What I've been reading

Lark Rise to Candleford
by Flora Thompson

"Combining three books in one anthology, this story of three closely related Oxfordshire communities - a hamlet. the nearby village and a small market town - is based on the author's experiences during childhood and youth."

When I was still at school, one of the teachers mentioned a book by two authors called Opie which was all about the games, songs and activities of children. It sounded so interesting that I kept an eye out for it, and later I must have found it in the library. It was as dry as dust - a scholarly, anthropological study written up in the style of academia, and I was thoroughly disappointed. This is the book that I was hoping for. A fictionalised version of the author's life in Oxfordshire in the late nineteenth century with all the colour and detail that was missing in that Opie book. A delight.

Psychopathology of Everyday Life
by Sigmund Freud

"Through a series of case histories, some no longer than a few lines long, Freud explores how it is that normal people make slips of speech, writing, reading and remembering in their everyday life, and reveals what it is that they betray about the existence of a sub-text or subliminal motive to our conscious actions."

The seminal work, translated from the original German in the days when it was assumed the reader would understand French so didn't bother to translate those paragraphs. It does make sense that sometimes words are transposed in speech or writing, and in my case it's usually because my mind has skipped ahead to whatever's next and incorporates a word or part of word too early, or because my typing fingers run away with themselves and type something they prefer instead of the word I want. Freud seems unwilling to accept that there is any such thing as a random mistake; it is all explicable as long as you apply the psychoanalysis. Not that he's perfect; he catalogues instances where his treatment fails, but I find it all so smug, and I don't think it would stand up for a moment against modern science's evidence-based requirements.

The Murder on the Links
by Agatha Christie

narrated by B. J. Harrison

"Poirot has been frantically summoned to France by Monsieur Paul Renauld. Unfortunately, upon arrival, Hastings and Poirot are informed they have arrived too late and Renauld is dead."

My main complaint about classic detective novels is when they are serialised for radio and I simply can't keep up with all the different characters and how they are related to one another and to the murdered individual(s). So I was pleased to be able to follow this one all the way through, possibly because it was a straight narration of the book rather than a radio play. Even if the narrator's French/Belgian accents are hopeless and his English accent is almost as bad.

Hons and Rebels
by Jessica Mitford

"The Mitford family is one of the century's most enigmatic, made notorious by Nancy's novels, Diana's marriage to Sir Oswald Mosley, Unity's infatuation with Hitler, Debo's marriage to a duke and Jessica's passionate commitment to communism."

I don't know what makes this family's stories so riveting. It started with reading Nancy's novels, and I've got a biography of all the family waiting to be read, but Sister D was giving books away and this was one of them. Jessica (Decca) Mitford is the one who eloped with her cousin to the Spanish Civil War, then went to America. When they were briefly living in London she writes that she didn't realise that electricity and gas had to be paid for; she thought it came with the house. The book relates her life mainly in the 1930's, and is frighteningly reminiscent of the times we are living through now, in as much as there's a right wing government which doesn't seem to care much about the populace in the lead up to a world war.

Plague: Black Death and Pestilence in Europe
by William Naphy & Andrew Spicer

"The Black Death first hit Europe in 1347, ripping through towns, villages, and families. Subsequent attacks of the disease, coming almost every decade, so limited the population that it was not until the 18th century that it managed to surpass the levels of the 1340s. In the end, this mysterious disease that had terrorized, terrified, and killed millions, disappeared as inexplicably as it had appeared."

Another of dad's books, and very readable but ultimately unmemorable. I thought I'd be more interested than I was - it turns out, surprisingly, that I'm just not particularly interested in plague.