Top Ten Books of 2012

Here's my list of the best books I read in 2012. No rereads & I've cheated a little by including two series & lumping two books by the one author together. There is no order to the list & it's a mixture of Fiction & Non Fiction. Follow the links to my reviews.

In the year of the Bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens, it was inevitable that I would read something by the great man. I read the last two of his novels that I had never read before, Barnaby Rudge & Martin Chuzzlewit. Put off by the stodgy names & reputation for unreadability, I was surprised at how much I loved both books. Knowing very little about the plots was also an advantage. I was eager to find out what happened to everyone. I also reread Great Expectations, The Mystery of Edwin Drood & A Christmas Carol.

Staying with Dickens, Michael Slater's The Great Charles Dickens Scandal was much-anticipated & didn't disappoint. A drily witty, succinct account of the lengths that Dickens went to to hide his relationship with Nelly Ternan & the efforts everyone else has gone to ever since to find out what really happened.

The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard was the most harrowing book I've ever read. The story of Scott's last expedition to find the South Pole, this is a beautifully-written account of hardship & determination by one who was there.

Almost as harrowing was Germinal by Emile Zola. Like all Zola's novels, this is an absorbing journey into the lives of the working people of 19th century France. The scenes in the mines are unforgettable & chilling in their horror.

I'm including a couple of series in my Top 10 because I can't choose just one book & I read them as a whole so it's easier to just nominate all of them. Bloomsbury have re-released many of Ann Bridge's novels as POD paperbacks & e-books. I loved the Julia Probyn series which I started last year & finished reading in August with Julia in Ireland. Julia is a female James Bond - beautiful, intelligent, well-connected & resourceful. I loved her adventures, set in exotic locations in Europe such as Emergency in the Pyrenees.

Martin Edwards has also benefited from the e-book revolution. After being out of print for some years, his Harry Devlin series is now available in paperback or as e-books. I've read the first two books, All the Lonely People & Suspicious Minds, & I have the third downloaded & ready to go. Harry is a lawyer in 1990s Liverpool & the atmosphere of the city & Harry's dogged pursuit of justice make the series compelling reading. Harry's adventures will keep me happy while I wait for the next Lake District mystery, The Frozen Shroud, to be published next year.

Catherine Aird's standalone novel, A Most Contagious Game, was a delight with its echoes of Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time. I loved the way that research was still done in libraries & newspaper archives (it was first published in 1967) & the historical aspect to the modern-day mystery was fascinating.

More history in Linda Gillard's The Glass Guardian. The legacy of WWI combined with a romantic ghost story set in wintry modern-day Skye was the most all-consuming reading experience I had this year. I read it virtually in one sitting, just wonderful.

I read very little historical fiction these days but Hilary Mantel is the exception. Bring Up The Bodies continues the story of Thomas Cromwell begun in Wolf Hall & brilliantly retells the story of the fall of Anne Boleyn. We all know how the story ends but this novel read like a thriller. An amazing achievement.

Queen Victoria's Letters to her daughter Vicky, Empress of Germany are touching, opinionated, gossipy & compelling. Vicky left England when she was only 17 & the letters selected here cover history, politics & family matters. The Folio Society edition is also beautifully produced with some gorgeous plates as well.

Well, that's it for 2012. I'm looking forward to plenty of good reading in 2013 & will be back in a couple of days with some thoughts about reading plans for the year. Happy New Year!

The Great Charles Dickens Scandal - Michael Slater

This is just the kind of book I love. Michael Slater is one of the foremost Dickens scholars in the world. His biography of Dickens was published a few years ago & I loved it. Slater brought something new to the life of Dickens by focusing on the journalism &, in so doing, broadened our idea of Dickens as a writer & a professional journalist & editor. This new book has a rather sensational title & vaudevillian cover but the content is serious, well-reasoned & very unsensational in its conclusions.

The great scandal of Dickens's life was the breakdown of his marriage to Catherine. They had been married over 20 years, they had 10 children & Dickens's image as a family man was a major part of his public persona. In 1858, Dickens separated from Catherine in a sudden & very cruel manner. He took all but one of the children to live with him & he never saw Catherine again. Dickens had met a young actress, Ellen Ternan, known as Nelly, while performing in a charity production of Wilkie Collins's play, The Frozen Deep. Nelly was 17, Dickens was 45. He was immediately infatuated & seemed to see in Nelly all the qualities of innocence, beauty & purity that he had so admired in other young women in his past life & that he portrayed in many of his heroines in his fiction.

Dickens had had two experiences in his youth that had influenced him ever after. His first love was a young woman called Maria Beadnell. He was poor & unknown; she was capricious & her parents didn't encourage her relationship with Dickens. She rejected him & he never forgot her. Then, after his marriage to Catherine Hogarth, her sister Mary came to live with the couple. Her sudden death one night after an evening at the theatre, shocked Dickens profoundly. He never forgot Mary & she became an idealized figure in his imagination. Catherine, meanwhile, must have found it difficult to live up to these ethereal images of womanhood. She seems to have been a kind, loving, not very intelligent woman who was almost constantly pregnant & gradually putting on weight with every year. She must have found it difficult to keep up with her dynamo of a husband with his restlessness & his great capacity for work. Dickens was the superstar of the age & news of the breakdown of his marriage caused a tremendous scandal.

When the scandal broke, Dickens took steps to try to contain the story. He allowed his close associate, W H Wills, to circulate the contents of a letter which detailed his unhappiness in his marriage & complained that he & Catherine had never been suited to each other & had never been happy. His vague comments about a young lady whose name has been coupled with his but who was as innocent & pure as his own daughters only fanned the flames of rumour. Most people seemed to believe that he was having an affair with Catherine's sister, Georgina, who had lived with the family for years & had helped Catherine look after the household. Dickens's warm comments about Georgina in the letter only encouraged this idea. Dickens then made the mistake of publishing an Personal Statement in The Times which only excited more gossip. The Statement vehemently denied the rumours without spelling them out so the many people who didn't know about the scandal yet were mystified & eager to find out what it all meant.

In these last twelve years of Dickens's life, he hid his relationship with Nelly so effectively that there is very little documentary proof of where they lived, if they lived together, how often they met. Scraps of evidence have come to light, including rate notices that show that Dickens paid the rates on a house in Slough where Nelly lived with her mother. He used several false names, including Charles Tringham. Nelly seems to have spent time in France & it was rumoured that she had a child there, who died young. Nelly & her mother were with Dickens on the train that crashed at Staplehurst in 1865. Dickens covered his tracks there as well & Nelly's name was never mentioned in all the publicity about Dickens's work on that day as he helped the wounded & comforted the dying. Nelly spent the rest of her life hiding her relationship from Dickens. She married & had children but they knew nothing about their mother's relationship with Dickens until after her death.

Slater's book really takes up the story after Dickens's death with the attempts by scholars & biographers to discover the truth about Nelly. Dickens's first biographer, John Forster, was a close friend &, although he certainly knew the truth, he did not reveal it in the book. Biographers were circumspect while Dickens's children were alive. But, after the last survivors,  Kate & Henry died in the 1930s, the revelations began to be published. Kate had spoken to Gladys Storey, who published a book, Dickens & Daughter, which told the story of the child who died. Sir Henry Dickens & the Dickens Fellowship effectively stymied other writers by refusing permission to quote from family letters but the books & articles kept coming & the speculation about the relationship ranged from it being a chaste relationship to a torrid affair complete with scenes of anguish & torment.

Slater explores the gradual drip of information & speculation that reached its climax in 1990 with the publication of Claire Tomalin's wonderful book, The Invisible Woman, which brought Nelly out from the shadows of the Dickens story. Tomalin's book brought together all that was known about the affair & her interpretation of the facts where there was no hard evidence. The Great Charles Dickens Scandal is an absorbing account of the lengths Dickens & his family went to to hide Nelly & the equal lengths researchers went to after his death to find out about her. We probably know all there is to know now unless something sensational turns up like Dickens's letters to or from Nelly or the birth certificate of the child that may have been born to them. Dickens destroyed so many letters & documents that it's hard to believe that there's anything left to find but a letter about his separation from Catherine was discovered just the other day so anything is possible. In this Dickens Bicentennial Year, this witty, intelligent, well-reasoned book should not be missed.

Bookish news - & some treats to look forward to

I mentioned in my last post that I love publishers who reprint out of print classics that have slipped under the radar for whatever reason. Now with e-books, it's even easier for a canny publisher to bring back an author's backlist without the thought of being left with a warehouse full of unsold hard copies. I discovered Martin Edwards through his wonderful Lake District series. He also wrote an earlier series featuring Liverpool lawyer Harry Devlin but most of the titles have been out of print for some time. I borrowed Waterloo Sunset from work & enjoyed it very much & Arcturus Classics have recently reprinted the first in the series, All the Lonely People. Now, Andrews UK have reprinted most of the rest of the series as POD paperbacks & e-books. Distinguished crime writers have contributed new Introductions & Martin has written a "Making Of" feature for each title & there's a teaser chapter of the next book in the series. All the details are here at Martin's blog.

Martin's blog also reminded me of Bello, Pan Macmillan's new e-book imprint. They have some fantastic authors, including Josephine Bell, a mystery novelist I read in the dim dark past but would love to read more of her books. She also wrote historical novels which are part of the new Bello list as well. Other authors include Vita Sackville-West, Eva Ibbotson, R C Sherriff (author of the terrific Persephone reprint, The Hopkins Manuscript), Francis Durbridge & Lillian Beckwith. I'm especially interested in the Lillian Beckwith books as I love stories set in Scotland & her memoirs & novels set in the Hebrides have been out of print for some time.

I'm reading Susanna Kearsley's novel The Shadowy Horses at the moment. I read all her books as they were published but this was an especial favourite & I recently read a rave review (I can't remember where now) that made me long to read it again. It's just as good as I remember & looking at Fantastic Fiction to find out when it was published (easier than going back in my e-book), I discovered that Susanna has a new book due out next March called The Firebird. Tantalisingly that's all I can find out about it. There's no blurb on Amazon & nothing on Susanna's website.

O Douglas is another of my recent favourites, discovered thanks to Greyladies in Edinburgh. They're publishing two new books next month & one of them is by O Douglas, The Day of Small Things. I think it's a sequel to The Proper Place which I enjoyed & reviewed here.

Finally, two books that I've pre-ordered & can't wait to get my hands on. Michael Slater's biography of Charles Dickens was published a few years ago & I loved it. Now, he's written a book (published in September) about Dickens's relationship with Nelly Ternan, The Great Charles Dickens Scandal. He not only describes the relationship between Dickens & Nelly & the lengths Dickens went to to keep it a secret but also discusses how the relationship was finally revealed & the many intrigues that accompanied each revelation.

Maggie Lane has been writing about Jane Austen for many years & her thoughts are always insightful & beautifully expressed. Her new book (published in October), Understanding Austen, was the result of a series of articles she wrote for Jane Austen's Regency World magazine. The articles explored some of Austen's favourite words which express her ideas about human worth - elegance, openness, fortitude. It's sure to send me back to reread at least one of the novels.

Well, I can never say I have nothing to read & nothing to look forward to!