Book news

I haven't been up to the post room today so don't know what's turned up today. But I did read Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle this weekend, mainly on the train to and from Newcastle.

I thoroughly recommend it. It's a subtle and rather lovely depiction of a girl in her late teens coming of age in a weird and dysfunctional family, and recording it all in her journal - much of it is rather dreamlike, but the haze is occasionally pierced by moments of profundity and sharpness (and it's heavily influenced by Jane Austen, one of my favourites). Part of the pleasure of reading it is in the space between Cassandra's naivety and what you as the reader can see unfolding. The opening line is excellent: 'I write this sitting in the kitchen sink…' and Cassandra's mix of precocious wisdom, stupidity and charm is captivating.

Smith was the author of One Hundred and One Dalmatians and its sequels, and seems to have led an interesting life as a popular author who associated with more literary ones - I Capture the Castle is the moment she produced something literary herself, though I do like the Dalmatians stories. Smith was friends with Christopher Isherwood, one of my literary heroes, and like him, was amongst the crowd of literary cowards who fled for the US when WW2 broke out - Smith's husband Alec Beesley declared himself a pacifist but ran away rather than (as many pacifists did) arguing their cases and taking a stand.

Meanwhile, lots of births and deaths in the literary world today. It's Orhan Pamuk's birthday, and witty Dorothy Parker, sensitive E. M. Forster and naughty Henry Miller died on this date.

OK, I've been up to the post room now. I've received the new Teenage Fanclub album on lovely vinyl (featuring John McCusker and Euros Childs!), Timothy Andres' captivating Shy and Mighty (sort-of contemporary classical pieces), Lev Grossman's interesting The Magicians (an anti-Potter wizard-college fantasy) and a free copy of Graeme Burton's Media and Society: Critical Perspectives, which has neither jangly guitars nor angsty teen magicians, but does look excellent as an undergraduate resource despite these shortcomings.