Spending money on books

Waterstone's have an overseas fiction section in their 3-for-2 offer. From it you should buy Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita; Szerb's Voyage by Moonlight; and Calvino's Invisible Cities.

I keep forgetting to write about what I've been reading, plus I'm still doing a lot of rereading at the moment -- lately John Julius Norwich's History of Byzantium, which I have certainly blogged about before. I read the new Patrick McGrath, Trauma, which is quite good, but I don't think he has ever quite got back to the heights of Asylum, which is a spooky modern Gothic story about a 1950s woman who falls in love with a mental patient, or Dr Haggard's Disease, which is also about obsessive love, though I forget the details. I also read the new Naomi Novik Temeraire book, which made me smile. I think that, like J.K. Rowling, she has an appealing natural honesty in her work. In this book Lawrence and Temeraire have to face the consequences of their decision to do the moral thing at the end of the last book, including worries about whether it was really the moral thing to do after all. I'd recommend the series if you want something easy to read and friendly but not annoyingly vacant, or they'd be good for children too I expect. I read Heather McGowan's Schooling because a friend recommended it, and it is very good. It's a sort of stream-of-consciousness story of a thirteen-/fourteen-year-old girl whose father sends her to an English boarding school after the death of her mother. The problem with stream-of-consciousness stuff is that I just don't think like that; I mostly think in sentences, certainly with proper words in (and sometimes I find myself going back to correct split infinitives); and if someone nearby says something aloud it in no way becomes jumbled with what I'm thinking. Everything doesn't rush at me at once. If the inside of someone's head was really like McGowan's Schooling then I think they would be mentally ill to a quite significant degree. The interesting thing is that I didn't use to think this about stream-of-consciousness when I first encountered it as a teenager. Either I was less critical then, or the way my brain thinks has changed and everything did use to rush at me at once, which may be true. Plus I read The Aviary Gate by Katie Hickman. I quite enjoyed it -- it's not challenging stuff, and it annoyed me on the first page when someone discovers a "parchment" with a watermark, but then "person finds interesting manuscript in the Bodleian" is one of the great story-lines, and I do intend to write one myself one day. There's a lot about western slave-girls entering the Sultan of Constantinople's harem, written in a way which must have made the publishers think "bingo!". The odd thing is that when I finished it and read the thanks at the end I discovered that she's married to A.C. Grayling. Somehow that doesn't seem quite congruent with writing racy orientalist historical fiction. And I read Conspiracies of Rome by Richard Blake. I nearly didn't pick this up because the hero is described in the blurb as a Briton called Aelric, but actually this was explained in the book, and most of its inaccuracies are arguable -- the Donation of Constantine is now thought to have been forged rather later than that, and the description of book production was more late medieval than early. I can never quite believe that the use of imposition in manuscript-making was more than a daft passing fad. The story is OK, but the blurb likens the main character to Flashman, which he isn't at all. I'll probably read the next one. Also I read The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce by Paul Torday, which was a real downer.

In other news I'm very annoyed because I just found out something I didn't know about bookland (not a land full of books but a type of Anglo-Saxon land tenure). And here is a good song:

and here is a fantastic one: