GENTLE READS

This column by Elinore Standard is one in the ongoing "My Reading Life" series in the Record Review and it appeared in February, 2005.


MY READING LIFE

"Gentle Reads"

Works mentioned in this piece: Land Girls and Wives of the Fisherman by Angela Huth, Quite a Year for Plums, by Bailey White, Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers, Old Devils by Kingsley Amis, Walking Across Egypt, by Clive Edgerton, Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie, Evening Star and Loop Group by Larry McMurtry, A Town Like Alice, Trustee from the Toolroom, On the Beach, The Far Country, In the Wet, Lonely Road, and Landfall by Nevil Shute, Remarkable Reads by J. Peder Zane, Sunset Song and A Scots Quair by Lewis Grassick Gibbon,

There seems to be a recognized book genre called “gentle reads”, works that are positive in tone, feature little, if any, sex and violence, and have settings that evoke this kinder, gentler time before the world became a globe. Since there is now a website for everything, when I Googled “gentle reads” I found several throughout the GLOBE that have interesting and extensive lists of books that you can read without being scared out of your mind or having your tail feathers ruffled in some unpleasant way.

I’m thinking about places where Winter is Summer and the world is upside down. I’m thinking about a place about as far away as possible from the eastern coast of the US. New Zealand? Close. Australia? Very close. Tasmania? Yes, Tasmania, home of Errol Flynn, that swashbuckling rascal of the silver screen. From way down there, from that former far-flung colonial outpost, we have the website of the State Library of Tasmania: www.statelibrary.tas.gov and books, books, lists and more lists of books!

On the Tasmanian “Gentle Reads” list are 22 novels by Nevil Shute, the Rumpole books by John Mortimer, Angela Huth’s “The Land Girls” and “Wives of the Fisherman”, Bailey White’s “Quite a Year for Plums” as well as all the mysteries by Dorothy L. Sayers (was there ever a more romantic moment than in “Gaudy Night” when Lord Peter Wimsey proposes to Harriet Vane and she finally accepts?).

As many libraries do, the Tasmanian Library maintains all kinds of lists including “Fishing Mysteries”, “Big Teeth” monster fiction, “The Detective Doesn’t Wear Trousers”, and “Seniors” fiction . The last category includes Kingsley Amis’s “The Old Devils”, winner of the 1986 Booker Prize, featuring a set of retired old cronies, (“media Welshmen”), who gather daily at a pub that is a home away from home. Their quiet routine gets stirred up when friends, who left years before for a glamorous life in London, return to Wales, a place “very like England and yet not England at all.” This book is available through the Westchester Library System.
Also on this Seniors list are Clive Edgerton’s “Walking Across Egypt”, Alison Lurie’s “Foreign Affairs: and Larry McMurtry’s “Evening Star”. I am sure McMurtry’s recent “Loop Group” will appear on this list before long.

“Walking Across Egypt” is not about walking across Egypt. It is the title of a church hymn written by the author – words and music in the back of the book. Clive Edgerton is an American author who I had never read before, although he has written many books. I see why his work is on the same list as Bailey White. Edgerton was born in the South and lives in North Carolina and writes about the South. “Egypt” is indeed a comfort read about a feisty old lady who becomes the guardian of a juvenile delinquent. The novel is full of great Southern cooking and Edgerton writes dialect that is not annoying, a trick that is a lot harder to do than you might think.

Long before I discovered the Tasmanian list, I went on a Nevil Shute (1899-1960) kick, finding many of his novels at the Bedford Village library and at the Halle Library in Pound Ridge. I re-read “A Town Like Alice” a haunting story that had been made into a wonderful BBC-TV series starring Bryan Brown, and “The Trustee From The Toolroom” an intriguing tale of a legacy and a sunken sailboat. “Toolroom” became a movie titled “The Legacy”.
If you want to create your own Nevil Shute library, you can buy many of his novels online from Amazon (www.Amazon.com). Shute worked at British aircraft companies in the early years of aviation and had a strong interest in flying, often reflected in his work. “Landfall: A Channel Story” (1940), about a young reconnaissance pilot, became a movie in 1949 and was later made into a BBC-TV serial. I recently re-read “Landfall” and breezed through it, an engrossing read even today.

In 1948, Shute visited Australia and was so taken with the country he emigrated with his family and bought a ranch. Australia became the setting for what are the two best-known of Shute’s works: “On the Beach” and “A Town Like Alice”.

Shute went on to write many novels set in the Australia of the immediate post-World War II, including “The Far Country”, “In The Wet”, and “Lonely Road” all of which you can find in local libraries. You can usually go online to a library's website using your library card number to access and reserve. This system works efficiently and you can browse at home to your heart’s content.

“Remarkable Reads” (Norton, 2004), is an anthology edited by J. Peder Zane and it features short essays about special books chosen by prominent authors. The writer Margot Livesey recommends a book by Lewis Grassick Gibbon, “Sunset Song”, which later became the first in a trilogy titled “A Scots Quair”. Livesey, a Scotswoman transplanted to Boston and to London, says she recognizes the 1932 Gibbon novel as “embodying the essence of my homeland and the exquisite detail with which Gibbon describes the land.” At the heart of this gentle read is the story of a biddable girl who becomes a strong-minded woman.

I quickly ordered the trilogy through the library system, and right away recognized the beauty of Gibbon’s prose. But there is a Glossary of Scottish words at the back, the print is tiny, the book is heavy, and, gentle though it is, I decided to abandon it. It just wasn’t the right moment for me to go that deeply into 1911 rural Scotland.
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Elinore Standard is the co-editor with Laura Furman of Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading. (Carroll & Graf, 1997).