Good morning all! I would like to invite you to join and participate in a new series, Books in My Life, which will pick up the slot recently vacated by The Books That Changed My Life when Diana in NoVA decided to take a well-deserved break as editor of that series.
This series will be very similar to that one with just some slight reconfiguration. Please know that this is an “official” hand-off with the support of Diana in NoVA who appointed me as her successor editor with some additional input provided by Limelite. My goal is to attempt to live up to the lofty standards and example Diana set. Like the Post Office, I promise to deliver a diary come rain, snow, sleet, or dark of night at 8:00 AM every Friday. Of course, I hope that the vast majority of those diaries are by writers other than me, like YOU!
Books in My Life, like it’s ancestor TBTCML, is looking for diaries about books that spoke to you personally and touched you in some way beyond that of just the usual good read. It might be because of where you were when you read the book or what was happening to you personally or the world at large when you read something that stayed with you. It could be the books that have endured throughout your life that you go back to time and again. Or possibly, it could be a genre that you have become immersed in. It doesn’t really matter, just tell us about the books that mattered to you and why.
As to format, you are free to let your story unfold as you like – it’s your life and your book after all.
Now that we have that out of the way, I will share the first Books In My Life.
A number of years ago I moved to a seaside town in New England. I have always considered myself a spiritual New Englander and the first night snuggled in my little iron bed in my new apartment I could see the misted light from the street lamp shining into my bedroom and I heard the fog horns out in the bay and I thought, “At last – I am home!”
Because life seemed to be perfectly falling into place for me at that particular time, I found work on my first day in town – at a Bookstore! It was sort of a funny bookstore in that it didn’t have many books, basically because it was also a stationer’s supply store. That’s the very old name for “office products”. The books had to share space with ledger books and pen nibs and whatnot so they were relegated to a few shelves and a table in the middle of the store. My friends called my workplace The Bookstore Without Books. But we did function as the bookstore for the townsfolk and we did much of our business through Special Orders. One of my jobs was to write up the special orders at my little desk in the uninsulated attic of the store, broiling in summer and freezing in winter.
There was one customer whose book orders I paid special attention to because he was so witty and dry and sparkling himself, whether in person or over the phone and he and I struck up a strong friendship. One day he came in and ordered a book and he told me that I had to be sure to order a copy for myself. “Do it” he said. “I promise you will never regret it and you’ll thank me for it”.
So I did as he advised and I do thank him and the book he told me to order that day has a place on the small shelf of books I maintain with the secret name of Books That Will Never Be Lent.
The book I ordered for him and myself that day was Make Way For Lucia, an omnibus volume of all the Mapp and Lucia novels of E.F. Benson.
Lucia lives in Riseholm, an idyllic village in England with her husband Pepino and her best friend Georgie who lives nearby. Lucia is the fierce social leader of the village who embarks almost daily on a regimen of self-enrichment which she also enforces on her followers and her acolytes, some of whom adore her, some of whom envy her, but all of whom bow to her iron will.
Sometimes Lucia gets herself into disastrous situations mostly of her own making.
(Spoiler, but of no great consequence) For example, Lucia likes to pretend that she can speak Italian. No one else in the village speaks it, so who would know that she is basically babbling nonsensical Italian phrases out of context? Her little ruse works well until the day an actual Italian opera singer turns up in her sphere and of course Lucia is expected to be the one to be the liaison to interact with him. Hilarious! When it’s over, is Lucia exposed and discredited? No she is not. Unfortunately, according to her, the opera singer spoke only an “obscure Neapolitan dialect” impossible to make out. Lucia is a force of nature and she cannot be denied. She occasionally gets bowed, but she never breaks.
As you make your way through the Lucia books, at the exact moment that it should happen, EF Benson realizes that perhaps the Riseholm well has run dry and for the next set of novels he sends Lucia off to live in Tilling, a town on the coast which happens to be under the rule of another social dominatrix, Miss Mapp. Actually, Miss Mapp is more of a would-be social dominatrix who does not have her village under thumb as much as she would like and Lucia comes to town and upsets many of Miss Mapp’s apple carts. Their ensuing comedy of manners wrestling matches are insanely funny.
Both the villages of Riseholme and Tilling are populated with numerous secondary characters that all add their own wonderful foibles and eccentricities into the mix.
The Lucia and Mapp books are frothy, diverting novels of a pre-war rural England. They aren’t “important”, they aren’t socially conscious or aware, they don’t critique the English class caste system.
If you are a PG Wodehouse fan or a Stella Gibbons fan, or an Anglophile, or a fan of humorous writing in general you might consider giving them a read. When I take my dog-eared copy of Make Way From Lucia down from the shelf, I let it fall open at any page and just start enjoying all over again. And sometimes I think I hear foghorns.
For more information about the Lucia and Miss Mapp Books and EF Benson, here is The Wiki