Nicholas Hoult to star in Birdsong

What? Huh? Wait. Have we not just had an adaptation of Birdsong for the screen? Yes, yes we have. But as we all know, nothing is ever finished with until Hollywood have had their go. Sometimes twice.

Think The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, The Great British Bake Off... One thing all these films have in common though? Except perhaps the latter... top male leads. Daniel 'Phwoar' Craig, Michael 'Wunderbar' Fassbender, Jeremy 'English Rose' Irvine... I'm sure Irvine would love being called an English Rose... *shrugs*

ANYWAY, the BBC had already done a pretty good job with casting for Birdsong last year with the irresistible Eddie Redmayne. Therefore it was always going to be tough for Hollywood to take it up a notch in my opinion. But, I have to say, if the rumours are true, Nicholas Hoult is a pretty good choice. Now he may not be the conventional Etonian gorgeousness that is Mr. Redmayne, but everyone loves a bit of Nicholas Hoult don't they? Even with blonde hair in A Single Man. Actually, that brings me on to a good point. Nicholas Hoult is not only rags to riches, Skins to Hollywood, rising British star... he also does a pretty good job of adapting characters from page to screen. From Nick Hornby's About a Boy to A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood to, more recently, Isaac Marion's Warm Bodies, he's done quite a range.

Now I still have reservations about whether or not Birdsong will ever make an entirely successful transformation from page to screen because I've always slightly wondered if there's something missing from Sebastian Faulks novel. That's not to say I didn't enjoy it (you can read my review here) but Hollywood is going to need to bring something a little different. Perhaps Nicholas Hoult will do that? We shall have to see.

See my thoughts on the BBC adaptation here.

Book Club: The Woman in White

'In one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop ... There, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth ... stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white'

The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his 'charming' friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, The Woman in White is the first and most influential of the Victorian genre that combined Gothic horror with psychological realism.

Perhaps the prettiest of the Book Club books so far, don't you think? Admittedly this novel was first published in book form (previously serialised) in 1860 so it's had quite a number of covers... including this simply gorgeous cover for the first US edition I think you'll agree...

Anyway, this book doesn't just win the aesthetic prize, it is also the oldest novel we've read together and, originally being an epistolary novel, it is also the longest. Jaysus. It is long. 700 pages plus. And it's an old book so it's not like reading Potter before any of you start comparing it... But I finished it people and do you know what that means? It was really quite good.

It's successfully eerie to start with. It's often credited as one of the first sensation novels, a genre of literary fiction that drew on the Gothic and Romantic genres and tended to focus on a shocking incident of some kind - murder, kidnapping, adultery etc - and often domestic in setting. This fits all that criteria and there are plenty appearances of the Gothic 'Other' too: nothing like a mad woman dressed all in white, and then you've got fat foreign Fosco who just can't make your mind up about.

It's really quite an achievement that, first of all, Wilkie Collins was taken seriously being called Wilkie..., and secondly that he has written a great novel which kept me entertained for 700 pages with only a small cast of characters.

One of the first characters we meet is Marion Halcombe, Laura Fairlie's half sister, and she's wonderfully feisty. I would go so far as to say Wilkie Collins is burgeoning on early feminist writing here if Marian wasn't immediately described as having an amazing physique but a really ugly face... Once he's got out the way, he can pave the way for her to be an opinionated, intelligent woman who fights back at authority. Beautiful Laura meanwhile just squeaks in the background and is a little dull. Saying that, there are other important reasons with regards plot why these characters are the way they are. It was more of an historical observation of the times rather than something I was offended by.

Anyway, if you are looking for a classic to read and you don't fancy Austen or the Brontes, I would definitely recommend this mystery novel. It's main downfall is that it is just too long for modern readers. I did drift off a little on a couple of occasions, but to be fair never for that long. All in all it gets an 8/10 from me, 7/10 from the Book Club.

Le Bal des Ardents

Le Bal des Ardents is a bookshop in the centre of the beautiful French city of Lyon. Lyon is located halfway between cultural Paris and sun-kissed Marseilles and so, naturally, will always be fighting for its own recognition... but I think this little bookshop is holding up, at least, Lyon's literary reputation, quite literally, pretty well all by itself. Nothing like this health-and-safety-law-defying arch of books to draw in some trade. I'd just love to be there the moment one man absent-mindedly browsing the books and thinking Oooh Victoooiiiireee 'Ugooo, removing a fat copy of Les Mis, only for the whole Arch de Literary Triumph come tumbling down around him.

Ignore my appalling French accent. I spend most of my spare time day dreaming of being transformed into Marion Cotillard. Naturally it's only my accent that lets me down...

Anyway, this bookshop looks marvelous and next time I find myself in Lyon, I will make my way here and see if this architectural triumph is still standing. The name is peculiar, though. Le Bal des Ardents, meaning 'The Fiery Ball' (ball as in a 'dance'), takes its name randomly from the Dance of the Burning Men, or the Dance of the Savages, a 1393 masquerade ball where Charles VI of France performed along with five other noblemen. A torch brought in by one of the audience, coincidentally the King's brother, set four of the men on fire. Turns out it wasn't the best publicity for the King's court and only exacerbated public belief that the court was a decadent disgrace. Anyway, noooo idea why this was chosen as the name but it sounds and looks awesome.

If you're lucky enough to live in Lyon or nearby and haven't yet been in here, I suggest you do and let me know what it's like. Although I could just spend my days looking at their 'virtual tour'... because I'm that awesome.

17 Rue Neuve

69001

Lyon

France

The Charleston Bulletin

Julian and Quentin Bell with their half-sister Angelica

Virginia Woolf's sister, painter and interior designer Vanessa Bell, had two children from her marriage to Clive Bell - Quentin and Julian. The family was, you might say, slightly unconventional. Vanessa and Clive had an open-relationship, with Vanessa having affairs with the likes of critic Roger Fry and artists Duncan Grant (with whom she had a third child, Angelica). Their family home, Charleston, was painted all over - including the furniture, by the artists that lived there and became a countryside retreat for much of the Bloomsbury Group, including EM Forster, John Maynard Keynes and Virginia Woolf herself.

Growing up in such a household, it probably isn't surprising that Julian and Quentin developed a creative streak.

Perhaps inspired by their mother and aunt's own childhood publication, the Hyde Park Gate News, Julian and Quentin put together a family newspaper, The Charleston Bulletin, during the summer of 1923 when they were 15 and 13 respectively. Rather sensibly Quentin concluded that 'it seemed stupid to have a real author so close at hand and not have her contribute' and so they employed the literary talents of their aunt Virginia.

The British Library are to publish these Charleston Bulletin supplements for the first time this June and they show a very different side to the perhaps unfairly pigeon-holed Virginia Woolf. The supplements document the adventures of the Woolf-Bell family coloured by Woolf's humour and wit and are accompanied by Quentin's illustrations.

Filled with family in-jokes, from light-hearted digs at the boys' father and Woolf's brother-in-law, Clive Bell, to the culinary disasters of the household cook, the supplements promise to offer their readers an insight into the life and times of the family from a refreshingly more informal, fun and personal perspective that we are perhaps not used to when learning about Woolf, who famously committed suicide in 1941. Sadly Julian too died prematurely at just 29 in the Spanish Civil War.

The supplements, as I said, will be published later this year and the unusual house and gardens of Charleston are available to visit (they are currently closed I believe, but will reopen next month).

The Hyde Park Gate News

Other posts on Virginia Woolf:

Introducing... Virginia Woolf

Book vs. Film: The Hours

The Rest is Noise

Keep Anne Ginger campaign!

Red heads are often missing from literature. Perhaps it's the author weighing up in his/her mind what the biological chances are that this character would be ginger? (Turns out about 1-2% in the world at large). Regardless, there are a certain few characters that we like to hang onto... The Weasleys... Pippi Longstocking... anyone played by Lindsey Lohan pre-crazy (aka. Parent Trap...think that's about it)... and Anne of Green Blooming Gables! So when someone tries to steal away the ginge... we're not too happy about it and start screaming 'THIEF' or 'RACIST' from behind our books.

And that's exactly what happened (not the screaming 'racist' bit...). A new edition of LM Montgomerey's childrens' classic, Anne of Green Gables, has been released via Amazon's CreateSpace program and somehow in the process Anne has been bleached! Her "very thick, decidedly red hair" and "much freckled" face has instead become a buxom blonde suductress. Just so you know, in case you aren't already acquainted, Anne is supposed to be ten years old at the start of the novel...

Anyway, it sparked [red fire joke insert here] a red riot with a 'Keep Anne Ginger' campaign and several highly intelligent (as a race, we are pretty damn smart I'll have you know) moments of comic genius:

'This book is supposed to be Anne Of Green Gables NOT Anne Does Green Gables!'

'For those of you who have not read this series, I will give you a summary: Anne is a young red-headed orphan sent to live on a farm on Prince Edward Island. Unfortunately the adoptive family wanted a boy but she does her best to fit in and warm their hearts. However, after coping with her feelings of abandonment and insecurity, getting her best friend drunk, getting teased by a boy in school, and losing the only real father figure she's ever known, she dyes her hair blonde, dons a plaid shirt and becomes the town whore of Avonlea'

Monica Hesse of the Washington Post writes:

'We shall overlook the clingy, farm-girl plaid shirt (no, really, we shan’t; that shirt is an atrocity), and we shall do our best to ignore the come-hitherness of the stare, with the bedroom eyes and the bee-stung lips, and we shall even forgive the fact that the girl on the cover of this new, horrid edition of the book that we used to re-read until the pages fell out is raking her fingers through hair that cascades loose down her back as if she’s a Canadian Rapunzel. But the hair itself. The hair cannot be ignored. Anne of Green Gables has red hair. And this saucy impostor is a blonde.'

Ohhhh the hilarity. Do Google this if you want some other nuggets of genius on the subject...

Dark World for the Amala Children’s Home

Do you ever have those moments when you meet someone and as they keep talking you start to realise how much more exciting/fun/meaningful their life is than yours and that you really should be stepping up to the table of life and start making your contribution? Ok, so maybe just me, but everyone knows someone who is doing that little bit more for the world than you are.

I reckon the friends of teenager Timothy Parker Russell are all feeling a little bit like that. Only a sixth form student from the Wensleydale school in North Yorkshire, not only has Timothy has gone and collected together a selection of ghost stories and produced and published a book, but it's all in aid of Amala Children's Home in India.

Dark World is a limited edition book published by Yorkshire publisher, Tartarus Press, and features thirteen ghost stories by various different authors, some of which have written stories specially for this collection. 

The writers involved are Reggie Oliver, Christopher Fowler, Rhys Hughes, Mark Valentine, Anna Taborska, John Gaskin, Corinna Underwood, Rosalie Parker, Jason A. Wyckoff, Mark J. Saxton, Jayaprakash Satyamurthy, R.B. Russell, Stephen Holman and Steve Rasnic Tem.

The Rest is Noise at The Southbank Centre

The Southbank is one of my top areas of London. It's kind of cheating because it's pretty long so includes lots of stuff... The Globe, Tate Modern, Gabriel's Wharf, The National Theatre, The Southbank Centre... the list goes on. Last weekend I had tickets for The Rest is Noise, a programme of talks, lectures and concerts that brings to life Alex Ross's survey of 20th Century music that is his book of the same name.

Before I get started, I  have a confession. I have not read this book. One of my mum's friends grabs us in a queue for the last talk of the day raving about this magnificent book by some guy on MUsic and CULture. Until then, neither my mum nor I knew this programme was about a book. Luckily for me, it's totally about a book, and so I can blog about it. Saying that, I'd have blogged about it anyway. a) because somehow I was always going to blog about something this weekend and I sense my 3 hour stint in front of the TV on Sunday morning probably doesn't qualify... and b) because my first talk was on none other than her wonderfullness, Virginia Woolf.

Professor Rachel Bowlby was looking at the work of Virginia Woolf while considering one of her most famous quotes: ''On or about December 1910 human character changed.'' I'm not about to type out what she said but I'm going to put my two cents in. It's quite a big statement to make about a year that most of us would struggle to talk about for much more than thirty seconds... It has been argued that Virginia Woolf suffered from something like 'hurry sickness', developing anxiety and depression as a result of the constant speeding up and flux of culture and time in the early 20th Century. This thought, together with Woolf's quote, do comfort me slightly as sometimes I feel we too often think that we are the first to experience the life we are living. The fact is, cultural change (be it good or bad) has happened before. Recessions have happened before. And we're still here!

Next up, David Tong on Einstein's Theory of Relativity and I actually understood it... ok, so I'm not about to write a paper on it, but my unscientific mind actually has some kind of grasp on this theory. That is really all I have to say on this matter. It blew. my. mind. Turns out there's no gravitational pull - WHO KNEW?

Finally, I got to meet the legend that is Tony Benn. To use the introducer's words, Tony Benn 'is history' - he's seen it all. Sure he was an MP, sure he was a cabinet minister, but what is incredible about this man is that he is one of those rare people who actually sticks to his values. It's so easy to say to ourselves that we believe in certain things but, when challenged, how many of us slip slightly to protect ourselves over our values? He didn't. Thus, he is a dude. He is also a great speaker.

If you didn't go yourself, wonderfully you can hear what they all had to say here on the Southbank Centre's website!