Charlotte's Web and Stephanie Plum

Both SFX Magazine and the Times Literary Supplement gave Hell's Belles very nice reviews this week. The TLS reviewer says: 'The skill of the author, apart from the jokes, is to give characters taken from previous novels a real presence in addition to their supernatural one.' I think she means my habit of adopting Gothic characters from out-of-print texts and trying to bring them to life in the here and now. She also, happily, sees the link with E.F Benson's Mapp and Lucia, which I was very chuffed about.

Here's a nice piece of mail that highlights a real problem though...

"hello Paul
just wanted to let you know, that i've had a right game trying to get hold of hells belles ! I'm in the midlands area and have been to book shops in Merry hill, Brum, Wolverhampton and Walsall !!!

in the end ive had to go to Amazon

i'm desperate to get my hands on it and def hope its here for christmas

your books are amazing, your imagination amazing, your storytelling captivating

thank you and merry christmas

Rach x"

Hope Rach doesn't mind me reprinting! But any post to me is in danger of ending up on my blog... She brings up a pet peeve - the stocking of my books in bookshops. All I can do is tell people to keep asking them to order them in! They'll get them for you. These shops just need a bit more encouragement to restock me on the shelves and to get me in those ubiquitous three-for-two piles. So, keep badgering them, everyone.

Okay - Christmas reading is going on apace.

Why did no one ever tell me I HAD to read Janet Evanovich? The first in her Stephanie Plum series, 'One for the Money' has been sitting on my shelves for years. I had a feeling it would be too hard-boiled or butch, somehow. But I loved it! This hapless, gung-ho New Jersey broad with her beat-up car and her determination to become a bounty hunter. The whole thing is wonderfully plotted and sparky with one-liners and some fantastic set-pieces and twists. LOVED IT. Now I want more. There's fifteen, isn't there? I love all her secondary characters. The gruff Grandma in her lime green shorts and sexy Joe Morelli, the man she's ostensibly hunting... Why did no one insist I read it? Why didn't I read this when it came out, fifteen years ago?

But then I guess it's all a process of ambling along, making up our own reading lives. Sometimes taking recommendations, sometimes not - depending on the fervour and the person giving them. Sometimes things pass us by completely and we let them, thinking they mustn't be our kind of thing: they're the wrong genre, the wrong type of character, the wrong picture on the cover. The wrong typeface inside. The only way of knowing is by sitting down properly and reading that first chapter. That's the only way to know whether it's your thing or not. That's what I say.

I reread 'Charlotte's Web' - again. I think there's real magic in that book. A sense of genuine, magical empathy, I love the way that the little girl, Fern, simply peels away from the story - her attention as she grows up drifting away from the barn and the pig and sitting on the stool, listening to the animals talking. That rings so true, somehow. She vanishes from the book and there's a sadness in that - but the reader is too busy being caught up with the drama of Wilbur and Charlotte and Templeton. I love these characters and revisit them often these days.

The scenes with the spider's egg sac and the very moment that the first baby spider pops up - to be followed by five hundred siblings - is very powerful. As is the bit where they parachute away in a cloud of gossamer balloons, leaving Wilbur bereft again. We had a spider exodus like this in our garden a couple of years ago. J. and I spent a whole spring afternoon watching these space stations tucked under the branches of tall garden plants simply exploding with gentle, silent WHOOMPHS. And then the air was filled with tiny spiders on missions - legs akimbo and fearless in their thousands. Geronimo! There are some photos J. took somewhere - I'll have to dig them out.

My latest love, though, is a book that came out of that random pile of ten I listed here the other day. When I was making my point about unearthed treasure in the house - and how I'm going to stop in my tracks and buy No More Books until I've explored some of what's already here. Anyway - I posted the cover of a book I knew next to nothing about - 'A Cricket in Times Square' by George Selden, from 1960. I read most of it yesterday evening and it's just wonderful. Delightful. Something - again - I wish I'd come across much earlier, so this could be a rereading. (Strange, that.) More about it soon. Anyone else know this fantastic book..?