that fateful letter that a certain someone moved to Geneva.

So languages are very useful. All of them. But it’s hard to know who is best to teach them. The natural way is best. But we can’t all be natural.

Back to Monsieur Roscoe and his happy goldfish. It’s a lovely book. Obviously it is. Read it for yourself, but think about as to whether you feel you can read it with your little one.

We have all arrived

And we would like to stay. I think that’s really what last night’s launch for Barbara Henderson’s book Scottish by Inclination was about. She came here thirty years ago, and has now written a non-fiction book about her time in Scotland, including interviews with a number of EU citizens who also came here some time in the past, and were expecting the right to a future.

The letter from the Scottish Government, telling us we are welcome here and they want us here, helped. But it’s no guarantee. Barbara has now acquired British citizenship, just to be on the safe side. She did this on the advice of Elizabeth Wein, who felt that it’s the only reliable thing to do, if you want to be sure.

Wearing her starry EU t-shirt, Barbara was talking to Margaret Kirk (who almost struggled to get a word in edgeways…). Barbara is a very cheerful force to be reckoned with. She read to us. Her arrival at Glasgow airport, where her first task was to find Fergus, which involved her walking round the arrivals hall singing, to attract the attention of the right very tall person. Then she read her memories from June 23rd five years ago, when the result of the referendum took her completely by surprise. (Available on YouTube.)

At first Barbara had no wish to write her memoirs, when it was suggested to her, but she changed her mind. And as I usually say, no one can tell you you have got your own story wrong.

She shared her path to British citizenship, which wasn’t plain sailing. With help from an excellent lawyer and making far too many trips from Inverness to Glasgow, she’s been successful. Barbara tested us on our knowledge of ‘Life in the UK’ from the official test (which I passed with flying colours). This could be because I have also taken, and studied for, this test. Mostly it seems people (those born here) got three out of five.

There was a question as to whether as a foreigner you have to be better, prove that you can do more than the natives. It certainly seems like it. But by now Barbara has decided she doesn’t need permission from others to determine ‘how Scottish’ she is. It’s her right to say, and she is Scottish by Inclination.

And so say all of us.

This, of course, has no bearing as to which football team she was rooting for on Wednesday evening.

Order, order

I own an old cassette of Christmas songs, sung by Roger Whittaker. I love it. I loved it even more – at first – when I was able to buy the same album as a CD. I mean, I thought I did. Was. Same title, same songs, but fewer songs. Seems a plastic ribbon has more room on it than a shiny disc. But apart from the lack of certain songs, and they were – obviously – some of the ones I loved best, there was a lack of order. It was the wrong order, as far as I was concerned. I’d nearly worn the cassette out, so I knew how I liked my songs. And it was not the CD order of things.

Order matters.

Then I happened upon an article by Dan Brotzel in The Author about ‘working out the best sequence for your story collection’. It seems it’s really quite difficult. Dan mused about his own stories, and also looked at what others have done.

I had actually pondered this before. Whenever I pick up a collection of one author’s stories or read an anthology put together by someone, I wonder how they determined what comes first, what sits in the middle and how to end things. Unless Dan is particularly unskilled at this, it would appear that someone has agonised over this very thing each time I sit there wondering about the why or the what.

And as with Roger Whittaker, some results feel better than others.

The last day of innocence

It was a lovely day. It really was. I think back to it often. And then I think of what came after. But how wise I was to at least plan my lunch to take place the day before the referendum. Anything else would have made it impossible. How five years can change so much…

Reading this again, I have just realised that what happened after must have been my fault. Thirteen people round the tables. I’m very sorry.

(Not to mention how sorry I am for the fact that WordPress has made it impossible to grab the old post and repost it. This wobbliness was caused by multiple screen grabs.)

We’re all doomed.

The Race

There was more to Eric Liddell than running along the beach in St Andrews in the film, or the famous swap of races in the 1924 Olympics to help him keep his Sunday clear for God.

In his new book The Race, Roy Peachey has found out more about this early sports hero, and we meet Eric both as a small child in China with his missionary parents, and we see him as a student back in England and as a medical student in Edinburgh. He has three passions; rugby, running and the church. It’s the church that takes him back to China after the Olympics; this time as a missionary himself.

Eric’s running is described in parallel with modern day school girl Lili, who like Eric lives for running, and who is both Chinese and British, having been adopted from China by British parents.

Lili usually wins every race at school, but with the announcement that the Queen is coming to watch their school race, she finds she has an annoying competitor for fastest runner.

So we follow Lili’s training sessions and her family life, alongside learning about Eric Liddell, China’s first Olympic medallist.

The Race is a fabulous tale; Lili’s story interwoven with Eric Liddell’s. I loved every minute of this fairly short book, and would have liked to read more, especially about Eric. It’s this kind of surprise find that makes reading such a great pleasure.