The excellent Jo Thoenes interviewed us last week, you can listen to it here.
December 5, 2011
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Richard recommends
By The Madhatter in Books, Shop, UncategorizedThe true pleasure of working in a bookshop is that it can feel like the best of book group the working day long. You get to know your neighbours through the lens of the books that they love. They inspire you to read the books that have moved them. My book list is now so long it is an impossible task to keep up. But I am reading more than ever before because all the recommendations really do make me hungry to read what’s on offer. So here are some of the books that I have truly enjoyed reading in the last few days.
The Hare With Amber Eyes by Emund De Waal
I was moved to read this when overhearing a visitor to Madhatter Bookshop telling her friend about why it was the best book she’d read in ages. She spoke enthusiastically about being plunged into modern history through the eyes of a sprawling banking family whose incredible wealth was originally founded on cornering the grain market in Odessa. The story moves between London, Paris, New York, Tokyo, St Petersburg and across the decades from the mid 19th century to the present day.
There is something in this sweep that takes you in, the woman said, so that you see how events connect, why art matters and how this all has a bearing on our own sense of who we are. She then bought her friend a copy of the book to take away. The next day, another woman came in and ordered four copies to give as presents to her dearest friends. With recommendations like that, how can you resist?
The Hare With Amber Eyes is indeed marvelous. There is something in the way De Waal talks about his family that immerses you in their lives through his voice, preoccupations and concerns. For me the really remarkable thing about the prose was the way in which De Waal makes the physicality of objects so real, rich and tactile through his descriptions. You really feel his eye and hand as a potter in the way he talks about holding, touching or carrying something – or in the way he sinks in to the presence and reality of a building. There are moments when you feel yourself at home in a world of polyglot nouveaux riches and aristocrats, high finance, high art, hidden inheritances, magnificent wedding gifts and personal loss and cultural tragedy.
De Waal worries that he may make his subject matter thin. Thin it is not. To me it felt like being tensed between the warp and weft of many different threads, coarse and fine, burr and silk – all meshing together to wrap you in the sensibility of how art and history matter to us all. The woman I overheard was absolutely right, this is a truly remarkable meditation on what shapes and makes us.
De Waal’s perspective also illuminates in a very powerful way what it is to be English. There he is, the scion of a banking dynasty that planted family
members in every important capital in Europe, the son of an Anglican clergyman whose grandparents were Jewish and Catholic, an artist scholar, a passionate connoisseur with no pomposity and a desire to deal plainly with a set of most extraordinary facts and objets d’art. In telling us about his family history, De Waal allows us to think about the nature of our own culture refracted as it is through his discourse on the cultures that shaped both his clan and the art treasures they commissioned or collected over the years.
Oh, and did I mention the netsuke figures which are the true stars of the whole story? The way De Waal talks about these figurines makes you truly appreciate why the art of Japan is so very very fine and so very unlike so much of our own.
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick de Witt
The Son of Neptune by Rick Riordan
December 1, 2011
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Madhatter cat
By The Madhatter in Books, Hats, Shop, UncategorizedFor all you cat lovers out there, you need to know that Madhatter Bookshop has been adopted by a beautiful tabby cat. The cat came last Saturday afternoon and has been coming every day since. He chooses his entrances and exits. He will not be put out of the shop and refuses to hurry. The shop exists to serve him. His favourite place is the armchair by the door. He is happy to share, but only on his terms!
So if you want to come and see this self-possessed creature in its adoptive habitat, drop by. We will be delighted to see you even if it is not apparent that he is too!
November 28, 2011
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Sunday is Washing Day
By The Madhatter in Books, Events, Shop
Come to our Washing Lines signing from lunchtime on!
Washing Lines is a wonderful anthology of poetry celebrating the presence of washing in our lives. Edited by two local washing aficionadas, Janie Hextall and Barbara McNaught, Washing Lines has garnered national repute. The anthology has been acclaimed in Tatler among others and warmly approved by critics such as Sebastian Shakespeare. Janie Hextall and Barbara McNaught will be signing copies of their self-published book, Washing Lines, from lunchtime on in Madhatter Bookshop, 122 High Street, Burford, on Sunday 4 December. Come and get a copy for a gift that will always be warmly remembered!
Janie and Barbara met six years ago at a Cotswold poetry reading group and quickly found that they had a love of washing drying in the breeze in common. The traded emails about the poems they found celebrating this passion. Over the course of time the idea of publishing an anthology took root. Washing Lines was launched at the Woodstock Literary Festival on September 17 and has simply gone from strength to strength every week since.
Janie says that she and Barbara take obsessive measures to indulge their passion of coming across washing lines on a daily basis. They each travel by train to get glimpses of washing lines in people’s back gardens. They each carry a camera so they can snap any interesting or picturesque washing line that comes into their view. They each have albums full of photos of washing of every kind blowing in the breeze. Barbara is also a collector of wood engravings, some of which she and Janie used to illustrate their book.
Washing Lines is truly a work of love and dedicated passion. It took Barbara and Janie three years to track down the copyright approvals for each of the fifty or so poems in the anthology. However, they have struck up friendships and a wealth of literary correspondence along the way. Washing Lines includes poems by Ruth Moose, Maura Dooley, Richard Wilbur, Gillian Clarke, Carl Little, Pablo Neruda and the Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney among many others.
Washing Lines sees washing lines as links to childhood, memory, love and loss. Above all, for many of the poets, washing on the line symbolises that heart and home are in good health, that love is at work in the household in a deeply practical, immediately physical and very visual way. Not surprisingly, washing on the line stirs intense reflection and emotion in men as well as women. Washing lines, the anthology makes us very aware, are not the domain of women alone.
Intriguingly, washing lines are not without their politics. It is not unusual for some people to dry their underwear inside pillow cases or sheets, for example, either to preserve their own sense of privacy or in respect of their neighbours’ modesty. In some parts of the US drying washing outdoors is prohibited by law. Washing Lines has joined the cause to promote the “right to dry” citing, in an afterword by Alexander Lee, founder of the Project Laundry List, that washing lines could save up to 10% of a country’s energy consumption.
So washing lines, it turns our, are emotionally satisfying, clean, green an powerfully poetic. Come along on Sunday 4 December for a book signing that will wring your heart and gladden your soul. We promise you will never look at washing line s as common-or-garden objects again. And, we hope the event will refresh, renew and reinvigorate your joy of poetry along with your everyday washing!
November 25, 2011
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Fab new hats just in
By The Madhatter in UncategorizedHurry, hurry, hurry! We have a wonderful new set of winter hats just in. This collection offers some extraordinarily attractive hats to see you through a cold, wet winter with inimitable style. But do hurry. Our hats sell out fast and there really is nothing quite like them. Once they are gone, they are gone and it’s a case of having to wait for the next hand made batch to come our way.
November 25, 2011
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Local author Jane-Anne Hodgson is signing on Sunday
By The Madhatter in Books, Events, Shop
Jane-Anne Hodgson is a children’s author of note. She is the creator of Grubson Pug, a sea dog with a difference. Grubson Pug has a life of adventure. In Hodgson’s latest work, Grubson Pug’s Christmas Voyage, the sea dog take his readers on an unforgettable adventure. Come to Madhatter Bookshop on Sunday 27 November at 12.00 noon to meet Grubson Pug’s creator and take home a signed copy of her festive book.
Hodgson says she was inspired to write a book that shows just why Christmas can be so special. To this end, Grubson Pug, his crew of dogs, an arm-wrestling cat called Banzai and Marjorie the parrot set sail from St Benfro somewhere in the west of Wales in search of Christmas presents for his demanding
children. Desperate to hurry home by Christmas Eve, they run into fierce
winter storms and Grubson has some big decisions to make. . .
Intrigued? Come on Sunday and find out more. We are sure you will not be disappointed.
November 25, 2011
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We are proud to be the front page of In Business
By The Madhatter in Books
The Oxford Times finds our hatshop in a bookshop concept novel and newsworthy. The report really picked up on our desire to work within our community to promote reading and to bring a new generation to love reading for its own sake. This is the area most booksellers find most challenging. We shall see if our sense of creating a more social space in the Madhatter Bookshop works to bring new readers in on a regular basis. There is no doubt that this area of fiction is one of the most interesting and vital in terms of new writers and new voices right now. We hope to report back on the books that inspire readers of every type as we get to know our younger customers’ needs and wants.
November 10, 2011
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Book group news: “Southrop” book group
By The Madhatter in Books, Events
We hope to be a hub for feedback from book groups of every kind within the vicinity of Burford where we believe a very great number of book groups meet to discuss a very wide range of literature and writing. The group we know best started in Southrop and, though it does not have a name can be identified for now as the “Southrop” book group.
The Southrop book group is a mixed group of men and women who come together to talk about books of every kind. The process is for chosing books is elaborate and very democratic and enormous fun. This prompts a great deal of reading which is the core aim for everyone taking part. We will post the follow up to each meeting here with a link to the blog so that anyone interested can pick up on all the great suggestions for what’s inspiring right now. Even better, if you want to take part, come along – the group meets the first Thursday (or Tuesday, or Wednesday?) of every month at The Keepers Arms in Quenington. It’s a long story as to how the group migrated from its roots in Southrop. But be assured, there is a novel, a screen play and a calendar in it!
So, with thanks to Margaret O’Donohoe who has the unenviable task of keeping track of conversations when all others have lost the plot, here is the latest update from “Southrop”:
A lively meeting saw us hosting the pub quiz while trying to talk books. Well done to John for being a brilliant quizmaster, and to everyone who provided questions. The night was a huge success for the pub and it was great fun but it was felt that we need to move the night of the book group from Thursday starting in the New Year. This would also help Annie come to meetings and avoid skittles night for 3 of our members.
The choice is between Tuesdays and Wednesdays so let your feelings be known!
The books we chose for December was The Damnation of John Donellion by Elizabeth Cook, BUT it has proven had to get hold of and the only source found wants to charge £14.99 for a paperback. So we are going with the book that came an extremely close second, The Darkness of Wallace Simpson by Rose Tremaine. Barb will get these for all those who wanted her to get the other one through The Madhatter Bookshop.
The Madhatter Bookshop, owned and run by Sara and Richard opened its door to the public last Saturday, and is having its grand opening today, Saturday 5th November, with music and mulled wine for all. It is located on Burford High Street between Huffkins and The Raymond Blanc café – you can’t miss it!!! It’s open 7 days a week – drop in and see them.
The also rans were:
A week in December by Sebastian Faulks
London, the week before Christmas, 2007. Over seven days we follow the lives of seven major characters: a hedge fund manager trying to bring off the biggest trade of his career; a professional footballer recently arrived from Poland; a young lawyer with little work and too much time to speculate; a student who has been led astray by Islamist theory; a hack book-reviewer; a schoolboy hooked on skunk and reality TV; and a Tube train driver whose Circle Line train joins these and countless other lives together in a daily loop.
Confessions of Conjurer by Derren Brown
Obsessed with magic and illusions since childhood, Derren’s life to date has been an extraordinary journey and here, in Confessions of a Conjuror, he allows us all to join him on a magical mystery tour – to the centre of his brain… Taking as his starting point the various stages of a conjuring trick he’s performing in a crowded restaurant, Derren’s endlessly engaging narrative wanders through subjects from all points of the compass, from the history of magic and the fundamentals of psychology to the joys of internet shopping and the proper use of Parmesan cheese. Brilliant, hilarious and entirely unlike anything else you have ever read before, Confessions of a Conjuror is also a complete and utter joy.
Boomerang by Michael Davies
Having made the U.S. financial crisis comprehensible for us all in The Big Short, Michael Lewis realised that he hadn’t begun to get grips with the full story. How exactly had it come to hit the rest of the world in the face too? Just how broke are we really? Boomerang is a tragi-comic romp across Europe, in which Lewis gives full vent to his storytelling genius. The cheap credit that rolled across the planet between 2002 and 2008 was more than a simple financial phenomenon: it was temptation, offering entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge. Icelanders wanted to stop fishing and become investment bankers. The Greeks wanted to turn their country into a piñata stuffed with cash and allow as many citizens as possible to take a whack. The Irish wanted to stop being Irish. The Germans wanted to be even more German. Michael Lewis’s investigation of bubbles across Europe is brilliantly, sadly hilarious.
Aerodynamics of Pork by Patrick Gade
Patrick Gale’s first novel is suffused with heady wish-fulfillment as two contrasting love stories entwine in the space of one simmering summer week. WPC Mo Faithe is overcome with lust while investigating a series of violent attacks on newspaper astrologers. Meanwhile in Cornwall, the Peakes are conducting their annual music festival, the cue for their two ‘children’ — Seth, a young violin prodigy, and Venetia, a highly-strung scholar — to embark upon a voyage of self-discovery. As Seth sets out in hot pursuit of unconventional romance on the cliff-tops, the virginal Venetia displays every symptom of an immaculate conception.
Toast by Nigel Slater
TOAST is Nigel Slater’s truly extraordinary story of a childhood remembered through food. Whether relating his mother’s ritual burning of the toast, his father’s dreaded Boxing Day stew or such culinary highlights of the day as Arctic Roll and Grilled Grapefruit (then considered something of a status symbol in Wolverhampton) this remarkable memoir vividly recreates daily life in sixties suburban England. His mother was a chops-and-peas sort of cook, exasperated by the highs and lows of a temperamental AGA, a finicky little son and the asthma that was to prove fatal. His father was a honey-and-crumpets man who could occasionally go off ‘crack’ like a gun. When Nigel’s widowed father takes on a housekeeper with social aspirations and a talent in the kitchen, the following years become a heartbreaking cooking contest for his father’s affections. But as he slowly loses the battle, Nigel finds a new outlet for his culinary talents, and we witness the birth of what was to become a lifelong passion for food. Nigel’s likes and dislikes, aversions and sweet-toothed weaknesses form a fascinating and amusing backdrop to this incredibly moving and deliciously evocative memoir of childhood, adolescence and sexual awakening.
Our next meeting is on the 1st December and we have booked a meal at the pub to celebrate the Christmas meeting, so could we make it 7.30 for 8pm start?
November 7, 2011
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Jo Cotterill author talks a great success
By The Madhatter in Books, Events
Jo Cotterill talked to about 200 students at Burford and Farmors schools today. Jo engaged a large audience of primary and secondary school students in the Assembly Hall at Burford School and to an audience of Year 7 – 9 students in the Library at Farmors School. In both schools students asked Jo a wealth of questions which showed their keen interest in the writing process. Jo very nicely demystified the process of writing a novel and made it clear that good ideas can come to anyone, at any time, anywhere.
Jo spoke about the long process and hard work to turn a good idea into a published novel. From the response that she got, it is clear that Jo was talking to several novelists of the future! The Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard reported very positively on Jo’s talk and the support Madhatter Bookshop gave to the event. And the Witney Gazette reported how engaged Jo’s audience was, quoting students saying “I thought her talking about how she developed as an author was the most interesting part” and “She is my favourite author and she was funny.”
All of us at Madhatter Bookshop wish Jo, and all those who heard her speak, the very best of luck. We hope to keep in touch with you all as you continue on your way in the realm of reading and make Madhatter Bookshop a focal point for you on the way!
November 5, 2011
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Creatures of the night
By The Madhatter in UncategorizedAs we toiled over rack and shelving, outside dark forces were at work. We awoke in the morning to find Madhatter Bookshop logos flyposted all over the beautiful face of Burford town. So guess who stepped into clean up! Hush, tell no one about what you see here…
