Celebrating the re-read

What's on your list?

Hello lovely readers! This is a light-hearted, bookish post (no drama!) – there are quite a lot of photographs so this may display better if you click the link ‘View in browser’ above. (Top right above the Roasting Tins.)

We call this room the library in a William Hague accent - ‘the lai-brah-reh’. (It was funny once then stuck.)

Bookshelves! I love looking at other people’s shelves (just like I do trolleys at the supermarket – isn’t it terrible?! So nosy.) These are ours – when we moved in four years ago, I’d hoped to get some sort of Henry Higgins style sliding ladder to get to the top shelves, rather than inelegantly balance with one foot in the air and the other on the armchair to reach Fiction A - C (left side) or Poetry - Self-Help - History (right side), but now that both girls are expert climbers this feels somewhat risky. (Or we could just lean in and put crash mats under the shelves, accessorised with throws and cushions like a Victorian opium-den.) I’d also hoped to keep all the books contained in one place, but they’ve managed to spill into most of the other rooms. A cull is imminent – there are too many. Just look at how tidy they were when we moved in:

So neat! This lasted five minutes.

I suppose it’s rather more lived-in now - all of us are chronic for pulling books out and returning them to the wrong spot, or letting them pile up on the hallway table / in bedrooms / in tote bags or – worst of all – on the corner of the kitchen island which drives me mad because then everything else gets piled there too, pens, receipts, rolls of dog bags, post I will never open – bah! Aesthetic clutter is one thing, but junk is junk. (Perhaps it’s hormonal, but I long for an empty white room like one of the characters in Byatt’s Possession, with nothing in it but an exceptionally comfortable bed, no phone, and NO COOKING.)

Anyway, I thought it might be nice to make a list of books which are not junk - and certainly won’t be going into a charity shop bag. Most of these are older books, or ones which I read quite young, and a lot of them have TV adaptations so in my head the characters now distinctly look like their matching actors or actresses:

• all the Poirot Agatha Christie (almost always forget who did it)

• I Capture the Castle (now populated by Bill Nighy, Rose Byrne and Romola Garai on a reread)

• key Nancy Mitford (of course)

• The Crimson Petal and the White (and most of Michel Faber’s others)

• almost all Rushdie (not sure why people think Rushdie is pretentious, I find his stuff endearingly Indian? His writing makes me feel like I’m in a home I didn’t know I had)

• many Sarah Waters (the Little Stranger is SO spooky)

• Jane Eyre (chatted to Vick Hope on the Women’s Prize Podcast about this - is Jane’s post-engagement Rochester management essentially negging? Discuss)

• sometimes The Time Traveller’s Wife (I refuse to watch the film)

• All Jilly Cooper, all Philippa Gregory (of which more later)

• key Austen (generally a BBC adaptation purist, though I did cut a Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Bennet fringe in homage at university)

• North and South (populated by Richard Armitage - hello!)

• the Silo books (Rebecca Ferguson & the fabulous Harriet Walter in the TV adaptation)

• Rebecca (PSA, there’s a newly jacketed collection of DuMaurier coming out!)

• C.S. Lewis books 1-5 (as I’ve said before, The Last Battle (6) is beyond redemption. Which is funny, because that’s supposedly what it’s about. Kicked out of heaven for wearing lipstick and nylons, I mean come on)

• Heartburn (sorry about that rant above)

• the original three His Dark Materials (ok, last one – the later prequel and sequel His Dark Materials novels were trash, no? Gratuitous violence/creepiness, not so much.)

Really quite new fiction which I can see making it onto this list include Gabrielle Zevin’s The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, Francesca Segal’s Welcome to Glorious Tuga (not ‘Glorious Tuna’ - thanks, autospell), Shelby Van Pelt’s Remarkably Bright Creatures and Taffy Broedesser Ackner’s Fleischman is in Trouble. (Maybe I could just check into the nearest Premier Inn with a stack of these and a few bars of chocolate. Bliss.)

Are there any crossovers here with your favourite re-reads? Comment away - I wonder if we could start the chat thing and you could send in photos of your favourite bookshelves too? Oh wait - there is a button for that! Here you go. Not sure what happens when we click it but if you get there, send book snaps!

I’d love to know which of your favourite books make the cut to official re-read status in the comments too:

I’m a fast reader but occasionally skim-read to get on with the plot, so reading a book for a third or a fourth time is quite helpful to flesh things out. And of course novels resonate in a completely new way as one gets older – case in point, I’ve reread The Pursuit of Love so many times, but it wasn’t until I had my daughter and read India Knight’s modern-day-Mitford retelling Darling with a newborn asleep on my shoulder that I properly sobbed at the ending, and was quite emotional for the rest of the day. (No spoilers in case you haven’t read it. But do!)

As a random aside, when I reread the original Pursuit of Love immediately after (no tears but still enjoyable), this passage seemed particularly hilarious. The women are stuck in a World War II version of lockdown at Alconleigh with their children:

‘So we worked hard, mending and making and washing, doing any chores for Nanny rather than actually look after the children ourselves. I have seen too many children brought up without Nannies to think this at all desirable. In Oxford, the wives of progressive dons did it often as a matter of principle; they would gradually become morons themselves, while the children looked like slum children and behaved like barbarians.’

Not to sound like one of the Rees Mogg clan, but I can’t help half agreeing, looking at my children in grubby pyjamas with haystack-hair long past 1pm, while I sing increasingly deranged repetitions of ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’, simultaneously writing up a recipe for a 2pm deadline. And I often think of this passage and have a quiet giggle when I ask my husband to move our car, so the lady who minds Mia can put her (much nicer) car on the drive – I bring her offerings of home-made smoothies, rainbow-topped porridge or smart wax-paper bags of chocolate tahini cakes to bribe her to stay with us and not leave for another, less chaotic family. (She’s Mary Poppins crossed with a collie whisperer. I would be toast without her.)

Any typos are her fault

But for two of my absolute favourite re-read authors, I’m embarrassed to say I don’t have a single copy on the shelf. Jilly is the first - for obvious reasons I’d try not to leave those around for a precocious child to read, though I suppose a three-year-old would mostly ask why there are so many bottoms on the covers. (Practising her phonics while leafing through would probably be less than ideal too. ‘A for Alba, R for Rukmini*, S for Spinosaurus, E for Erigeron**…’)

Philippa Gregory - who I love, is the other favourite - though she too lacks bookshelf real-estate. From the first in the Cousins War to the last of the last Tudors, fifteen of her books are stashed on my Kindle for iPhone (as are Jilly’s) and every other year, I read them in a back-to-back Tudor-Plantagenet-Rutshire feeding frenzy***. Maybe I have something against displaying 11-15 novels by the same author with the same jacket on the shelf? My much-loved Agatha Christie collection is a mix of old green & white spined Penguins, battered charity shop copies and a handful of more recent editions. When I extended the collection recently, I bought everything second-hand from Abebooks – even thought they didn’t arrive the next day! – to get a really interesting mix of vintage covers. (I’m aware that my bias against matchy-matchy covers is a bit rich for someone whose publishing output until recently looked like this:)

Pot, kettle.

Maybe cookbooks don’t count?

As a final note on beautiful covers, I had a thought recently that first editions might make really good presents for friends with upcoming 40th birthdays. So I contacted two independent booksellers with an interest in rare books and asked if they’d have anything nice within my budget, with a list of things my friends like (Austen, Dodie Smith, Mitford, Waugh etc.) I was v gently told that my budget wouldn’t get me close to a first-edition Austen or Mitford (oligarch money only), but Cate and Nash at Much Ado Books and Ben at B.B. Scott Rare Books went over and above with lists of more reasonably priced books that might suit - I bought a 1905 first illustrated edition of Pride and Prejudice and a first edition of The Starlight Barking from each bookseller respectively as gifts, and then couldn’t resist a first edition of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber as a present for moi. (As Miss Piggy would say.) Aren’t they gorgeous? Highly recommend both sellers if you have a close friend’s birthday coming up or feel like something lovely to take with to your nice, empty, quiet room.

And with that, I go back to the kitchen…

Aren’t they just lovely?

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*Astonishingly Alba has always pronounced my name correctly which is more than I can say for most adults, even after I say, slowly and carefully: ‘Rook like the bird, Mini like the car’. ‘That’s what I said - ‘Ruck-meanie?’ Deep breath. ‘No, it’s Rook like the bird...’ Incroyable!)

**Ok Alba doesn’t actually know what erigeron are, but she’s quite good on camellias vs roses. Or ‘meelias’, as she calls them.

***I will write a longer post on why I love Philippa Gregory - tbc!

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On the table this week

• Cheese bread - to be precise, shaped like a heart. A cheesy heart! A Valentine’s Day gift for Tim. I used the base flatbread recipe from The Green Barbecue, let the dough prove overnight in the fridge, then put rounds of dough next to each other in a heart shape, covered in cheddar cheese for a sort of tear and share thing. Probably the best bread I’ve made - the overnight fridge-prove is a winner. (Tim got me a stunning bunch of Smith and Munson tulips, after only a small hint that I was a fan.)

• Octavia Lamb chocolates: these are HANDS DOWN the best chocolates I have ever had. (I did one of those Academy of Chocolate judging panel things awhile back and she’d easily knock the gold winners out of the park.) Octavia is a genius - hand-making chocolates in small batches with the thinnest, crispest shells, and fillings like blackcurrant and liquorice pate de fruits (which totally converted this liquorice hater when I bought my first box) and yuzu cheesecake. I’m eating one of the tea and biscuits chocolates at time of writing (research, haha) - it’s a layer of crunchy biscuit, topped with a milk chocolate earl grey & breakfast tea ganache, and it is divine. Octavia sells limited edition chocolate boxes through the year, so you need to keep an eye out on her Instagram Stories for when they drop rather than buying them at will (which is probably a good thing for my bank balance.) In our ‘get everything tomorrow or by 10pm tonight’ world, they’re something special that are worth the wait. (Actually the next time I spot she’s doing a drop, I’ll send an emergency broadcast for you out on here. She hasn't paid or comped me any - I’m just a superfan.)

• My mum’s malai kofta - these are fluffy paneer dumplings, where you blitz the paneer with fresh coriander and spices, roll it into balls and deep fry them, and serve in an easy, cream-enriched tomato sauce. Mum made them last night - heaven.

• I didn’t make them this week, but can now share this one-tin gnocchi recipe with leeks and harissa from this week’s Guardian Feast column - lots of readers said they’ve made it already and it’s gone down v well.

• Cake! Because it’s Alba’s birthday this week. Three years old - how did it go so fast?

Mum’s malai kofta, from India Express. Photograph by David Loftus.