Playthings – Anna Vaught Writes

Updated. I think that’s probably it for 2016 with the books I’ve just ordered or bought…

A sixth form student asked me which books I’d read so far this year and could I list them for her – so here you go. Hope I’ve not forgotten anything. The list comprises fiction and non fiction I have read since new year and doesn’t include things that I have needed to read or re-read for English teaching, such as novels, poems, short stories, non-fiction texts, web texts, articles, essays and reviews – or blog posts, poems, magazines, journals and papers that I have read outside of this. And the list doesn’t include my own novel, published on 3rd March this year or the series of features I have written this year – or the poems or the bits of research I’ve been doing for the next book or the books I’ve read to or shared with the kids! Actually, all that adds up to a lot, now I think about it! But here’s the list you asked for, Sasha. And it’s fun to see what people read: you’ll see there are a couple of Horrible Histories in there. I love Horrible Histories. x

No reviews here: haven’t quite had time, what with writing the second book, the day job, the litter of boys, the MH stuff, the PTA…anyway, I think this is it, so far…

The Loney: Andrew Michael Hurley

Galaxy: Explore the Universe, Planets and Stars (Collins). I pinched this from one of the kids and plan to read a great deal more on the subject now that I’m clear what a neutron star is…

1.2 Billion: Mahesh Rao (short stories)

It’s All in Your Head: Suzanne O’ Sullivan. I thought this was fascinating and compassionate and I also trawled through many reviews, which were fascinating in themselves: she has had many detractors for her observations on ME, in particular.

Reasons to Stay Alive: Matt Haig. It was nice to meet him at an event in Toppings Bookshop, too. I thought he spoke with humour and compassion; I was also aware that some members of his audience were acutely anxious about situations in their own lives or in those of their loved ones. Conversations were had; questions were asked. I have struggled with mental health problems since I was a child. I wondered if, in writing the book, he had subsequently felt burdened by others’ concerns and by their sadness.

The Seven Storey Mountain: Thomas Merton

The Death of the Heart: Elizabeth Bowen

Playthings: Alex Pheby

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing: Eimear McBride

Horrible Histories – Henry VIII and his Wicked Wives and Cut-throat Celts

The Outsider: Colin Wilson

Orlando: Virginia Woolf

Duff: Suzy Norman

A Country Road. A Tree: Jo Barker

In Her Wake: Amanda Jennings

Armadillos: P.K. Lynch.

Local Girl Missing: Claire Douglas.

Middlemarch: George Eliot. (This was a re-read. I hadn’t looked at it properly for years and, of course, I was glad I did.)

The Last Act of Love: Cathy Rentzenbrink

Cloud Nine: Alex Campbell

Depression: The Way Out Of Your Prison: Dorothy Rowe (read for the third time!)

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves: Karen Joy Fowler

Our Mutual Friend: Charles Dickens (second reading) and Great Expectations (a third)

The Story of Blanche and Marie: Per Olov Enquist

This Book is Gay and Mind Your Head: Juno Dawson. I do think these are excellent books on sexuality and identity and on mental health for young people. Juno is a YA novelist too and used to be a PSHE teacher.

The Bell Jar: Sylvia Plath (second reading)

Crap Towns. The 50 Worst Places to Live In The UK (ed. Sam Jordison and Dan Kieran).

The Beckoning Silence: Joe Simpson

Very British Problems. Rob Temple.

How Novels Work: John Mullan

Lost at Sea. The Jon Ronson Mysteries: Jon Ronson

Talking About It Only Makes It Worse: David Mitchell

The Buried Giant: Kazuo Ishiguro

Dear Stranger: Various (Penguin/Mind – and this was a re-read).

I tend to dip into recipes and food writing a lot and my two favourite cookbooks so far this year are Mamushka: Recipes From Ukraine and Beyond: Olia Hercules; My Kitchen Year: Ruth Reichl.

Sometimes a River Song: Avril Joy (read twice). This is a haunting book. It is quiet, but in capturing the voice – of the river; of the White River Arkansas communities in the 1930s – Avril has done something ambitious.

Great Expectations (read multiple times before; it is still, probably, my favourite book).

Bleak House: Charles Dickens. This is my husband’s favourite Dickens and so it’s a sort of shared project, this.

More Dickens: I had never read The Mystery of Edwin Drood or Master Humphrey’s Clock. Have now. Genius.

Solar Bones: Mike McCormack. Boy does this deserve the plaudits it has been getting.

As I Lay Dying: William Faulkner. Again, a re-read. I love Faulkner and he is my husband’s favourite author. So, again, things to talk about here.

Feeding Time: Adam Biles. Now, I am reading my way through the Galley Beggar catalogue, as I am for a number of smaller presses, and this was a signed copy sent to me as a friend of Galley Beggar

Also, because of this, I have the proof of Paul Stanbridge: Forbidden Line. Yes, it is brilliant. Currently reading this.

Just pre-ordered Good Me Bad Me by Ali Land (which is out in February) and Kate Armstrong’s The Storyteller is at the ready. Because it was in The Guardian’s Book Club, I have just bought Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club and also – I do love it when this happens – a student I am currently supporting told me it was one of his favourite films and so we agreed that we would both read it and compare notes. That’s a new buy, as is Jessie Greengrass’s short story collection, An Account Of The Decline Of The Great Auk, According To One Who Saw It, which would get my prize for favourite title of the year and I do love a short story

I also…read through the draft of Patrician Press Anthology of Peacekeepers and Refugees (out January, 2017) and my poem ‘Emigre’ is in this; ditto The Emma Press Anthology of The Sea, where you would find my funny little poem, ‘Cast Out My Broken Comrades’ – set in Pembrokeshire and inspired partly by Homer’s Odyssey (from which its title comes). This is one beautiful anthology from an innovative and hard working press.

Michael Ondaatje’s In The Skin Of A Lion for a book group.

And, ALWAYS, I am dipping into all my poetry books and short stories (John Donne and Isaac Azimov got a lot of time this year and I read a few of last year’s listed short stories in the Galley Beggar story competition). I spent an evening reading Donne’s Collected Sermons too, as one does.

And back to what I was saying about texts I haven’t included, now that would be a quick re-read of ‘An Inspector Calls’, ‘Macbeth’ – you know – GCSE texts, plus things for IGCSE, A level English Literature and the anthologies for A Level Language and Literature. And, for example, a romp through The Great Gatsby, in which I always find new things.

And

I have been learning Welsh (which feels right with my heritage) and beginning, in such faltering terms, to attempt poems in it. Thus I turned to Gwynn Williams’s Welsh Poems, which has long been on my shelf and I have also been reading The Mabinogion.

Oh – and a side project: reading Thomas Wolfe at bedtime with my Georgia-born husband. We began with Look Homeward Angel – note the gorgeous paradox of this review on Goodreads – This book is a masterpiece that I wouldn’t recommended to my worst enemy. It is dense, repetitive, overly descriptive to the nth degree, filled with page after page of infuriating, hard-to-like characters, and more or less moves like molasses. It also is possibly the most beautifully written, poetic and longing book I’ve read. And I have been reading The Web and The Rock. Or rather he has been reading it to me. That’s how we met, you know. He asked me for directions, did Georgia Boy, on a street in Kolkata, then read to me in a hammock on a roof. He says he thinks my writing is like Faulkner or Wolfe, which probably means I should keep the day job. But oh.

It is early days for Killing Hapless Ally. Which is a strange feeling as I am already working on at least one other book. I am both letting her go and keeping an eye on her, and writing pieces on mental health, anxiety, literature and well-being, young people and mental health and parenting and mental health. You can access any of these through the pages of this blog, linked at top, or read some of them as blog posts here. I notice that even when I write on more frivolous topics – such as in my posts for http://www.selfishmother.com – I am also mindful of the topic of mental health. I have so much more to say here, I think.

Anyway, I liked today’s review of Killing Hapless Ally. It’s nicely written, isn’t it? That ‘So’ had me at hello.Here we are:

‘So. I suggest you don’t try to approach this as a book to dip into, in the few minutes before sleep for instance. The early chapters are a roller coaster of happenings expressed in dense, layered prose full of wit and horror. They are gripping and challenging at the same time, and the style cleverly reflects the state of the young Alison’s mind as she tries to cope with her family. It almost feels like the literary pizazz and black humour is there to deflect the tale of such cruelty to a child. When we get to the adult Alison’s showdown with her demons, and her work with Drs Hook and Crook, the style becomes calmer as Alison’s voice takes over. This packs even more of a punch when describing the dispatching of the chorus of Hapless Ally, Dead Santa Maria, Brother who Might as Well have been Dead, Vaguely Dead Dad and her other demons. This dispatching is incredibly moving, as is the knowledge that Alison’s voice, spirit and fierce intelligence was not dimmed despite everyone’s best efforts including her own. Highly, highly recommended.’

What am I reading? I am about to write a review of The Loney and A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, about which I have conflicting views, but both of which interested me greatly. I thought, for example, that the language of the former was utterly beautiful; its evocation of landscape is something that will stay with me for a long time. I also felt it pulled off the difficult feat of making one laugh at the very time one is unsettled by the prose and full of dread. The latter, I am torn by. I am a huge fan of both Beckett and Joyce and instinctively felt at home here and yet…More to come. On my bedside table at the moment, Playthings by Alex Pheby, which is, I am convinced, entirely brilliant. Again review to come, when I get time. I do want to say, though, that all three of these fascinating titles found their home (at least initially) with small presses. May I remind you of my article on publishing with a small press myself. Here:

A Small Press State of Mind

And what with Alex Pheby’s book by my bed (and some rather ravishing other things to come from Galley Beggar Press) and most of my way through the whole Wellcome prize list, I want to recommend to you Suzanne O’ Sullivan’s It’s All In Your Head: True Stories of Imaginary Illness. She is a neurologist and has a deep interest in and respect for psychosomatic illness, which I should add is not ‘imagined’ as in ‘faked’, but a gamut of really experienced physical symptoms which, it is argued, may have their root in psychological issues. That does not under-value their reality, the pain these things cause or the havoc they wreak in people’s lives.

I felt that O’Sullivan is elucidating in what seems to me a very sensitive way the subtle link between the mind and the body. I can see from some of the negative (some furiously so) reviews on Amazon that many people have taken her to task, accusing her of misunderstanding illness for which, at the end of the day, it is hard or impossible to attribute physical cause, but I also have some personal understanding of this, in that, as someone who received mental health support and who had many years of struggling with anxiety, depression and OCD, I also had a raft of (physically) unexplained medical problems alongside them: pain, awful fatigue and IBS to name three. Now I am mentally much stronger, because – and it would have been different otherwise: I cannot emphasise this enough – I have been helped to find the tools for health by appropriate MHRS support and I had to choose to engage with that support. And my physical health is very different. When it wavers, as it must do, both my psychological and physical responses are very different. I would have to posit, therefore, that these things – the pain, IBS and fatigue – were, for me, quite possibly psychosomatic and rooted in the psychological distress I was experiencing. I do feel uncomfortable stating this, but thus was my experience: pain came from pain; illness came from sadness – a fruit of what, in other times, might have been called hysteria or melancholia. It is this same inference on which some of those Amazon reviewers have taken her to task because they feel it is a misunderstanding of subtle illness.

I know that it is not easy for people and that shifting illness for which there is no attributable cause (which is not the same as saying there isn’t a cause which needs treatment or that the illness is not real to its sufferer or that it isn’t a serious matter) does not receive the compassion it should in the everyday world, so that those who suffer from something which may, by some definitions, be termed psychosomatic, also have to cope with others’ lack of understanding and sympathy. I am afraid it is also thus with mental health disorders and I certainly felt stigmatised within society and even within my own family; people still do – and that’s partly why I wrote my novel. No-one should feel both ill and persecuted and I wanted to punch stigma roundly on the nose. So, I did find much of what O’Sullivan wrote resonated with me – particularly its thornier or more uncomfortable points – because I also knew that I could, at several stages, have accepted further medical and/or psychiatric intervention which, on paper, was not essential. It is for serious illness – mental illness, I mean (and you see I am pains to point out that I am speaking only of myself because mental health problems are complex, diverse and peculiar to the individual) but I was encouraged to see I had the answers and, of course, I had my Dorothy Rowe books beside me. Her line – also not popular with all – is that depression is a prison where you are both prisoner and jailer; ergo, you put yourself in there and you have the key to getting yourself out. Human beings have the most extraordinary resources and we should never forget that.

I will take some weeks to digest the book and I urge you to read it. I hope that the tone of my comments comes across well.

Anna.

Category: Playthings

My 2016 in books so far…

Latest review and what I have been reading – particularly from The Wellcome Prize Shortlist