Classics Club Spin – Nights at the Circus

I finally finished my Classics Club spin book, Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter, on the very last day of the challenge. Not because it was a particularly hard read, it wasn’t, but because it was one of the few books I didn’t already own and when it arrived I suddenly had almost no reading time. Due to my lateness, and even more due to the fact that I’m currently somewhat overworked and completely uninspired, I won’t give this novel the proper review it really deserves.

Published in 1984 it is one of the youngest books on my classics list, one I added to my list after being stunned by her brilliant short story collection The Bloody Chamber and other stories. Most of the novels I have read lately have been sharp, restrained texts but Carter’s is neither. Indeed Angela Carter may be the least restrained author I have read anything by, she is constantly pushing the border between brilliance and nonsense. Her imagery is rich, disturbing and always on the brink of collapse but somehow it mostly works. I left the novel with a wide collection of imagery and ideas but the over-abundance of the text is such that I know that I probably missed half of it. As a break from the more focused texts I usually read I found it very refreshing but my recommendation if you want to explore Angela Carter’s works would be to start with The Bloody Chamber and other stories which remains my favourite.

Last year this book was discussed in a series of articles for The Guardian‘s reading group. I really recommend this article series if you are interested in in-depth discussions of the novel. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 (with some spoilers).

 

 

 

A selection of brilliant books

It may be because I spend too much time musing in front of my bookshelves rather than actually reading my books but I really enjoy rearranging my bookshelves (to a moderate extent of course). My library (that is, the part of my living room where my bookcases live) is not large enough for the books to actually need to be sorted in alphabetical order and as I’m the primary user I instead try sort them in ways that makes sense to me. Mostly that means that I place books that I feel somehow belong together adjacent to each other in the bookshelves but there are often multiple interesting ways to that. My  books by Lewis Carroll for example give a different impression next to my books about the history of mathematics than they would have if I had placed them among my children’s books. That also means that every time I reorganize my bookshelves I get to see some of my books in a new light.

Moving is of course the major reason for re-sorting a library. After one move I placed all my “books I find brilliant by woman authors” in age order on the same shelf and could suddenly see a line of great authors stretching back to Sei Shōnagon. Rather than individual authors they became part of a great history.

As in any categorizing effort I of course ended up with multiple difficult decisions. What if I loved one book by an author (A Room of Ones Own) but struggled with another (Mrs Dalloway) should I place one of them on the brilliant books shelf and the other in the general fiction section or prioritize keeping them together (and if so, where)? Should I include children’s books? What with books that could be placed on this shelf but also really should be placed in one of my other categories? To solve these issues I allowed myself to make some rather arbitrary decisions. Woolf and Sayers got one work each on my canon bookshelf with their other works shelved in other places whereas I kept all my Tove Jansson’s adult fiction together for now. I excluded children’s books not to overcrowd the shelf although that sadly excludes Brothers Lionheart by Astrid Lindgren which is otherwise a key work in my personal book canon. The final result may not be my ultimate personal book canon but it is close enough for now.

These are the books that currently live on my brilliant books bookshelf:

• The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon
• The collected works by Jane Austen
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
• Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë
• Selected poems by Emily Dickinson
• Gösta Berlings’s saga by Selma Lagerlöf
• A Room of Ones Own by Virginia Woolf
• Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers
• The Summer Book and various short stories collections by Tove Jansson
• Mörkret som ger glädjen djup and Love Story of the Century by Märta Tikkanen
• The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood
• The Bloody Chamber and other stories by Angela Carter
• Kastanjeallén by Dea Trier Mørch

I find it very satisfying that whenever the world tries to tell me about a literary canon filled by male authors with only the rare woman scattered in it I can look in my own bookshelf and see an unbroken line of brilliant female authors and know that there is more than one truth.

This blog post was inspired by a discussion on Calmgrove’s blog about various ways to link different books. I was also inspired by this article about the art of unpacking a library from The Paris Review.