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2018

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Jan 2018

3^rd January

[W]hat I wanted was something engrossing, something reliable, and for me, that means something I have read before.

When I re-read, I know what I’m getting. It’s like revisiting an old friend. An unread book holds wonderful unknown promise, but also threatens disappointment. A re-read is a known quantity.

Jo Walton, 'Why I Re-read', 15 July 2008, in What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Fantasy and SF (2014)

10^th January

The woman who knows beyond a doubt that she is beautiful exists aplenty in male novelists' imaginations: I have yet to find her in women's books or women's memoirs or in life.

Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983)

17^th January

It is common to describe a dreadful restaurant meal as being like a car crash.... I have realised the comparison is entirely wrong - at least with a car crash the emergency services eventually come to deal with the pain and distress. With a terrible restaurant experience no one ever comes. You are left only with the bill and the aftertaste and an abiding sense that you did something really stupid by booking a table.

Jay Rayner, The 'Indian Jamie Oliver' leaves a shell-shocked Jay Rayner picking through the wreckage, The Guardian, 9 Aug 2009, reprinted in My Dining Hell: Twenty Ways To Have a Lousy Night Out

24^th January

All women should, therefore, be prepared for discovering faults in men, as they are for beholding spots in the sun, or clouds in the summer sky.

[Sarah Stickney Ellis], The wives of England : their relative duties, domestic influence, & social obligations (1843)

31^st January

The extraordinary, the thrilling, the transgressive provide automatic glamor, but it takes a brave author to try to describe lives that are so commonplace as not even to be extraordinarily unhappy. And happiness - not sexual satisfaction, not reward of ambition, not ecstasy, not bliss, just day-to-day happiness - has practically vanished from fiction. That may be because we distrust it, seeing it as sentimentality, confusing the real thing with the fake. Indeed, it’s not easy to write about. To ring true, description of even the humblest kind of fulfillment and contentment must be written in awareness of human inadequacy and cruelty and the always imminent possibility of illness, ruin, death.

Ursula K Le Guin, 'Kent Haruf: Our Souls At Night' (2016), in Words are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, with a Journal of a Writer's Week (2016)

R.I.P. Ursula K Le Guin, 1929-2018.

Feb 2018

7^th February

[W]hen the chips are down, the spirit is exhausted and the body hungry, the same old thing is a great consolation.

Laurie Colwin, Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen (1988)

14^th February

I am only certain that from first to last I have never had any ambition in the world beyond the deep instinct to attain self-expression, which instinct was accompanied by the conviction that thereby only could I fulfil the desire of my heart to help others. Fame, for one who is by temperament and taste a recluse, could be nothing but an embarrassing superfluity.

Havelock Ellis, My life (1940)

21^st February

I wasn’t really a baby. I was a bookworm. For the true bookworm, life doesn’t really begin until you get hold of your first book. Until then - well, you’re just waiting, really. You don’t even know for what, at that stage - if you did, you would be making more noise about it[.]

Lucy Mangan, My life as a bookworm: what children can teach us about how to read. Guardian Saturday Review, 17 Feb 2018

28^th February

It is a salutory thing to look back at some of the reforms which have long been an accepted part of our life, and to examine the opposition, usually bitter and often bizarre, sometimes dishonest but all too often honest, which had to be countered by the restless advocates of 'grandmotherly' legislation.

E. S. Turner, Roads to Ruin: The Shocking History of Social Reform (1950)

Mar 2018

7^th March

[T]his suggests to me that freedom of conscience is more profoundly inhibited by prejudice and taboo, internalized by us all, than it is by laws and institutions. We can see that it is easily manipulated by subrational means, suggestion, and repetition. And it can be inappropriately invested, making us confident when we would be better served by doubt.

Marilynne Robinson, 'What is Freedom of Conscience?' (5 May 2016), in What Are We Doing Here? Essays (2018)

14^th March

It’s called fat shaming with good reason. By the second episode I had decided to pre-empt the abuse, by misquoting Churchill on Twitter: yes, I was fatter than I might like. But I could lose weight. My tormentors would always be unpleasant ill-mannered scumbags.

It was a good line but I doubt it will ever stop them. Mention issues around weight management and there will always be someone wanting to point out the existence of food banks. Well done them. Personally, I think being sanctimonious is much worse than being obese. At least the overweight only have to deal with the impact themselves, whereas the judgmental impose their views on others.

Jay Rayner, 'Yes, I have to watch my weight. But don’t get me started on diets', Observer Food Monthly, Jan 2018

21^st March

[B]lockbusters such as Passengers and Jurassic World could have benefited from more female input, if only to point out that women don’t usually fall in love with creepy stalkers or go on safari in stiletto heels. It’s not that we need more kick-ass sci-fi heroines so much as a wider perspective on technological and ethical issues in the imagined future.

Anne Billson, 'The final frontier: how female directors broke into sci-fi ', The Guardian G2, 16 Mar 2018

28^th March

Literary history is, I think, familiar with the Catch-22 by which women who were virtuous could not know enough about life to write well, while those who knew enough about life to write well could not be virtuous.

Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983)

Apr 2018

4^th April

[S]he advances towards the row of gleaming white wash-basins, but is there defeated by the turning on of the water to wash her hands. It's a simple-looking stream-lined but incomprehensible mechanism she's never seen before: does one twist something, depress something, or wave one's hands at a certain distance beneath the orifice? There's nothing as obvious as a tap, and she is about to give up hope when another older woman arrives by her side to share, momentarily, her bewilderment, and then to solve the problem by a deft turn of a discreet lower spigot.

Margaret Drabble, The Dark Flood Rises (2016)

11^th April

I’m trying to get away from that old-fashioned female character as written by men for women, which is all about suffering, endurance and sacrifice. Why don’t we find some other talents and separate ourselves from the boredom of always having to be defined or pinned down in that way?

Deborah Levy, Books interview, The Observer New Review, 8 April 2018

May 2018

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