Garnett and Ferguson

What do you do when you aren't particularly enjoying something you're reading? I always remember a very sensible friend of mine saying that life's too short to read stuff you're not getting on with. There are so many novels out there that you'll never catch up. If you read a hundred pages and you hate it, just give it up. Seems like sound advice, but I always think if I do I'll miss the point when it suddenly gets good, and I'll never know what happened. Or that I'm missing the point of the thing I'm reading, somehow, through being obtuse or reading stupidly. (I wasn't enjoying Nancy Mitford's 'Love in a Cold Climate' when we read that for my book group, then suddenly, with the arrival of the hilarious Cecil, the whole thing warmed up considerably.)

At the moment I'm struggling a bit with Rachel Ferguson's 'The Brontes Went to Woolworths.' I've always been intrigued by that title and so, when I saw that Bloosmbury had republished it, with other 'forgotten' novels of a similar vintage I snapped it up. It was one of my 3-for-2 binges, this time in Borders in Edinburgh. ('The Disappointing Binge' sounds like an Edward Gorey book.) Beautiful design on this 'Bloomsbury Group' of reprints, by the way. They're like exotic sorbets.

But the actual novel is leaving me a bit cold. It feels like eavesdropping on a whole load of private jokes between posh school girls. They're all fussing over a high court judge they've got the hots for, which is amusing up to a point. But there's something twittery and too arch about their fantasy lives and in-jokes and the whole thing. But we'll see. I'll stick with it. I promise! I know that some people love this book and Bloosmbury clearly thought it worth bringing back to life... so maybe I'll be convinced by the end...

The other thing I've been thinking about is Eve Garnett's children's classic, 'The Family from One End Street', which we were talking about in my MA class last night. Very interesting that those of us who'd read it in childhood were less impressed by it, returning to read it now, for the course. I remember being gobsmacked, when I was a kid, reading these episodes of domestic realism and gentle tribulation; all of them set in terraced streets recognisable from my own visits to my Little Nanna Mason in South Shields. When I was little, bits of Shields still looked like the 1930s, and that very matriarchal, working class life was still very much in evidence. I think Garnett's book was one of the first times I saw people I recognised and knew inside the pages of a novel.

Looking at it now though, it feels a bit benign, even anodyne. The whole MA group thought that. Where was the plot? The adventure? The danger? Would it hold a kid's attention now, when all kids' books seem so whizz-bang and busy? It's the very small things, though, in 'One End Street' that are the most dramatic. The bit that stuck with me from childhood is when the girl has a go at ironing for her mother's boss, and, to her horror, shrivels a petticoat in an instant. ('The Shrivelled Petticoat' could be another Gorey title.)

Great conversation, anyway, about the book, last night. About the charm of ordinariness. How strange and shocking it must have been at the time: a book about an ordinary family having ordinary, mildly funny adventures. It got us onto the whole topic of the 'family novel', and how often they have at the centre of them the child (usually a girl) who grows up to be a writer. I think you can feel the difference between the emotional charge of 'Little Women' and the 'Little House' books, in which the eventual writer began as a part of the family in the story, and 'One End Street', in which she didn't.

Edith Nesbit next week! I'm looking forward to hearing what the class makes of the Phoenix and the Carpet.

More book talk tonight! It's the first anniversary dinner of my local Book Club, which began last October at my kitchen table. We've doubled in size and feel like congratulating ourselves, so we're all off to Sweet Mandarin in the Northern Quarter for dinner and to discuss this month's book. 'Dead After Dark.'

J. (who isn't in Book Club - and nor is Panda) calls it, 'Drinking Wine and Gossiping at the Kitchen Table Club.'