Tag Archives: summer reading

Enough is as Good as a Feast

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Kate Atkinson, Human Croquet

Kate Atkinson, Normal Rules Don’t Apply

It may have been a mistake, saving my stash of Kate Atkinsons to take with me on holiday over the summer. Not because they are not wonderful; they absolutely are. Reading Human Croquet, which I did in a day, gulping it down in a way I haven’t done with a book since the height of the pandemic, was a joy, an immersion in language and characterisation and intricately intersecting plot lines that took me to another place as only a great book can.

But oh! they are so rich! Coming to the end of the book after a day spent reading like that felt a bit like getting up from the table after an overly rich meal, or waking up with a hangover. It was almost too much, to the point where I felt lethargic and slightly headachy. So following such overindulgence with more of the same may, as I say, have been a mistake. Yes, Normal Rules Don’t Apply was, as a collection of short stories, briefer and lighter, but the collection of linking characters, locations and storylines required work, the language was just as intoxicating and the emotions evoked were, if anything, even more quietly devastating.

To recover, I gave myself a palate cleanser of Georgette Heyer’s The Quiet Gentleman, which was light and funny and straightforward in terms of plotlines and the emotions aroused, although not, perhaps, overly memorable. But it did leave me slightly out of time to tackle Shrines of Gaiety, which I had been keeping to savour,before the end of our stay in the US. I was left with the choice of starting it on the plane ride home or saving it for the long weekend trip to Scotland scheduled for the week after we returned. The former option risked my staying up all night reading, followed by jetlagged exhaustion on arrival. That was how I read Life After Life, but I wouldn’t have slept on that flight anyway, In the depths of grief following my mother’s death the week before, that book saved me from going mad, a life raft in the ocean of suspended time that flying back to my family in the UK entailed. This time I anticipated no such need, just the prospect of houseguests to prepare for, making the prospect of exhaustion compounded by jetlag a less than enticing prospect.

Saving it for Scotland, meanwhile, would give me something to look forward too when my husband and son headed off to climb Ben Nevis without me, a challenge to far for my torn ACL, which had been playing up even in the slightly less strenuous context of the hills of Western Massachusetts. So that is was I decided to do, planning to balance the intensity of Atkinson’s rich literary vision of 1920s London with the anticipated jeu d’esprit of Juno Dawson’s Hebden Bridge-set witchcraft novels.

Summer Reading and Future Plans

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Somehow, it is the August bank holiday weekend, and thus almost the end of summer. I am back at work (which means hundreds of emails and frantic lecture writing and lesson planning for a month before teaching starts) on Wednesday and the kids are back at school the following week. This summer seems to have gone by in a blur, over before it barely began, but it has seen two important developments, at least as far as this blog is concerned.

In the first place, I have managed to to a lot more fiction reading this summer than I have for the past couple of years. Returning to immersion in fiction as a space for relaxation and recuperation has been a joy, and I hope to carry on with this habit even as the busyness of the academic year accelerates. My-to-be read shelf has not noticeably contracted, as holiday travels have involved many bookshops and and I appear constitutionally unable to enter a bookshop without purchasing something, particularly second-hand bookshops, and there is also the list of things I want to read but haven’t quite got around (or found a good excuse) to purchase yet.

The second development of the summer was my decision (along with many others) to finally cut ties with the social media site formally know as Twitter and move my micro-blogging onto Threads, where I go by @thehistorianskitchengarden. As I originally joined Twitter to publicise this blog, in the days when there was a 180-character limit, this transition feels like a good excuse to revive and revise what I am doing on here.

My initial enrolment with Threads was due to the fact that I have an Instagram account, where I mainly post pictures of my cooking and gardening endeavours, as well as views from my morning runs and holiday walks. However, I have also been intermittently involved with the #bookstagram hashtag, primarily through posting stacks of books prompted by a theme. However, I also enjoy reading reviews of books posted on the site, and have considered posting my own, thwarted only by the incovenience of writing a detailed review on my phone keypad. Given the regularity with which I post typos due either to fat fingers or the vagaries of auto-correct as it is, attempting this on a regular basis seemed like a bad idea.

I did flirt with the idea of launching a Substack, something I may do in the future depending on the direction my writing career develops in the future, but adding an additional platform at this stage, when I already have this one at my disposal. So how I will be using this blog will change over the next few months. In addition to publicising my posts on Threads, I will be posting more (and hopefully more regular) book reviews. These will mainly be fiction, moving this site away from its focus on the First World War, although there will be some non-fiction reviews as well.

I don’t want to move entirely away from the role that this site has played as a research diary, not least because I am now working on not one but two book, a history of men and war in the modern period and a history of the returning British servicemen of the First World War. Both of these are now at the proposal stage and starting to have both argument and form. All that is lacking is sufficient time for me to write them. I will be trying to carve this out over the next year and the practice of working through ideas on this blog can only help make the process more efficient. Again, I will use Threads to help disseminate my writing, highlighting the historian as much as the kitchen and the garden of my handle.

So there will be quite a lot going on on here, I hope, and I will be updating the look of this site as part of that. There will be separate pages for the reviews and the two book projects, as well as an updated profile. There will be more photographs integrated into my posts, reflecting how I have developed my use of Threads in conjunction with Instagram. There may be some publicity for my other project, the podcast on the intersections of the First World War with popular culture, that I co-present, although I am not clear what form this will take. Finally, there will, I hope, be more scope for comment and discussion both on here and on social media, particularly relating to the book reviews. All of this may take some time, not least because, as of next week, my priority will be writing and creating the presentation slides for the eleven lectures I am due to deliver in the current term. But there will be reviews of at least some of the books I have read this summer before then, and before the start of the new year catches up to me.