Articles in “Books”

Since a large number of my teaching duties have ended for the semester and I have a few clear days ahead before the assessment comes in, I decided I’d have a lovely clean house before I had to start marking.

But—and there’s always a but—since I’m not feeling bright-eyed and bushy-tailed today, I’m looking for ways to do a bit of cleaning without having to move around too much.

I thought I’d achieve this by doing a few loads of washing, which really only requires frenetic activity every forty-five minutes or so—but then the weather greyed over.

So I settled instead on a little light organising—a phrase that always reminds me of the episode of The Goodies where they end up at the Jolly Rock Lighthouse: “I thought it said ‘a little light housekeeping!’”—and, more specifically, moving and re-shelving the 60-odd books that currently live on the bedhead.

Ever since I was woken abruptly by a hardback copy of The Vicar of Wakefield, these books have been the bane of Nick’s existence. Even my sister, whose own pile of bedside reading is only kept upright by a convenient wall, popped her head in and said, “Yep, you’re definitely going to die.”

Still, it could have been worse: The Vicar of Wakefield is not that long a book. It could have been Dickens or Tolstoy. (Well, no: it’s highly unlikely to have been Tolstoy.)

Disturbingly, though, I found I’d forgotten half the books that were up there: technically, if they’re on the bedhead, they’re supposed to be books I’m currently reading. But I’d forgotten I even owned a copy of Manon Lescaut, much less that I’d abandoned it halfway through: apparently, I don’t have a great deal of patience with sentimental, eighteenth-century French fiction.

I’d also forgotten that I owned Patricia Wrede’s Mairelon the Magician, which I don’t think I’ve even opened. I will read that, though, since I did enjoy The Enchanted Forest Chronicles and the co-authored Sorcery and Cecelia; or, The Enchanted Chocolate Pot—although, true to form, I’ve bought the second volume in the latter series and not read it, and only discovered today that there’s a third book.

On the plus side, I found Dorothy L. Sayers’s Strong Poison, which I’ve been futilely looking for on my living-room shelves for three days.

There was a Philip Pullman—one of the Sally Lockheart Mysteries—that I abandoned halfway through, because I just couldn’t cope with the battering that the heroine was taking any more. Those books are brilliant—especially if you’ve just spent three years working on penny dreadfuls—but they are hard on the nerves.

A couple of the wonderful Diana Wynne Jones’s books were stacked up there, too, one of which also had a telltale bookmark halfway through. A word of advice: if you’re trying to complete your Ph.D. thesis, stay away from Archer’s Goon. The story of a man being pursued by wizards because he owes them two thousand words just hits a little too close to home.

Then there was a mysterious pile of Victorian sensation novels, which I suspect have been sitting there for three years. I know, at least, that I intended to do a course of reading sensation novels in the early stages of the Ph.D. Then the topic shifted, as topics are wont to do, but the books stayed where they were: Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, Armadale, and No Name; Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd; and Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne—“Dead! And never called me ‘Mother’!” Or is that just the stage version?—and Lord Oakburn’s Daughters.

Still, they’re all safely rehoused now in the living room, the hallway, the spare room, and the study, along with various Anthony Trollopes, biographies of Dickens and Charlotte Bronte, and Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm.

And it’s inspired me to once again pick up Erik Larson’s book about the Chicago World Fair of 1893 and the simultaneous predations of an urban serial killer—which means that maybe, sometime soon, Facebook will stop asking me if it’s true that I’m still reading it.

I’m always suspicious when a book is touted as “the new Harry Potter“, and it’s not because I didn’t enjoy the Harry Potter series. I did—immensely. But “the new Harry Potter“ as s shorthand description of a new novel doesn’t always seem applicable.

Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, for example, is occasionally mentioned as a “new Harry Potter“ and, despite seeing its popularity among my late-teen students, I don’t see the analogy—except in that it’s sold a lot of copies and is being made into an expensive-looking film. That, to me, is not what makes a new Harry Potter.

I’ve probably bored a lot of people with this story before now, but I did come into the Harry Potter series reasonably early—reasonably early, that is, compared to many of the six million people who bought Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I read the first two just before the third book came out in hardback.

But that’s not the main point of this anecdote.

At the time, I was teaching in a coaching college; among my classes was a Year 4 group, who met on a Thursday night at about 7 p.m. While not reluctant or in any way illiterate, they were not keen readers. They’d been reading Hating Alison Ashley and, frankly, hating it. In consultation with my boss, I suggested Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, fresh off my own reading of it.

At first, the students were very reluctant. They all bought the book and brought it into class. But they sat there while I read the first chapter out loud and moaned, “Miss, this is boooring. Do we haaave to read this, Miss?”

I wasn’t particularly sanguine about the outcome.

Until I came in the next week. And they were all sitting there, with the book lined up in front of them. Most of them had little piles of books one and two and the hardback of volume three. And they mobbed me when I came in; “Miss, I sat up all night reading this! Miss, I’ve read it twice already! Miss, I’ve read all three books! Miss, I had a dream that Voldemort came after me because I didn’t do my homework!”

The last one was a little disturbing.

But I’ve never seen anything like this in all my years of coaching classes of students ranging from Year 3s to graduate students. By the time I left that job several years later, those students were ploughing happily through the many hundreds of pages of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

I’m always suspicious, then, that “the new Harry Potters“ that are frequently vaunted refer only to the books sales, franchising, and movie deals, which to me is only part of what made Rowling’s novels a phenomenon.

But, and this immensely lengthy preamble has been building to this point, I still bought a copy of Roderick Gordon and Brian Williams’s Tunnels, despite the fact that it’s occasionally touted as “the new Harry Potter“.

Of course, according to the Wikipedia page, it’s attracted this accolade simply because Barry Cunningham, the man who signed the novel to the “plucky new children’s book publishing company” Chicken House, was the man who signed J. K. Rowling up to Bloomsbury—which seems a more tenuous connection than usual.

Of course, I haven’t read Tunnels yet; I only know that it’s the story of a fourteen-year-old boy who shares a passion for digging with his father and, when the latter mysteriously disappears down an unknown tunnel, unearths a terrifying secret deep underground.

Sounds great, frankly. I’m looking forward to it, even if it doesn’t generate the same general enthusiasm for literacy that marked my experience of the Harry Potter phenomenon.

But I’m not sure how those Year 4s of mine would have responded to it.

And I really hope it doesn’t have a borderline psychotic vampire anywhere in it.

I mentioned in my post on the first of this saga that I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would—and I did.

I even lent it to my sister-in-law, because I thought it was very much her cup of tea. I don’t know yet if she enjoyed it.

But I also mentioned that I needed to read the others before I could legitimately judge what I thought. I’ve now read two and three, New Moon and Eclipse—the fourth, called I believe Breaking Dawn, hasn’t been published yet—and I now find I’m more ambivalent than before.

These books have been going through my first-year students—the female ones, anyway—like a dose of salts.

(On that note, giving a lecture on cliches last week seems to have had an adverse effect on my writing: “cup of tea” and “does of salts” in one post? Let’s see how many more tired metaphors and battered similes I can use in this post.)

But my students are reading and loving these books; in fact, when I said that halfway through the third book I started thinking to myself, “You know, this vampire is psychotic!” they were up in arms.

(And there’s another cliche for you.)

But that’s where my thoughts starting shifting; and it retrospectively changed my understanding of the previous books.

It wasn’t so much that at one level Edward thirsted to drink human blood; that’s not actually that psychotic, for a vampire. (It reminds me of a news broadcast that talked about the damage caused in the U. S. by a “rogue cyclone”; really, a cyclone causing massive property damage is a fairly well-adjusted cyclone.) No, I started thinking he was psychotic when he removed the distributor cap from his girlfriend’s car to prevent her visiting her Native American werewolf buddies.

Of course, I didn’t like her werewolf best friend, either—he was just as possessive, in a different way.

But Edward’s behaviour bothered me, more than the idea that he might one day be unable to resist the impulse to have Bella for lunch.

When I was reading Twilight, I said to Nick that there were shades of a domestic violence debate coming through the novel for me; I couldn’t judge whether it was deliberate on the author’s part or something that I was reading in for myself, but it came through the emphasis on the dangers of consorting with vampires. Somewhere in there was the sense that we all, on one level, take that risk; we all, when we enter into a relationship, determine—usually on a subconscious level—that this person will never pose a threat or a danger to us and, horror stories aside, we’re mostly right.

The idea of layering that through a romance with a vampire, inherently more threatening than any human partner, fascinated me; it seemed to give weight and substance to the discussion of a relationship that otherwise seemed to accelerate too quickly, even for a romance between teenagers.

Until he removed the distributor cap.

So now I’m not sure how I feel about these. I know as the books progressed, I became more and more annoyed at the idea that the romance would end in marriage—or, analogous to marriage, being turned into a vampire or both—for an eighteen-year-old protagonist, which is not something with which I find myself in sympathy. We haven’t got to that point, yet, but I suspect we will.

On the other hand, I did read all 1200 pages of the second and third novels and, while I’m not generally someone who puts books down unfinished, that does say something about Meyer’s ability to write page-turners. And she is capturing a broad readership among late teens, arguably a harder task than grabbing the early teen market, given the greater time pressures on 17-20 year olds.

But that’s not, I suspect, enough to make me ignore my growing feeling that this vampire is psychotic and that this might be less a great romance than a damagingly co-dependent, potentially abusive relationship.

I haven’t blogged for while, excepting the short pieces I just uploaded, largely because I’ve been taking advantage of the long weekend to have a bit of a break—the first time in seven weeks I haven’t had assessment to mark. W00t!—and partly because I’ve mostly spent that time rewatching Veronica Mars season two, and I have nothing to say about that, except that I miss the show.

But I have been reading something recently—Kerry Greenwood’s Death by Water, her fifteenth Phryne Fisher mystery, according to Wikipedia. And it reminded me that somewhere along the line, I started to get really annoyed with this character.

Way back when I edited the book review section of a review journal, I never either published or wrote a hatchet job—and I don’t intend to do so now. It’s not Greenwood’s novels that I have a problem with; they’re enjoyable murder mysteries/period pieces.

But at some point, Phryne started ringing false for me.

I read Cocaine Blues and Flying Too High after finding them in a secondhand book shop many years ago—I don’t know how many years, but well after they were published. Wikipedia, frustratingly, offers alternate dates of 1989 and 1991 for the first book and I don’t have it on my shelf, so I’m not even sure when it was published. But I can’t have read it before my undergraduate years, which still makes it over a decade ago.

Back then, we were told that Phryne was the daughter of minor aristocracy: her father had been an unsatisfactory younger son, shipped out to the colonies, in traditional fashion, where he had lived in abject poverty until a couple of the people between him and the title died and he was whisked back as the now comfortably affluent heir.

I’ve always wondered why the colonial branch was so straitened, when Phryne’s own resources indicate that the baronetcy was an unusually wealthy one, but that’s not important.

The important point was that that back story made sense: Phryne hadn’t always been rich, but she was now. She enjoyed the money, but wanted something a little more exciting, and slipped into detection almost by accident. Not, perhaps, as convincing a back story as that of Hercule Poirot, ex-Belgian Police Force, or Miss Marple, an unusually intelligent person constrained by the late-Victorian restrictions on her gender, but it was plausible.

But at some point, it came to seem that Phyrne was capable of anything, at which point I started wondering about how the back story worked. Phryne’s years driving ambulances behind the lines in World War One, working as an artist’s model, and barely avoiding a career as a prostitute seemed to fill to short a gap.

I think it was around the time that I read Queen of Flowers that the character struck me as suddenly infallible. I’d not read all the books leading up to that one and those that I had read I hadn’t read in order, but in that book, Phryne managed to leap onto a stampeding horse—one of a herd of stampeding horses—as a result of her earlier experience in a circus, and it rang suddenly false for me.

It’s not as simple, I suspect, as describing the character as a Mary Sue. In fact, I don’t think she is a Mary Sue, because to me—although the definition might have shifted a little recently—the key point of a Mary Sue for me is a desire for wish fulfillment on the part of the author, and I don’t think that’s what’s happening here.

(Similarly, I note from the Wikipedia page on Mary Sues that Bella and Edward from Twilight have been read as Mary Sues, and I don’t think that’s entirely the case, either—although I suspect the author is partly fulfilling the perceived wishes of her readership, I still don’t think that’s quite how a Mary Sue character works.)

But Phryne is increasingly infallible, surviving drownings and being thrown over her horse’s head—something that, due the nature of the act, can kill accomplished fox hunters. And even if you find fox hunting morally repugnant, as I do, it does provide an extraordinary challenge to a participant’s horsemanship.

Unfortunately, for me, this increasingly infallibility brings with it a commensurate lowering in the amount of sympathy that I can generate for the character, because she seems less human. That’s not a problem with superheroes, but it is a problem here.

Call me old fashioned, but I enjoyed the old days, when Phryne changed lovers every book—before she became formalised in the slightly disturbing position of “concubine,” in her words, to a married man—and the outfits were lovingly detailed. Then I enjoyed both the mysteries and the period.

As it stands, the deumanising of the character means I can’t sympathise with her. And that effects my enjoyment of the depiction of 1920s Melbourne society and of the murders, and drives me straight back into the arms of Rex Stout.

Well, essentially, it just has to be published.

But when I was looking at the upcoming releases in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, after reading the first novel, I came across Libba Brays’s A Great and Terrible Beauty, apparently the first in the Gemma Doyle Trilogy.

Normally, I wouldn’t look twice at a book called A Great and Terrible Beauty, assuming it to be a historical romance of some sort.

Then I saw the first line of the Amazon blurb:

“A Victorian boarding school story, a Gothic mansion mystery, a gossipy romp about a clique of girlfriends, and a dark other-worldly fantasy—jumble them all together and you have this complicated and unusual first novel.”

Yep—pretty much going to have to buy that.

After all, I own an entire bookcase’s worth of girls’ school stories and—while a lot of them tell me about passionate friendships, the rules of lacrosse, and how to win for your house—not one of them is set in “a girls’ academy with a mysterious burned-out East Wing.”

I have a feeling that I might have been a little over-eager in my rejection of vampires.

I mentioned in that post that I’d just bought Twilight, the first in Stephenie Meyer’s four-part series about, to borrow the terms used in the blurb, a high-school vampire romance.

I know—I was surprised when I bought it as well.

I bought it because it came to my attention as a book that had become something of a phenomenon, and I figured that if I continue labelling myself a bibliophile, I really should judge these things for myself.

Although I suspect that I came to this a little late—I’ve never been a trend-setter, but I do usually get onto these things a little earlier than this. I managed to come to Harry Potter before the real media frenzy built up, after all—not right at the beginning, but early enough to feel a bit smug. (You know, privately.)

(To counter that, though, I didn’t come across Green Wing until four years after it aired in the U. K., which is chastening enough to dampen the Harry Potter smugness.)

I have a vague recollection, if I’m to be totally honest, that I didn’t come across Twilight until I started seeing information about the forthcoming movie adaptation.

You see, it’s so far outside my normal realms of interest.

I read a lot of young-adult fiction—but it’s mostly fantasy. I tend to find that—with exceptions such as Charles Stross’s Merchant Princes saga—most of the innovative, fascinating writing in this genre is aimed at young adults, for some reason.

And I don’t often buy either vampire fiction of any description or horror fiction. (The exception to these two rules is sitting on a shelf behind me, however: I do own the first 30 Days of Night trade, because the concept fascinated me so much. I haven’t read it yet; Nick scared me by telling me to make sure I read it during the day.)

But I bought Twilight and, since I’ve been marking all day and Nick’s been out all night at a Belgian-beer cafe, I read it tonight in one sitting.

That should be sufficient to demonstrate that I enjoyed it much more than I was anticipating.

I wasn’t sure what I’d make of a vampire romance set in high school. The very concept sets off warring reactions.

I’m really not keen to relive high school. I enjoyed high school in terms of the friendships that I made there and the people I got to socialise with. I was also a girly swot—still am, actually—so I enjoyed the academic side of things.

But I didn’t like high school in general; in fact, when I’m very tired or under a lot of pressure, I still often have dreams that I’m back in high school, and that they won’t listen to me when I tell them that I should be able to leave since I already have two degrees.

On the other hand, I’m keen on a good romance narrative these days.

Put the two together, though, and you have a romance between teenagers—which is a bit of a tiring prospect.

But not always—I thoroughly enjoyed I Capture the Castle when I read it a couple of years ago (although the protagonists, while young, aren’t precisely high schoolers) and even got a kick out of The (now somewhat dated) Constant Nymph, with its fraught romance between a young girl and her cousin’s husband.

And I didn’t find this romance irritating, either.

Part of that might have been the prose, which was measured and deliberate without being frustrating—and nicely copy edited, which is important to me these days. With the exception of one incorrect irregular verb—“lay” where it should have been “lie”—nothing leapt out at me.

(Unlike my most recent reprints of Dorothy L. Sayers, which I think must have been prepared on character-recognition software, there are so many frustrating errors.)

But I think what intrigued me was the presentation of the vampires.

I’m not sure that vampires have ever been static characters: the mythos is too varied across the different cultures that believe in blood-suckers for them to have ever been effectually standardised, a point that this novel makes quite neatly.

But since Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire made radical shifts to the textual presentation of vampires, authors have been playing with their depiction.

Twilight doesn’t make any extraordinary alterations to the basic nature of vampires—they still need to drink blood and avoid sunlight, although they don’t sleep in coffins, thankfully—but she does tweak the characters in ways that allow interesting plot developments.

I don’t want to mention spoilers, and I’m not going into the plot, so there’s not much I can say about how the characterisation of the vampires works.

But one thing did intrigue me: the repeated emphasis on the coldness of their skin and their closer resemblance to the artificiality of statues than to humans. I think that’s where my interest in the book really lay: the construction of alienness.

Not a unique gift, perhaps—but one that always interests me when it’s done well.

I guess when it comes down to it, I’m not particularly interested in reading books about ordinary humans living their lives.

But, ultimately, this book is only the first of a four-part saga. I’m going to have to read the rest, now, before I can decide what I really think.

I’m feeling a little melodramatic tonight—not exactly a rare occurrence. Tonight, I think it’s because I’m wearing a floor-length, swishy, velvet skirt, an absurd quantity of bangles—quite why I’m wearing a wristful of Indian bangles while sitting in my own living room enjoying a quiet drink is a bit of a mystery, even to me—and a long cardigan. It’s an ensemble guaranteed to make anyone feel melodramatic.

(And to those who question the inherent coolness of a good cardigan, I shall simply point to the example of Kurt Cobain.)

So, I’ve decided that the best way to harness this melodramatic frame of mind is to listen to some covers of Jimi Hendrix songs and blog about vampires, while waiting for dinner to be ready.

Because the thing is that I’m actually not a big fan of vampires.

Or, more properly, I’m not a big fan of vampire fiction, which is why I put this under “Books” instead of “Television.” (Naturally, I’m also not a big fan of actual vampires: they’re insanely powerful bloodsuckers, and I don’t place much faith in that “can’t enter unless they’re invited” caveat. But, then, to balance that there is the idea that they don’t actually exist—that must be given due weight, I suppose.)

I loved Dracula when I first read it and realised how very different it was from any adaptation I’d ever seen—and I love seeing students’ reactions to it, when they experience it for the first time.

I simultaneously enjoyed and was slightly horrified by Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula. I always did have a soft spot for poor Jack Seward, which is probably partly inspired by the fact that he was once played by Richard E. Grant. But I’ve never read the later books, although Nick owns them all.

I’ve also been reading—intermittently—the Kim Harrison series of alternate history urban fantasies, which have a strong vampire component, and The Dresden Files, which are veering more and more into vampire-focused plots at the stage I’m up to, which is currently the fourth book.

I’ve also recently bought the first book in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, purely, in this case, because I felt I was out of the loop on something that I should probably judge for myself.

But, that lengthy series of exceptions aside, I rarely buy anything from the section of shelving that bookshops are increasingly labelling “Vampire Fiction.”

And I have no patience with the Interview with a Vampire series. I’ve read the first book—I’ve even taught classes on the first book—and I can see both the impact on contemporary horror fiction of Anne Rice’s re-visioning of the vampire and the fascination of the Anne Rice cult. But I really didn’t like the first book, and didn’t fancy reading the later ones.

But to balance this, I rather like vampire films and television. Within reason, anyway.

I was a big fan of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer—until season 5. I did keep watching after that, right until the end, but in common with a lot of fans I felt it lost something of its focus at that point. I liked Spike, but then I’d liked Angel as well, and if Buffy had been willing to kill Angel, why would she so fiercely defend Spike against the people whom he had injured?

I enjoyed Angel as well, although there the disappointment rather worked in reverse: season 1 wasn’t fantastic, to my mind, but it was still finding its feet and it worked itself into an interesting concept (although I do miss Glenn Quinn; I did like him in both Roseanne and Angel.)

But even when it comes to television, I’m not a big fan of vampire-themed shows.

Except for Ultraviolet, which Nick and I are rewatching now (after a brief and ultimately futile discussion as to which of us has been stalling on re-watching it since I bought it for him some years ago: I say him, he says me.)

I suppose, it one wished to be pedantic, you could claim that Ultraviolet isn’t, technically, a vampire show, since they never say the word “vampire” at all. When they do decide, around about episode two, that they do need a general noun, they call them “leeches.” In fact, Nick swears when it first came out it was advertised in such a way that he thought it was about a fraud investigation squad, and nearly didn’t watch it.

But, sophistry aside, it is one of the cleverest vampire-focused shows I’ve ever seen, and it’s holding up now, ten years after it was released (which is scary enough as it is; I don’t like thinking that ten years can pass since a show that I watched as an adult aired on free-to-air television.)

So while I don’t want to end every blog post by wavering away from my original point—I have fears that my blog will end permanently tentative and lacking any firm opinions—I suppose I do have one final caveat.

I’m really not that interested in vampires—unless they’re key characters in sexy British programmes starring Jack Davenport.

And, let’s face it, that doesn’t happen nearly often enough.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a sucker for a serial, especially if the characters attract me from the outset. Then I want to spend more time with them, and serials are the most effective way of doing that.

(Re-reading works as well, if you’re that way inclined: I am. I’m a voracious re-reader—and re-watcher—where Nick is not. He will re-read—and I have induced him to re-watch by, unpleasant as it sounds, essentially getting a little sulky if I’m not able to watch things more than once each—but he prefers to move on to new fiction and leave the old material behind. I can’t do that. Partly, I suspect, I have a poor memory. But mostly, I suspect, I just like to get back into a particular fictional world. One of my ideas of a personal hell is being told I’m not allowed to re-read Pride and Prejudice any more.)

But really enjoying something that comes in serial form makes re-reading something of a shadowy pleasure. Because with serial story telling, you can revisit the same world and the same characters without having to re-explore the same plot.

This is part of the reason why I prefer television to movies, speaking broadly. (On that note, I seem to be using the construct “part of the reason” or “partly” a lot—either I’m a complex individual, or I just want to think I am.)

Of course, serial story telling has its disadvantages, whether you’re talking books or television.

One of these is a tendency to drag on. For this reason, I’ve never liked soap operas (well, for this reason and for the fact that they’re, to my mind, absurdly overblown. I’ve read and enjoyed my fair share of Victorian melodrama and sensation fiction, but the modern version leaves me cold.) Let things drag on too long and you’re bound to have to replace some of the actors, which always irritates me.

(The worst example of this, I think, is the initially charming Nicholas Lyndhurst comedy Goodnight, Sweetheart, about the man who had the ability to travel between contemporary London and the London of the Blitz. When they recast both his wife and the woman he fancied in the 1940s, the whole tone of the show changed, and not for the better.)

I suspect this is why I’ve always had a soft spot for the sort of television shows that maintain their setting and focus, but don’t emphasise the melodrama of personal relationships, like Law and Order at its peak—ah, Jerry Orbach. How we miss you—and the original template of The Bill, which is now a show well past its prime of episodes such as “Burnside Knew My Father.”

The other major problem I have with serial story telling is the tendency to either go broadly off the rails at some point—alas, Buffy, the Vampire Slayer still remains my benchmark for this. I loved the opening three seasons, thought the next two had some fine moments, and frankly disliked most of the last two seasons—or to get cut off in their prime—and, sticking with the Joss Whedon theme, Firefly is a good example of this.

Any good work of fiction will make me wish that it hadn’t ended, which is where a tendency to re-read comes in handy. A really well-written piece won’t make me wish it had never ended, not if it’s beautifully constructed, but it will make me wish that I hadn’t read or watched it quite so quickly.

But, somehow, this is worse with serial stories, because they induce in you a sense that they will keep going, so the inevitable end becomes harder to cope with. (Television shows are still the best example of this, because their end can be so abrupt and unexpected. Really well-plotted television will bring a season to some sort of ending, but that doesn’t always make up for the abrupt loss of an overall story arc. Can you tell that I’m still bitter that David Milch wasn’t allowed a fourth season of Deadwood?)

But—not to make a mockery of this entire post—there’s a disadvantage to serial story telling that rests entirely with me, not with the form; I’m just not good at dealing with delayed gratification when it comes to stories.

In order to balance a desire for serial story telling and a desire for more-or-less immediate satisfaction, I bless two inventions in particular: trade paperback reprints of comic-book series and DVDs.

With the exception of Fables, I don’t read any comics in their monthly instalments: I find the cliffhangers too frustrating. (Perhaps, at age 31, I should have just got over this, but I suspect that my tendency to respond emotionally to texts is part of what makes me successful at the kind of work I do.)

And while I watch live television and enjoy plenty of programmes that I have no desire to own on DVD, there’s a certain satisfaction to having an entire season of something to work through at my leisure; I would never have survived watching Deadwood or Dexter live to air.

So while I’m glad that Jane Austen didn’t write serials, I’m also glad that studios and (especially in the U. S.) cable companies are starting to put money into writing and producing high-quality television, so I can have at least twelve or thirteen hours of fun, instead of just two.

I’ve never actually thought of myself as a romantic. Apart from a period spent wallowing in Sweet Valley High novels that is probably best left unremembered now, I wasn’t overly interested in love stories as a teenager.

But I find that these days I’m more interested in a well-constructed romantic plot line, and more likely to get attached to stories that do this well.

(This excludes romance novels generally, although I do have an embarrassingly large collection of Georgette Heyer novels. I can’t actually remember why I started reading Heyer; I think it was a reaction to reading Lois McMaster Bujold, although I gave up on her after reading the two-novel anthology Cordelia’s Honour, from which I took the lesson that one never goes shopping with Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan. But I do have almost all of Heyer’s Regency romances; I read them while I was completing my M.Phil. on Lady Caroline Lamb’s novels—it was a way of pretending I was researching while I was just lying around reading. They’re variable in quality, but generally fun. But that’s not the sort of thing I“m talking about here.)

Basically, I’ve become a sucker for a happy ending.

And I’ve developed a strangely conservative streak. I’ve never been particularly interested in marriage for myself—apparently, you’re not a real girl if you haven’t been planning your wedding from age 11, but such is life—and I’m not married now; Nick, apparently, fancies living an alternative lifestyle—or at least about as alternative as you get when you’re white, middle-class, and straight—so here we are.

But I want my favourite characters to get married. I don’t know if it’s exactly conservatism, or if I just want to see them safely fettered so I don’t have to worry about the ups and downs of their relationships any more, but I’m a sucker for a book or television wedding.

Some of this stems from early reading: Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre wouldn’t have been nearly as satisfying without the “Reader, I married him” endings. But it’s getting more pronounced.

Partly, I think Fables is to blame for this. Of the 70-odd issues I’ve read to date—I haven’t read the most recent one yet—the two story arcs that really stand out for me from a continually outstanding series are the Boy-Blue-focused Homelands and the Flycatcher-centric The Good Prince, both of which explore the diasporic aspect of the world building and showcase Bill Willingham’s ability to find and exploit obscure source material.

But what sucked me in to begin with was the relationship between Bigby Wolf and Snow White. It didn’t help, of course, that the third trade ended on a cliffhanger for this relationship. I discovered Fables when I was given the first three trades for my 30th birthday so, when I read the three arcs back to back a couple of days later, I was left wondering about where it was going and spent the next fortnight—in between frantic, last-minute Christmas shopping—searching Brisbane’s comic-book stores for the next three trades.

One of those trades was Homelands, which had nothing to do with the Bigby-Snow relationship, but a large part of my impulse was the desire to get to some sort of happy ending.

Maybe romantics develop naturally from people like me, who were lucky enough to find their life partners early in life and live happily ever after (minus the small pinpricks of wondering why one’s beloved insists on leaving the electric kettle on the bench instead of putting it back on the rest). I don’t know.

But I do know that tragic love stories don’t satisfy me these days. I’d rather read a beautifully written tragic story than a prosaic or poor happy one. But these days, what I want for my leisure reading is a beautifully written happy ending.

I often worry slightly that I own too many books—and then worry about the fact that I worry about owning books, when they’re really only material objects on one plane of existence (the plane of existence, unfortunately, that requires bookshelves and wall space).

Part of my problem is that I’m fascinated by textuality, by textual scholarship, by bibliographies and reference texts—including one, rather embarrassingly, called Who’s Who in Enid Blyton—and by the textual development of stories.

This fascination is integral to my ability to perform the kind of textual criticism on which my work centres, but it also means that I end up owning multiple copies of certain novels.

This afternoon, I moved a bookshelf from the study to the spare room, as part of the ongoing process of opening up the study and making it a more congenial workspace. In the process, I came across such a wide range of multiple editions that I somewhat horrified myself, and ended up getting Nick—slightly melancholic himself, being unable to defeat a boss demon in Diablo—to keep a list for me. (Not, as it turned out, the best idea: I ended up slightly hysterical at the thought of my profligacy, while Nick eyed his vast collection of Doctor Who Target novelisations and sighed.)

But here’s a brief list, anyway.

William Beckford’s Vathek.
I own four copies of this work: an Oxford World’s Classic; a Penguin, complete with additional Beckford stories; another Penguin, in a volume called Three Gothic Novels (which is also the reason why I own two copies of Horace Walpole’s The Castle Of Otranto, and far too many copies of Frankenstein); and a gorgeous Broadview edition of Vathek, with The Episode of Vathek.

The problem is that I can’t remember if there even were alternate editions of Vathek or whether I simply own four copies of an identical text, which would be less justifiable.

They do all have different textual apparatuses (except, perhaps, for the two Penguins) and I did need the novel as literary context for the last chapter of my M.Phil. But did I need four copies?

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
I also own four copies of this, including the Broadview and the Norton. At least in this case, there are two alternate texts—1818 and 1831—and this was the work on which I produced my first major piece of criticism, my Honours thesis, all those years ago.

But I don’t think that’s the reason why I keep buying it—it’s just such a fascinating, complex, tragic novel, and so thoroughly shocked and surprised me when I first read it that I can’t help but buy any edition that might have new footnotes.

(On that note, I can offer in my own defense the fact that I have not replaced all my old Penguins with the new Penguins, even though the new ones have entirely fresh critical apparatuses by scholars who aren’t all died-in-the-wool Leavisites. I think that’s fairly restrained.)

I also own at least three copies of Bram Stoker’s Dracula—I realised while Nick was making the list that there might be another copy somewhere, and indeed the entire list-making process was punctuated by me saying “Did I say three copies of that book? I’ve just found another one.” It would only have been two, however, if I hadn’t had to buy a recent Penguin when I last taught Gothic Lit., so that the students and I would literally be on the same page.

I’m not even going to mention how many copies of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women I own—but, to balance that, I don’t own a single copy of any of the film versions.

Nick’s face fell at the last Lifeline BookFest when he asked what I’d bought and I pulled out another translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. But that one was H. C. Cary’s translation from the early nineteenth century, and I really did need it to balance my translations by Mark Musa and Dorothy L. Sayers. I also used Cary as my translation for my M.Phil, but that’s not much of an excuse, since I submitted that four years ago.

I discovered two copies of George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss today, as well—and, Victorian scholar though I may be, I haven’t even read the book. Yet.

Ditto Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Cervantes’ Don Quixote—two copies of each—although I swear I am going to read the latter one day. After I have, I may even get around to reading Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, of which I thankfully only have one copy.

I don’t think I need to justify owning three copies of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, do I? Or two copies of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights?

Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, on the other hand—I’m not sure I want to confess this, but I don’t actually like it very much. Or, rather, I don’t like Jane very much. She’s so dreary. Still, it’s worth it for the sake of Rochester.

I’m not apologising for my two copies of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, because that’s a great book. I’m a little uncomfortable with my TV tie-in edition, now, but I can’t bring myself to get rid of it—it’s got Rufus Sewell as Will Ladislaw on the cover. I’m not that strong-willed.

I probably don’t need two copies of Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals, though. Or three copies of Northanger Abbey. Or two copies of The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde; one isn’t even a critical edition, and the texts are identical, so I can’t begin to justify that. And I can’t remember why I own four copies of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk—although the texts do vary.

I can justify my two different versions of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, though. I bought a cheap-and-nasty copy—one of those awful 1960s hardbacks, with the heavy black line drawings picked out in one or two colours, usually purple or red, and a plasticky cover—at a BookFest some years ago, just to have the stories.

(Although, in retrospect, I’m not sure why—I rarely re-read my Andersen, because the stories are so depressing, and often cruelly arbitrary. A little like Wilde’s fairy tales, but without Wilde’s language.)

Then, I came to write the second chapter of my Ph.D., and I realised I needed a different translation of the tales to make my argument—these are the tales with the half-naked princess illustration, by the way.

I couldn’t isolate the exact translation that Eliza Winstanley had used as the basis for her adaptations, so I chose the most contemporaneous; Henry W. Dulcken, who published his translations in 1864-1866.

(Actually, his translations are extremely complex, in how they navigate between Andersen’s casual taking-the-Lord’s-name-in-vain and Dulcken’s middle-class, English, mid-nineteenth-century audience’s distaste for seeing the name “God” in a fairy tale—Kirsten Malmkjaer’s work on this aspect of his translations is fascinating.)

So I bought a copy of Dulcken’s translation, and I thought I’d get rid of my old, plasticky book.

But when I took it off the shelf, I saw that it was Mrs E. Lucas’s translations, which I knew from Viggo Hjornager Pedersen’s Ugly Ducklings? was much later but still a nineteenth-century translation. And my resolve to remove it from my shelves entirely disappeared.

I can’t believe that we live in a world where it’s wrong to want to own multiple nineteenth-century translations of a Danish writer’s work because the differences in the translations tell us so much about the market for which they were produced.

And, anyway, I’ve never complained about Nick’s Doctor Who novelisations.

For someone who explicitly said they wanted to blog about reading, I really haven’t posted much about reading. Perhaps I’ve spent too much time watching television, recently: I do like good television. (More so than movies, actually—I’m a sucker for serial story-telling, hence my thesis on serial fiction of the mid-Victorian period.)

But lately I’ve been on an Agatha Christie bender. Or a re-bender, I suppose, since I’ve read most of them before. (Oddly, I recently pulled my copy of Crooked House off the shelf and realised, unusually for me, that I couldn’t remember where and when I’d bought it, and that I’d never actually read it. It’s very good, by the way.)

So I’ve just finished Death on the Nile (1937) and moved on to Five Little Pigs (1942); this latter, according to Wikipedia, was also published as Murder in Retrospect, which I have to say is the daftest title for a murder mystery ever.

These two were both adapted in the BBC’s series of Poirot mysteries in 2003-2004, along with Sad Cypress (1940)—a lovely book—and The Hollow (1946)—a strangely disappointing book, I felt, because it turned on the charisma of the murdered man, and I thought he was a prat. The problem’s with the reader there, I feel.

My disappointment in The Hollow aside, I felt this was an exceptional bunch of adaptations. Of course, Poirot adaptations have traditionally been treated more accurately than their Marple cousins; I have no idea why, since there’s no discernible difference, to me, in the quality of Christie’s plotting between the two detectives. But these four were unusually good.

The newspaper reviewers at the time picked Sad Cypress as the best of the bunch, and it was good. But when I mentioned this to my sister, she disagreed in favour of Five Little Pigs. To her, the tragedy of the story—the fact that these two vital, fascinating, clever, creative people were dead sixteen years before the novel even started, so that the solution of the mystery could only benefit the second generation—made it a far more gripping plot.

I would agree with this, to an extent. I still like a happy ending, although I’m not daft enough to think I could get one out of this book. But part of the reason why I gave up watching Cold Case was because I couldn’t deal with the emphasis on the victim; the crimes were significantly harder to deal with in this than in, say, Law and Order. Even though the Wikipedia page says that the actual murder in Cold Case is often omitted “due to the heinousness of the underlying crime which is included with the murder,” when “the crime is usually rape or sexual assault of an innocent child or woman,” I gave up after the racially motivated Depression-Era rape and murder of a young black woman—that episode was so horrific I couldn’t keep watching.

Five Little Pigs works in a similar way, for me. Most of Agatha Christie’s work centres on the idea of protecting the innocent; she emphasises in more than one work that the English judicial system has never hanged an innocent person, as in Mrs McGinty’s Dead, where the conviction is overturned, and in Ordeal by Innocence, in which the convicted man dies in prison but escapes hanging.

Five Little Pigs falls into the latter category, avoiding direct criticism of the English judicial system by having the convicted murderess die of an illness in prison.

The idea that the English judicial system has never hanged an innocent person is one that I can’t entirely support—Derek Bentley? Edith Thompson? Paul Hanratty?—and I’m not sure that, given her emphasis in other books, Christie was actively making a point about the irreversibility of capital punishment. But that’s what the book suggests to me.

I’ve never supported the death penalty in any shape or form, for any crime. It’s such a core belief for me, that I’m not going to set out my arguments here; people will either agree with me or not, and I’m not to be moved on this issue.

For me, it was the story of the execution of Derek Bentley that devastated me—I am, in fact listening to Let Him Dangle as I write this. I could not, and still can not, comprehend how any judicial system that favoured an irreversible method of punishment could carry out that sentence.

But for at least two of the Queens of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, it was the execution of Edith Thompson that seems to have caused the most concern. Christie cites Thompson on more than one occasion, and Dorothy L. Sayers’s co-written text The Documents in the Case—with Robert Eustace—also evokes the Thompson/Bywaters affair.

Sayers is a more complicated case. She doesn’t oppose the death penalty; in at least one novel, she advocates suicide over public ignominy and execution—and references the possibility in another novel—but Lord Peter Wimsey struggles with the reality of the death penalty. This is brought home to the reader most effectively in Busman’s Honeymoon, a book that broke my heart when I first read it, many years after reading the other Wimsey novels.

But even there, the objection is less to the execution—the murderer has confessed, and is undoubtedly guilty—as to the fact that Wimsey can’t receive absolution from the man that he, and he alone—the police being stymied—brought to the noose. Wimsey is deeply affected by the fact that he ends people’s lives, but less from a belief in any flaw in the judicial system than out of a realisation that he pursues detection as a hobby, rather than as a profession. Still, the doubt is there, an integral part of Sayers’s detective.

Five Little Pigs is unique, as far as I know, in Christie’s oeuvre, since the presumed-innocent character in Ordeal by Innocence was, in fact, guilty. Like any other murder mystery, Five Little Pigs provides the satisfaction of finding out who the murderer is, but it’s a melancholic book, not simply because the revelation of the murderer is anti-climactic and because the victims are attractive and charming.

For me, the devastating fact of this novel is that an innocent woman—while not hanged—dies for a crime she did not commit. The texts that provide Poirot with such vital information for the revelation of the real murderer—the letters that a dying Caroline Crale writes to her sister and to her daughter—remind me of an incident from several years ago.

As a postgraduate student, my sister worked at a nineteenth-century prison that had become a tourist attraction, and arranged for my mother and me to take a night tour, complete with candlelight.

The only time I’ve ever felt distinctly claustrophobic, including many years as a child spent touring limestone caves, was on that tour, when we were enclosed, in the dark, in the cell occupied by convicts on the night before their execution.

The main story for this tour was a famous bushranger, but a secondary story was that of a nineteenth-century baby farmer, executed for killing her charges, who spent the night before her execution sewing a drawstring into her skirt, so that the executioners couldn’t see her petticoats when the trapdoor was released. To me, the idea that this woman spent her last night thinking of her modesty is devastating.

When I re-read Five Little Pigs, I think of that story.

When our tour guide told this anecdote, the tour group laughed.

I decided last night, for no apparent reason, to move Nick’s vast collection of art books to the shoddily painted (by me) craftwood shelves from the equally shaky dark-stained bookcase they’re currently on. This essentially involved moving them a metre to the left, but it’s slightly more complicated than that.

The art books are fine—they’re so huge that the books can’t doubled stacked even if I wanted to. But the other shelves are filled with results of eight years shopping at the Lifeline Book Fest, and I’m a little surprised at the things I’m coming across that, apparently, I can’t bring myself to get rid of.

I’m not sure, for example, that I really need all seven Donna Parker books. Sure, they have exciting picture boards showing full-skirted girls dancing at what I assume are sock hops, and the idea of 1950s American girlhood is always intriguing, but then I also own a copy of the journals of Sylvia Plath, so am I likely to re-read Donna Parker?

I’m also not sure that I technically need Walt Disney’s Annette Mysteries. These, I suppose, have some kitsch value (though not when crammed away out of sight on a back shelf); I mean, Annette Funicello solves mysteries!

I’m a bit annoyed, though, that I don’t seem to own Sierra Summer. I could at least have bought the entire set.

I think I’ve even got a copy of a Patty Duke book by the same author somewhere.

I’m also fairly certain that I don’t need the 1980s Nancy Drew revival: The Nancy Drew Files. I’ll resist to the utmost any attempt to remove my 1970s Nancy Drew books—they might be revisionist versions of the old 1930s and 1940s titles, but they’re the ones I grew up with—but these? Are frankly awful, unless you have a weakness for lengthy, badly written descriptions of the sartorial advantage of an oversized jumper worn over tight-legged jeans.

The one advantage of the series is that they finally realised that Ned Nickerson was a waste of space, although the fan-fiction writers over at the Sympathy for Ned community don’t agree with me.

Mind you, I’m not getting rid of my Nancy Drew/Cherry Ames slash fiction.

But for every slightly dodgy book that I probably should send back to the Lifeline sale, there are some little treasures that I’ve forgotten about.

I’ve found a lovely Collins edition of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poems, which was hiding in plain sight. I’m not a particular fan of Longfellow, but the soft, green, suede cover of this book is a delight in and of itself.

There’s also a 1970s paperback of Tuck Everlasting, which I haven’t read. At least now I can pull it off the back of a shelf and add it to the precarious pile of books on the bedhead (I still haven’t effectively learned the lesson of seven years ago, when I must have shifted too much in my sleep and was unpleasantly woken by a hardcover copy of The Vicar of Wakefield bouncing off my forehead. Despite this, the bedhead still seems to me a sensible place to store books.)

I’ve also unearthed a lovely pile of the Mary Grant Bruce Billabong books, some of which are modern paperback reprints, but four of which are lovely 1980s hardbacks that, despite the unattractive cover art, have a solidity and weight far in excess of their size. When did they start depriving children of solid-feeling hardbacks in favour of flimsy paperbacks that all seem to have the same holographic covers?

(Speaking of holographic covers, I also located my copy of The Looking Glass Wars. Not quite a holographic cover—although my copy is unnecessarily shiny—and a disappointing book to me. It seems there’s a sequel, but I don’t think I’ll bother with it.)

On the plus side, there’s a copy of The Mystery of the Shining Children, one of the Jenny Dean Science Fiction Mysteries. Really, who doesn’t love a book about, according to the back cover, “a sixteen-year-old sleuth with a passion for solving some of the most extraordinary science fiction mysteries ever recorded”?

Now I just need to find the other three books in the series.

Also lurking far on a back shelf were several of the Dana Girls mysteries. Teenage girl sleuths who are also students are a private girls’ school? Two of my favourite genres in one—and if none of my girls’ school stories have shown up in this list, it’s only because they have a dedicated bookshelf and don’t get shuffled around.

And Bedknob and Broomstick. I’d completely forgotten I owned this, although four of author Mary Norton’s Borrowers books, which I’ve adored since childhood, are on one of the shelves in the hallway. And, for that matter, why only four? What happened to my copy of the fifth?

This post, I’m starting to suspect, could last forever. But there’s one final set of books that I’d forgotten and am thrilled to see again: Mary Poppins. I’m not even sure I own the original book—although I remember a copy from my childhood that must still be at my parents’ house—but I do have Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane, Mary Poppins Opens the Door, Mary Poppins Comes Back, and Mary Poppins in the Park, and that’s enough strange and slightly sad, 1930s-1940s, English urban fantasy to be starting with.