In Praise of The Long Book

Dear Off Topic friends,

I hope you’ve been having a happy week. Here are a few good things from mine:

• This ridiculously bonkers little horse - I’m not sure it should even be legal for this level of cuteness to be whinnying about the land.

• Walking along the road with my husband in the evening sunshine just after it had stopped raining last night (see photo below), we were both reminded of the 1990s hit by Zoe, Sunshine On a Rainy Day - we sang a few lines and then he wondered at the awfulness of the lyrics. Naturally, I leapt to the song’s defence (it was an anthem of youth, after all) and it was then that it came to light that when Zoe gets to the chorus and sings, Sunshine on a rainy day, Makes my soul, makes my soul, Trip, trip, trip away, my husband has always thought her soul was drip, dripping away. This made us laugh like drains¹. I love that moment when you realise you’ve always misheard a lyric. For years, my sister and I referred to REM’s The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite as Homin Chadavaka….that line is apparently ‘Call me when you try to wake her’, but I still don’t believe it. Do listen and delight in that wonder for yourself if it’s not a song you’re familiar with.²

• My friend Deborah Smith’s book was published this week - it’s an incredibly sweet story about a little acorn called Nutley who is struggling to build up the courage to fall from his oak tree and put down roots of his own.

• For anyone who is gluten-free, I’ve been ordering fresh pasta (and even a vegan macaroni cheese) from here lately and it’s delicious. Just don’t sit salivating by the letterbox too soon, as despatch normally takes a few days (I’m guessing they’re making it in small batches to order). Also, isn’t Leggero a nice word.

Onto books (which are also part of my good things list, but this paragraph just seemed to want to burst out of its bullet point once it had reached a certain length). For the last week I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Maggie Shipstead’s wonderful Great Circle while I’ve been working on a new fabric-cut. It’s about a woman learning to fly small planes and the story around her life spans most of the 1900s and into this century. Its initial appeal was that I love novels that go into great detail around the processes involved in a person learning to do something - reading about someone’s determination to master something and being alongside them for each step is somehow utterly compelling. But that wasn’t actually what ended up being the thing I loved most about this book - although it has the same depth of detail, for me it somehow didn’t have quite the same pull as Kya learning to live self-sufficiently in Where the Crawdads Sing; Anna becoming the first female wartime diver in a Brooklyn naval yard in Manhattan Beach; the processes involved in art forgery in The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, or the making of intricate carpets in The Blood of Flowers - so I was left wondering what exactly it was that was drawing me in (because I was totally drawn in). And I think it was the book’s epicness. That feeling of being fully immersed over such a long span of time, both in terms of the characters lives, and in my own twenty-five hours of listening. Occasionally, an epic book can feel like something that could have been edited down into a regular book, but with Great Circle, it seems generous, as though Maggie has offered up a whole cake, rather than just a slice. Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance was also a whole cake. And I’ve had Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life sitting on my bookshelf for the last few years waiting and I’m wondering if this too is a cake? If you’ve read it, I’d love to know what you think - I’ve heard mixed things, so have been wavering over diving in.³ But anyway, back to Great Circle - that its length ended up being the thing I loved most about it is actually quite ironic, as this had also been the basis of my avoiding it since it came out last May. I find it’s really easy to forget how much I love long books.

Wishing you a happy end to the week.

With love, and thanks for reading,
Florence x

1. Not actually an intentional pun.

2. I think it might indicate a whole disturbing personality type that I almost changed the spelling of Tonite to Tonight and really had to fight with myself not to (good won out 🙈). But in persuading myself to leave it alone, I discovered several interesting things. Firstly, that The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite is based on The Lion Sleeps Tonight and REM paid royalties to take inspiration from it, especially in the first four notes sung. Despite being very familiar with both songs, I’ve somehow never actually noticed this overlap. Also, I realised that tonite is actually a word in its own right meaning an explosive compound; a preparation of guncotton. For a moment I was delighted that this might be what Michael Stipe had intended, but in an interview he says, ‘Half of the song is about somebody trying to get in touch with someone who can sleep on his floor. The other half – you’re on your own.’ Which made me think my excitement might have been premature. Also, I’m so sorry if you don't know this song, don’t want to know this song, and just want me to stop talking about it. This is a cake when it should have been a slice. Or maybe even a crumb.

3. All this talk of epic books reminds me of the year my father took A Suitable Boy (over 1500 pages) on holiday and then spent the entire time negotiating with us over how many of our regular books his one absolute whopper was worth. Discussions were heated. Over dinner each night, our conversation would briefly touch on a) whose arms were brownest* and then b) who had really read the most books. Although I don’t remember any of us actually trying to race through them as it was more a case of trying to eke them out to avoid having to start in on someone else’s choices. Really, it was all determined at the point of packing the suitcase and then picking up extras once we were through duty-free (don’t you miss the days when airports had amazing bookshops?).

* It was the 1990s…now we’d be more likely to compete for who’d managed to keep their arms most protected from the sun. Or maybe we’d just sit around the table having entirely non-competitive conversations :)