I am just like a crow - any new shiny thing that catches my eye I grab on to and bring back to the nest.
In this most recent case, the glittery object was, no surprise here, a book: The Clothes They Stood Up In (1996) by Alan Bennett.
It appeared out of nowhere (most likely in an Amazon promotional e-mail) and because I found Mr. Bennett's An Uncommon Reader so delightful, I checked the library catalog and sure enough it had this one on the shelf. Before I knew it, I had put other reading aside and was curled up in my chair this morning sipping coffee and reading this funny little gem.
And I do mean little. The book itself only measures 5-by-7 inches and Mr. Bennett tells this story - his first novel - in 160 pages. I read it between breakfast and lunch.
The tale concerns Mr. and Mrs. Ransome who come home from the opera one evening to find their London flat empty. They have been "robbed" as Mrs. Ransome exclaims or "burgled" as Mr. Ransome corrects. Premises were burgled; persons were robbed. (Mr. R spends a lot of his life correcting not only his wife but everyone in general.)
All possessions are gone: the chairs and tables, the fitted carpet, the stereo, the casserole that had been cooking in the oven, the oven, and even the blue toilet paper rolls.
Mrs. R weeps. Mr. R goes out to find a phone to call the police. The police, not very sympathetic to the Ransome's plight, arrive, take a few notes, and depart.
The Ransome's are adrift. They wander about like I do when the power is out and I enter a room and hit the light switch and wonder for a split-second why the room remains dark.
Mrs. R decides to make a list of provisions to buy but realizes she has not paper nor pen. Her husband goes to work and she leaves the apartment and becomes better acquainted with her neighborhood. She talks to a counselor from the police department who is sent to help her find peace with the loss of her things. She rents a television and begins to watch daytime talk shows where she learns about an entirely different world than the one she has spent 50 years living in. She discovers the corner store owned by an Asian grocer and begins to shop there.
In short, she starts to look at life through a different lens - one in which she has been liberated, in more ways than one, from 'stuff.'
A lot goes on in this small tale. Some of it will make you laugh, some of it will make you nod your head in agreement, some of it will make you sigh sadly.
But at at the risk of writing more words about this book than even make up the book, I will end this post here.
It took me a while, but I finally got around to listing (see the tab at the top of the page) the titles of all the books I read in 2011. I remember some with great fondness (2011).
During the review I checked to see if some of the authors had new books out. I was happy to see that Tarquin Hall has another mystery starring the portly Vish Puri, a crime solving private detective in Dehli. It has the irrepressible title of The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken. This is the third in the series featuring Mr. Puri and his undercover operatives and I have it on my reserve list at the library.
I also discovered that Alan Bradley, author of the Flavia de Luce mysteries, has a fifth book in his series coming out in January 2013: Speaking From Among the Bones. It too is now on my reserve list.
If you are not yet acquainted with Flavia, she is an 11-year-old girl living with her widowed father and two older sisters in a somewhat decaying country house in England in 1950. She spends most of her time cooking up poisons and other potions in the abandoned chemistry lab at the top of the house. That is when she is not pedaling around the countryside on her bicycle and solving murders. A delight.
I am also putting Alan Bennett's An Uncommon Reader on my list to re-read. It is the novella featuring The Queen and her discovery of the joys of books and reading. It will be saved to be read in an afternoon over a cup of Earl Grey tea.
I underestimated myself. I recently committed to reading two more of the books I bought on the Grand Southern Literary Tour by the end of the year. Happily, I finished both before the end of this month: Lanterns and Lances by James Thurber (here) and Every Day by the Sun by Dean Faulkner Wells (here, here, and here).
Now I have moved on to something completely different: Mrs. Queen Takes the Train by William Kuhn. I adore the cover and the idea behind the novel which has to do with The Queen, yes, that Queen, escaping from Buckingham Palace one rainy Monday afternoon and taking the train to Edinburgh for a visit to the decommissioned royal yacht, Britannia, that is moored nearby at Leith. She has many fond memories of days and nights spent on the yacht and wants to recapture just a bit of those happy feelings. And who can blame her.
Into the mix and on her trail are her lady-in-waiting (Note to Self: find one of these), her dresser, a butler, an equerry, a girl from the royal stables, and a young man who works at the shop that supplies cheese for Her Majesty.
I have to admit I am always happy to read fictional exploits of The Queen. I so enjoyed Alan Bennet's An Uncommon Reader which concerns what happens when The Queen takes to reading. I love getting even a little look at what goes on behind the walls of those palaces. Even if that only comes from the author's imagination.
While other girls may have yearned to be a princess I always wanted to live in castle and be The Queen.
Reigned all day.
