Abigail Rieley's Blog: With My Nose Buried in a Book

This is a bit of a pet subject. I make playlists for all my main characters when I'm writing fiction and it really helps to get a hook on them. Anyway, I've been writing about it on my other blog but I thought readers here might find it interesting.

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My love of books comes from growing up surrounded by them. When I was a child, in the grim, penny pinching 70s, new books were something that arrived at Christmas and perhaps at birthdays. The rest of the year, in those days when I read so voraciously I knew the cereal box by heart, I read books that came from the library or those that I took from the shelves at home. There wasn't a room that wasn't full of books at home - there was even a bookcase - glassfronted against the steam - in the bathroom and from the shelves about the house I made my oldest friends, learnt about countries I hadn't yet seen, felt emotions I was years away from understanding.
My mum never restricted my reading so by the time I started secondary school I had discovered Edgar Allen Poe, R.D. Laing, Fay Weldon and John Wyndham, to name but a few. Her rule of thumb was generally that if I was too young for the book I wouldn't understand it anyway so there was no real harm in my reading it - though I do remember her hiding the D.H. Lawrence. Back then I knew that many of the books on the shelves at home had been bought by my dad, who had died when I was still a baby. I knew that the Isaac Asimov was his, as were the Robert Graves and I knew that the impressive library of Everyman books had been started by my grandfather and the collection continued by my dad.
Just after Christmas this year I received a very precious object indeed. It's a fairly tatty cloth-bound navy blue notebook, moulting newspaper clippings and only half filled but if the house was burning it'd be the first thing I'd grab. When I first opened it I didn't even recognise the handwriting, it took me a few moments to work out what I had. My father's book journal. He started in in September 1971 and continued it for almost a year. It's clear from the sporadic entries that diary keeping wasn't my father's strong point - he berates himself for the fact in some of the longer entries. I know that I was probably a contributing factor to his stopping altogether as the entries get few and far between once I have been born. I can't describe here the magic of reading his words, learning his writing, hearing his voice describe the latest find in some second hand bookshop. I wasn't even two years old when he died. I have no memory of his voice. He exists for me as a construct, pieced together from the memories that others have shared with me. This ragged blue notebook gives me, for the first time, a real piece of him. I now have an idea of the man. I know that if he had been alive today I'd have introduced him to Goodreads - he'd have loved it.
The diary consists of the books he was reading during those all too short months. "19th September 1971", the first entry reads, "Finished reading Index to the Story of My Days: Some Memoirs of Edward Gordon Craig "Beautiful passages about Isadora Duncan".
A week later he received a delivery from The Poetry Society.Winter Trees. He notes that phrases from the poems, written by Sylvia Plath in the year before she died are "written on a nerve edge. An awareness of thoughts, half thought or unthought in others except when perception is exceptionally acute, which usually occurs horrifyingly in the lonely hours of the night".
Elsewhere he chronicles his perpetual quest for the perfect second hand bookshop. He is delighted in December '71 when a new bookshop opens up opposite the Prince of Wales pub in Wimbledon (my parents local at the time). The first visit yields a matching set of Thomas Hardy for 5p each. "We will have to visit him regularly in the next few weeks before he either closes of shoots up the prices." Two days later he goes back for more Hardys and is delighted to find "Maxwell's The Irish Rebellion very interestingly illustrated by Cruickshank" in an 1892 edition for 40p. He notes "My first reason for going in was my desire for the Irish Rebellion which I had been thinking about and feared, because it was on display in the window, that some other Irishman, perhaps ricocheting across the road from the public bar of the Prince of Wales, would set eyes on it and buy it." Less than two weeks later he ruefully comments that the prices in the Wimbledon bookshop have indeed started to creep up. The latest purchases of more Thomas Hardys cost 15p each. Even so he hands him the list of the Everyman books missing from the collection "A chance for him to profiteer, I hope he will not take."
It's fascinating reading my father's words. His delight at a new find mirrors the feeling I've often crowed about on Twitter and Facebook, or even here. He is, for the first time a real man, not a perfect god. He is sometimes rather pedantic, perhaps a little too much but I can imagine simply smiling and rolling my eyes if I had known him. My father was a teacher of English and the Classics so a lot of his reading matter reflects this. He had also once pursued a career in the theatre, where he had met my actress mother and I can read this interest there too. He was also a writer in his own right, and that I recognise. Most of all though I recognise in my father's words a passion for books, a passion that he passed on with the relics of these pages that still sat on the bookshops when I was growing up without him. His diary lasts for too few pages, not even half the notebook is filled, but there he is.
The first time I read the notebook I was left yearning for his company. I felt the tears pricking my eyes the next time I was in a second hand book shop. The titles that leapt out were the one's I now knew he would have picked. The lack of him suddenly felt raw in a way it hadn't for years with the realisation that I would never be able to show him Goodreads, or Abebooks or explain to him the libraries across the world that are opened up by this extraordinary brave new world we live in. But I wouldn't be without this notebook because it's given me the man, Colin Rieley. Before I had a dad-shaped hole, the unknown, should-have-known. When I fell down as a child I knew he would have been there to pick me up but I missed the role not the person. It hurts that we never had a chance to enjoy how similar we are but now I know who I always wanted to make proud. Now I know why I was so determined to write, to be a writer. In a way it feels like suddenly, after all these years, I have a dad - all in a few tatty pages.

You can't walk into a bookshop or open a newspaper these days, let alone log into Twitter or Facebook without 50 Shades of Grey running up to you like an excited puppy and slobbering all over you (there will be no Inner Goddesses in this post!) It's all pulses racing, lip licking and the occasional bit of flogging these days but it's got me thinking.

Now this isn't a critique of the 50 Shades trilogy. I'll hold my hand up and say I'm not a fan. Personally I'd be quicker to recommend something by Anaïs Nin than a piece of rejigged Twilight fanfic but each to his or her own. Anyway it's not recommendations for discerning friends that I'm pondering today, it's more the generation of kids who'll be getting part of their informal sex ed from this book. Because as it's lying around in countless households around the planet you can guarantee any kids attached to those households will be having a sneaky peak. We've all done it. It's part of growing up.

So my question is this, and it's not a rhetorical one, what inappropriate books did you find informing your adolescent curiosity back in the day? At the risk of giving away my age (although I think Goodreads have already let that cat out of the bag, Bless 'em) I grew up in the glory days of the bonk buster. Authors like Jilly Cooper and Jackie Collins reigned supreme. Titles like Lace by Shirley Conran were the big news of the day. With this kind of book big news meant that you generally knew someone who had the page references for all the mucky bits. Among my school friends the surprise hit (to our parents anyway) was The Clan of the Cave Bear. We learnt all about how to tan leather...and how to have sex on, under and beside a horse (which must have been particularly illuminating for the members of the pony club). Since it was an all girls school we also read The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 with rapt attention for the insight it gave into the workings of the male mind.

I'm not sure how much practical use any of this early reading was, although it probably shaped my sense of humour more than I'd care to admit. So 'fess up. What were the books that were doing the giggly rounds when you were at school? What books did you bring home from the library with smuggler's glee? Please share in the comments.

I've hesitated about writing about Ray Bradbury since his death earlier this month. There have been so many tributes paid by writers I deeply admire, who knew him and respected him. From the Guardian alone in the days after this death there's a heartfelt piece by Neil Gaiman http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/... and a few days later the great Margaret Atwood wrote about his influence http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/...
Writing anything myself felt like a rather pathetic attempt to jump onto a bandwagon that had rolled out for a writer whose work I've loved for as long as I can remember.
I've always shied away from those public outpourings of grief that erupt when a public figure dies. Maybe it's that stiff British upper lip I was always told about but I find all that brow beating and clothes renting a bit embarrassing, especially when it's someone you don't know from Adam.
So I waited. I hummed and hahed. I picked up a collection of Ray Bradbury stories and started to read his words again. I got lost in his stories again. Because that's what you do with a Ray Bradbury story.
I realised that when I set up this author page and listed my favourite authors he wasn't on the list. The names that popped into that mind when I was filling out the form were the writers that I had read most recently, the ones whose books were on the shelves beside my desk, the one's that have the strongest influence on what I write now. At the time it didn't occur to me to add him. It would be like mentioning breathing as an activity I like to do.
When I was a kid, just starting to explore beyond children's books but too young to have a reader's ticket to the adult bit of the library, they'd just started to show Ray Bradbury Theatre on TV. The first one I remember seeing was about a little girl at school on Mars. She had grown up on earth so remembered flowers which couldn't grow in the arid climate. Her classmates were annoyed by all her stories so when the rains came, a rare and brief event that made the whole planet burst into life, they locked her in the broom closet.
That was my first introduction to his particular brand of story, that bitter sweet taste they leave, the gentle irony, a certain falling cadence. Eager to hear more I was allowed to stay up to watch the television adaptation of The Martian Chronicles and I devoured my dad's copies of The Illustrated Man and, of course, Fahrenheit 451.
It wasn't till I left home and was living in a city with more than one bookshop I got to read more. There were the two volumes of his collected short stories (my favourite was The April Witch)and more novels - Something Wicked This Way Comes and Death is a Lonely Business were two favourites.
There was always more to discover, always something to reread. His work shaped my reading tastes and my imagination, as it has done for so many writers and readers for more than 50 years. He coloured my view of the world. When I started to write my stories owed an awful lot to that falling cadence. There will always be a collection of his short stories by the bed.
So I'll admit that I cried when I heard that Ray Bradbury had died. It was the sorrow of the knowledge that there would be nothing new, that the body of work was now complete.
Bradbury's stories are the kind that lodge in your mind like mythology. He had a turn of phrase, a knack of imagining that created archetypes. So he's on my list of favourite authors now and I'm rereading his stories and rewatching Francois Truffaut's adaptation of Fahrenheit 451.
Ray Bradbury RIP.

My mother died five months ago. After the initial rush of pain the loss has settled into something softer, quieter. A background hum to normal daily life that only rushes into the foreground when I'm caught unawares. That happened a few days ago when I picked up my copy of New Grub Street looking for something to read. Opening the cover I saw my mother's handwriting. She'd picked the book as a birthday present the year I graduated as a journalist.
So many of my reading choices have come from my mother over the years. She was the one who encouraged me to read and before I could handle a full book myself, she would read them to me. I'll never forget the voices she did for The Hobbit or Out of the Silent Planet. We had already worked our way through all the Narnia books before moving onto C.S Lewis's Space Trilogy. My mother's favourite was the dreamlike Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) but I always had a soft spot for That Hideous Strength, possibly because it was the first of the three I read by myself.
When I did graduate to solo reading my mother still influenced my taste in books. It was as a proud Welsh woman she introduced me to The Owl Service, introducing me to one of my favourite authors and inspiring me to become a writer myself. Dark Quartet: The Story Of The Brontes inspired a life long fascination with the lives of the Bronte Sisters. When I hit my teens I borrowed her copies of books by Fay Weldon, Alison Lurie, Margaret Drabble, Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Jane Howard or John Fowles, who gave me my first view of the adult world. She informed so much of my taste in books.
Later when I left home and bought more of my own books I got to introduce her to new writers. She loved A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian and The Time Traveler's Wife and devoured the works of Margaret Atwood and Philippa Gregory.
Since she died I've been finding myself looking for ways to feel close to her. I've taken to wearing a perfume she bought me years ago, because the smell is more her taste than mine. I've also found myself rediscovering the writers I first discovered with her. That shared love of books went to the heart of our relationship and by retreading that literary path I feel perhaps I'll find her somewhere along the way.

There's nothing like a good murder. It's an act that strips away all but the bones of the human condition, shows us the dark side of our souls, distils human relationships into a single fraught moment. Murder contains at it's heart the very essence of all drama - conflict. The act itself isn't genre specific - although there are certain kinds of books that allow the single sordid act to flower into all it's Gothic complexity. It's a subject we're not going to stop reading about any time soon.

I've covered the courts for a long time. I've watched the grating twists of the justice system, the pain of the families whose lives have been shattered. But I've also seen the modern-day Madame Defarges who bring cushions into court to save themselves from the bum-numbing seats and suck boiled sweets through the opening speeches. Even at it's realest, cruellest and most pointless, murder can be seen, and is seen, as entertainment. In a way I'm with the tricoteuse who come to witness every fall from grace. Every trial encapsulates a story that deserves to be told. A story of life and death. How could a writer not be fascinated by that?

To be honest, it was an interest I've always had. It's fascinating to wander the mind of a killer, trying to spot what makes them different. What takes away that final sanction and leads them into such a brutal way of problem solving? Long before I had ever set foot in a court room I had devoured accounts of Jack the Ripper, Dr Crippen or Peter Suttcliff looking for that common thread. The witches' mark for murderers that when identified would act as an indemnity against ever encountering one, or recognising them soon enough to run like hell. Of course, working in the courts has taught me that there isn't any witches' mark. Killers are just like you or me, you can't tell who's going to cross that line until it's crossed. It's a lesson that can only be learned in retrospect. But you keep looking.

I've always had been fascinated by the true stories. There's a shed load of utterly brilliant crime fiction out there (Ireland is flying the flag particularly high in that department) but there's something about those stranger than fiction cases that will always keep me turning the page. Recently I've been hunting out older books and classics of the genre. Truman Capote's In Cold Blood is the ultimate benchmark, but Ludovic Kennedy's court reporting is worth seeking out. His best known is Ten Rillington Place, made into a stunning 1971 film of the same name, starring Richard Attenborough as a chilling Christie and filmed in the house itself, but it's also worth seeking out The Trial of Stephen Ward for an account of the circus that surrounded the trial of disgraced doctor Stephen Ward who found himself at the heart of the Profumo scandal and paid a dreadful price.

Most recently I've discovered one of the grandfathers of true crime, a writer who reached his peak in the 1920s. William Roughead was a Scottish lawyer and amateur criminologist. He writes with a glee that wouldn't be quite done in these more sensitive times but his books are the perfect thing to curl up with by a roaring fire on a dismal day. They hit the spot as well as any Agatha Christie. I'm only sorry I didn't discover his books sooner!

These days people look at you rather oddly if you talk with relish about a good murder. It's a bit of an occupational habit as a journalist but it's really not as callous as it sounds. When real life chimes with fiction's tropes it lends a story resonance, and that resonance helps it get heard. Rather than desensitising the audience, you talk to something deeper, to stories we've been telling each other since the first narrators started to spin. We remind ourselves that there but for the grace of god go you and me and all of us. And that's a lesson worth listening to.

I've just finished reading The Tenant of Wildfell Hall for the first time. I've been fascinated by the Brontë sisters for years, ever since I saw a Blue Peter Special Edition documentary on their brief but brilliant lives when I was very small. I remember I was inconsolable after that show - to the extent that my mum banned me from watching Blue Peter Special Edition until she had checked the subject matter. When I was a bit older I was given a copy of Jane Eyre as an English prize in school - the one and only time I ever received a school prize. I was already making my own miniature books which I carefully stitched together and covered with scraps of leather filched from the art studio in school.
Eventually I discovered Dark Quartet: The Story of the Brontës by Lynne Reid Banks, which filled in some of the gaps the Blue Peter Special Edition, mindful of their young audience, had left out. I mention all this because I still find it extraordinary that given this enduring fascination which bordered at times on obsession, I've never actually read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall before.
I grew up in a house well stocked with books. My dad was an English teacher we had a pretty comprehensive library. As my reading tastes expanded I could be fairly certain that if the book was considered a classic it'd be knocking about somewhere. This was certainly true of the Brontes and I methodically read my way through the poems of Acton, Ellis and Currer Bell, Jane Eyre, Villette, Shirley, The Professor and Wuthering Heights. I read Anne's first book, Agnes Grey but for some reason stopped short of reading The Tenant. I had the idea that the tenant of the title was a dissolute rake. In my head, the book was always linked with the Steeleye Span song Bachelors Hall http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdbiOM...
I got it kind of right. There is a dissolute rake at the centre of the story . What didn't find out until years later is that the story isn't told from the rake's point of view but from that of his long suffering wife and her story is one of the frankest portraits of a marriage you'll find in Victorian literature. Right now I'm researching a new book set in the 19th century so I'm reading a lot of Victorian writers. All of a sudden there was an excuse to go back to that family of writers that had always fascinated me as a kid and fill in a long left gap in my knowledge.
What struck me about Wildfell Hall is that it doesn't feel like it had been written by the quiet,dutiful youngest sister that I'd read about and that had written Agnes Grey. This was a howl of rage from someone who had sat on the sidelines and watched her brother destroy himself through drink and drugs. This was written by someone who'd bitten her tongue when seen the way women were sold off in marriage to the highest bidder, how they were expected to defer to the men in their lives even before this transactions and how life in a small community was one of constantly twitching curtains and wagging tongues. Once you strip away the Victorian language and devout Christian sentiments there's much here that wouldn't be out of place in a modern feminist leaning novel.
By coincidence, another book that I've finally got round to reading this year after far too many years of avoidance is Fay Weldon's Praxis. Like Anne Brontë's tenant, Praxis is a woman used and abused by the opposite sex. From her early life, brought up by a mad mother in an old house in Brighton, to feminist icon and finally decrepit, pragmatic decay a forgotten relic of old ideals, Praxis is a rather passive character who, for much of the book quietly submits to the whims of a succession of useless partners, thoughtless family and fickle friends. It's a pretty bleak look at the lot of women across the bulk of the 20th Century but it's Fay Weldon who wrote The Life and Loves of a She Devil and Remember Me. Like Kingsley Amis, Weldon tends to be fairly equal handed in the scorn she heaps upon her characters.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall doesn't have a knowlingly feminist slant to it. It doesn't have the sharpness of a modern novel or even one of Jane Austen's drawing room comedies. But in it's own way it is a shocking book and I can see why big sister Charlotte was quite so scandalised that she wrote in the preface to a later edition that Anne had made a serious error in her choice of subject. At the moment I'm reading books to get into the heads of people who lived a century and a half ago. If I had read Tenant as a child I wonder how I would have found it. Would I have thought it too preachy or melodramatic? Perhaps. But I'm glad I've come to this particular book when I did. It gave me what I needed and I've found a book I'll probably return to in the future. And it's given me a greater understanding of the youngest Brontë who I never really paid attention to in the past.

Testing. Testing. I feel I should be tapping an imaginary mic. Or at the very least standing up to introduce myself.
I've decided to start writing a blog here, partly because the very nice people at Goodreads suggested I did and partly because I wanted this blog to be separate to the one I keep on my website (which is linked to on my profile anyway).
That blog is about what I write but this one will be about what I read. I've been reading for a lot longer than I've been writing you see, a lot longer than I've been published anyway. Books shaped me as a person and are the reason I ended up in this line of work. Books have been my friends, my teachers, my inspiration for as long as I can remember. I write true crime because of an accident of circumstances but my reading habits are far wider ranging and voracious.
What I wanted to do with this blog was to talk about the books I have loved, the books that have made me who I am, the ones that have made me laugh out loud on crowded buses or allowed me to lose myself in the dark times. These are the books that I've wished I could write or the books I wish I had. These are the guilty pleasures and the revelations and the touchstones.
I remember the books my mum read to me when I was a kid, doing the voices for J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. There were ones I turned to in my teens, mainly female writers from the 50s, 60s and 70s and beyond - Fay Weldon, Alison Lurie, Margaret Drabble or Margaret Atwood, interspersed with the softer styles of Elizabeth Goudge or Catherine Cookson. Later came the intensity of my late teens with Umberto Eco, John Fowles and Peter Ackroyd. Then I discovered a sense of humour and discovered Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams.
Just as the songs that were playing on the radio form a soundtrack to your life so books have formed the library of mine...and that's not even touching on book/song combinations.
So I'm hoping that this will give me plenty of scope to prattle on about books and hopefully I'll meet other readers who've been on similar journeys or at least don't mind hearing about mine. I'm very new at Goodreads so be gentle with me. Consider me tapping my imaginary mic and asking "Is this thing on?"