Lynne's Regular Column

Seasonally Affected Reading

I’m so pleased Transita have set foot in the world of blogging.

Blogging could really do with finding a much nicer word to describe itself but it is an amazing medium and plenty of us are finding a ready and willing audience out there, and with it a very gratifying two-way means of communication plus an outlet for sharing that love of good books (and knitting and quilting in my case.)

It was a post from Transita author Jane Gordon Cumming that set my trail of thought racing for this month’s column.

Jane, ever the intrepid explorer it would seem, roped up the huskies, shouted “mush” and set out armed with map and compass to find the beautiful snow encrusted house that adorns the cover of her book A Proper Family Christmas.

I read it last Christmas and loved it. But it was that cover that clinched the deal because it decorated a room all on its own. Remember this tip for next year, forget paper chains and holly, just leave A Proper Family Christmas lying around and feel that inrush of Christmas spirit.

I am a complete cover girl, the sort that will pick up a book for its cover long before I’m even half sure of the content, fickle though it may seem these things really do matter. The cover starts to shape the book for me and I’m already picking up its sense of place in my mind.

Of course in the early days of Transita there was a great deal of debate about book covers and plenty of us taking a wide berth around the wall to wall pastel chick-lit with those stick-thin figures and cartoon style covers. I still couldn’t read one if I tried, you’d have to conceal it in brown paper.

Currently nothing has changed and I’ve recently made quite a foray into some books I had always thought of as unreadable and not for me under any circumstances, all thanks to a bit of re-branding and some fabulous covers.

Let me tell you I am now addicted to P.G.Wodehouse.

How on earth can this have happened?

I loathed the TV series years ago with a complete passion; Ian Carmichael just irritated me beyond belief; it was all so stupid, honestly, what on earth is funny about a man with a monocle and a pompous butler?

Then I caught a glimpse of a complete set of the new Everyman Wodehouse series and immediately fell in love with the books, but what a nuisance, I hated them. But in fact I’d never actually read one.

I was sufficiently in love with the Everyman books as objects of adoration to overcome this minor obstacle and knew that I had to have just one and of course the cover was so lovely I was bound to enjoy it.

I started to read and was quickly laughing like a drain at a grown man putting a bag of flour on top of a door so that it fell on someone, but this is the hysterical bit, it doesn’t fall on the someone because they go in through another door. Bertie Wooster forgets and dashes in the booby trapped door and, wait for it, it falls on him. I’m even laughing just writing that.

You see I can just visualise you all falling off your chairs with laughter too reading this…no of course not, you’re thinking give me Little Britain any day.
Right, that doesn’t make you laugh either.

Well trust me, don’t be fooled by the seeming dullness of the humour, P.G. Wodehouse has the most enviably funny writing style that will have you smiling inside with every read.

Perfect for those seasonally affected and disordered days of January and February and if you find it’s not to your liking, well the covers look gorgeous lying around on the coffee table.

Easily less expensive than that complete make-over you’d planned for the room.