Lyra Lit

My column for January had been shaping up nicely over the last few days until I had another fateful and chance encounter with Woman’s Hour this morning. Now it’s all gone a bit pear shaped but I promise to get back on track after a quick diversion.

I listened (in the bathroom actually!) and my jaw dropped as the debate about fictional heroines unfolded. Can you believe that apparently women are now fed up with chick lit! Horror of horrors what will become of us? Citing the lower age limit for these books as 16 we are now looking at the emergence of Lyra-Lit. Young girls want feisty heroines (as in Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights trilogy) who know what they want, feminism has got us all confused and we must look back further to the 19th century novel to seek out some role models, Elizabeth Bennet was cited as usual. Bridget Jones took a pasting, though it was carefully explained that she had originally been intended as satire and it had all been taken too seriously.

This just left me with the usual and obvious thought; every Transita novel that I have read so far has given me a strong and eventually self confident mature woman who knows her mind, finds her way through a maze of trials and tribulations and emerges strengthened. What more could you ask?

A Reader's Journal

Back in 1988 and blessed with three small children it became apparent that Fulminating Brain Mush was settling in for the duration. My literary world extended no further than Postman Pat meets Topsy and Tim, urgent action was required.

Reading had always been a cornerstone of my life and clearly needed to be consciously restored and so that year I began something that I have kept going ever since. I now have eighteen years worth of reading journals to look back on. I am a hopeless personal diarist. I look back on a treasured one kept through 1962 when I was about nine “Went to play with Anne, we went to Woolworth’s on our roller skates” “My Judy comic had a free gift in it today” (it was a rosebud ring I’d written that down too!) Maturity didn’t seem to make the content any more interesting, in fact probably less so, any attempt at personal insight read back as embarrassingly mawkish.

In contrast I am currently reading Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary with a group of friends online and we have quickly identified that one reason for its superb readability is that compared with life today, Woolf had few demands made on her other than to read and then to write. I have to add that we have already established that she is a great and revered writer!

My reading journals not only trace all the books I have read since 1988 but also periodically my thoughts on the books at the time which also takes into account the context of my life and circumstances as they were at that moment. I am a read and gorge person, if I find a writer I like I have to read them all so in 1988 I ‘read’ Mary Wesley, Alice Walker and Garrison Keillor; in 1989 Penelope Lively and Alice Thomas Ellis; in 1990 Anne Tyler. I only need to glimpse a Mary Wesley book now and I’m right back there folding nappies (yes we knew what ‘real’ nappies were in those days!) and escaping into The Vacillations of Poppy Carew. Looking back on them now they read like a history of my reading journey and consequently my life and I now can’t imagine life without them.

As I wind up the 2005 volume with my reading Oscars of the year and start yet another volume for 2006 I can report that I have honed the thing into a uniform volume so now use one of the much hyped but still adorable little Moleskine notebooks and of utmost importance is a decent fountain pen filled with some Diamine ink (my preferred colour is Burgundy, others I know favour Sepia, some Prussian Blue, it’s a very personal thing) Through the year I may paste in cuttings, pictures etc in fact anything that strikes me of relevance to what I am reading. I’m sure most of you have been far more assiduous about all this than me and have been doing similar for years but if you haven’t, why not make a start? Then you’ll be ready next month for my column on finally reading some of those books you’ve always meant to read unless of course Jenny Murray diverts me off course again.

Lynne Hatwell January 2006