When I was home my mum gave a book. A book she read over a year ago, but I've had to wait for, as naturally she leant it to all of her sisters and half of her one thousand friends before I got my hands on it. It was definitely worth the wait though and I gobbled the whole thing up in less than a week. God love transport for the time it gives to bookworms!
"Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself."
-George Bernard Shaw
The book was Me and Mine, a portrait of an Irish family living in London. It was heart-warming, anecdotal and quite honestly it made me think so much of my own family. Not just because they were from Longford and reading the Longford Leader, which once reported my own parents marriage- completely inaccurately! This book is a real page turner and I quite literally couldn't bare to put it down. I'd thoroughly recommend it to anyone. It depicts family exactly as I think it should be, a hub of loving intrusion and jest, both in spite and because of each member's imperfections as well as their strengths.
"The definition of a page-turner really aught to be that this page is so good, you can't bear to leave it behind, but then the next page is there and it might be just as amazing as this one."
-John Burnside
As you know, at Christmas I got a Kindle. This was a very practical decision, supported by two very simple reasons.
- Books are very expensive here, especially foreign ones.
- I have my luggage allowance to think of, and lots of books would certainly weigh me down.
As much as I enjoy playing with my new toy and the delights of finding literary freebies, it was wonderful to have a real book in my hands again. A real page turner, complete with pages to turn!
Having devoured this treat so quickly I have now returned to my new found technological ways and you could say I'm even being conscientious by having started North and South, by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell. This is one of the set texts for 'The English Nineteenth Century Novel', a module I hope to take next year at Warwick. I'm really enjoying it. I can't help but wonder if people really were as eloquent as characters in these old novels though. Margaret Hale, the protagonist, speaks so poetically as she describes her old rural home to her new friends in the North that I wonder have we forgotten the power of poetry, simply become too lazy to fully describe all that we perceive, or rather have become sadly unaware of the beauty and the music in the world around us?
I'm just a quarter of the way through now- thank you Kindle and your handy little percentage bar- and am really enjoying this read. I hope the rest of the books on this reading list treat me as kindly.
Also, yes... I have seen a BBC adaptation of this tale. And no, it doesn't hurt to imagine the dashing Richard Armitage as the leading man, John Thornton. Do you judge me, fellow Literature students?
I'm going to stop now as I have a book to be getting back to...
p.s. If you like the sound of either of these books, here are the links to them on the Waterstones website.
- Me and Mine, Anna May Mangan, http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/anna+may+mangan/me+and+mine/7441649/
- North and South, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/elizabeth+cleghorn+gaskell/north+and+south/8585681/
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