#nellstevens

[bibliobethblog]

Hello everyone! TGIF! Today I’m sharing more of my book haul from when I went book shopping with my bestie @keeperofpages Scary Monsters was an absolute no-brainer. Three scary monsters - racism, misogyny and ageism roam through this mesmerising novel. It’s reversible format enacts the disorientation that migrants experience when changing countries changes the story of their lives. I love a book I have to flip upside down to read the second story! Shame on me, I didn’t realise that one of my favourite authors, Emma Donoghue had a new book out. This novel follows three men - a scholar/priest and two monks in seventh century Ireland who leave the sinful world behind. They find an impossibly steep island inhabited by tens of thousands of birds and claim it for God. But in such a place, far from all other humanity, what will survival mean? Finally (and totally a cover buy 😂), we have Briefly, A Delicious Life. Described as a lively, daring ghost story set in 1473, this follows a dead teenage girl who falls in love with a female writer who has no idea she exists. I’d love to know your thoughts on any of these books or authors. Let’s have a chat in the comments! #bookstagram #scottishbookstagrammer #bookshoppingisthebestshopping #bookaddict📚 #scarymonsters #michelledekretser #haven #emmadonoghue #brieflyadeliciouslife #nellstevens #booksimexcitedtoread #bookhaulofawesomeness #booksonthetbr https://www.instagram.com/p/CkRCY0WLIg7/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[matildasbooks]

hibernation months

Lockdown #3 feels interminable. Today, I explained to my mother the meaning of ‘pathetic fallacy’ as the rain drummed around us. Storm Christoph is on its way and the river is fit to burst its banks again, the waters so ice-cold the dogs won’t swim. In the bluebell woods which are only russet and bronze right now, no hint of cobalt yet, I slid like a silverfish over the water-logged ground, blinked fat raindrops from my eyes. The dog’s red coat frosted with rain freckles. I’ve read a lot as always, but have enjoyed it less than usual. I put novels down for a few days and forget where the story’s going. Non-fiction is gentler; I can read a chapter as a snapshot stand-alone essay. 

A friend recommended ‘The Year of Living Danishly’ by Helen Russell to me years ago when I was in Edinburgh for the book festival and it’s only now I’ve got around to it. Reading a travel memoir might sound an odd choice when it’s unlikely anyone will be travelling for a while yet, but moving to a new place, as Russell does, can be extremely isolating. She and her partner, who works for Lego and is therefore referred to in the book as ‘Lego Man’, move to Denmark during the winter months. Spring, they are told, officially starts in March, but doesn’t normally appear before May. The streets are so deserted Russell proleptically wonders if there’s been some kind of viral outbreak (the book was written long before the word ‘corona’ - sadly not the beer - became a part of our daily lexicon). Denmark was meant to be an escape for Russell from the rat race back home and the constant questioning from strangers as to when she’d be having a baby; their arrival in the midst of winter appears, at first, to ensure the opposite. Russell feels trapped in a new town that greets her like an ice box. Through windows, she sees little movement, only glittering candlelight. A neighbour explains that the Danes “hibernate” over winter, staving off the darkling hours with glimmers of flame and hygge (Danes burn more candles per head than any other country in the world (Russell 2015, p. 10)). Although in the UK, hygge is a word most people will recognise, sold as a concept in self-care magazines and scrawled across the “perfect-Christmas-gift”-books such as ‘The Little Book of Hygge’, when I asked my French university students what it might mean, they had no idea. Apparently in the UK it’s a more attractive and marketable idea than in France, at least for now. In Russell’s book, however, it’s clear that hygge is not just a lifestyle one strives towards to achieve a better version of themselves or a fleeting fashion, its a means of survival. The Danes fight Seasonal Affective Disorder by, as one local puts it, ‘holing up for winter’ (p. 12). 

Despite my reluctance to buy into (quite literally) the hype around hygge, reading Helen Russell’s witty account of a year in the “happiest nation in the world” has been comforting in these dark and dreary months. The only candlelight in my room is the blue glow of my computer screen as it whirrs like a plane taking off to keep up with the amount of work I’m using it for - it was on its last legs before lockdown #1. I haven’t changed much about my routine - I’m still halfway through the book - but perhaps there’s something to be said for some elements of hygge in this Covid world. I’ve rediscovered a childish joy in stickers (literary ones, of course) which I’m affixing to every notebook I own and I’m trying to journal - there’s a good video by @TheOxfordPsych on how to use journalling as a tool to improve your mental health, rather than just a performative exercise, which I found useful. I’m beating myself up less about getting through my growing pile of books and reading slowly, as if I’m a university student again, annotating my books with a pink pen. 

My favourite read so far this month has to be ‘Field Notes’ by Anna Selby, published by Hazel Press and sold by The London Review of Books Bookshop. Written under water on transparent notebooks, her poems are electric. With an epigraph from Joan Didion - ‘what it is like to be a woman, the irreconcilable difference of it, the sense of living one’s deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death’ - Selby dives deep into waters where she can become a creature apart from the murky subterranean existence of a woman, catcalled and pregnant and un-pregnant, something more like a fish that’s soldered its wounds with kintsugi, with the golden threads of a lit wick. Her blog (on her website http://annamariaselby.co.uk/) also serves as a wonderful introduction to her work as a poet, PhD student and naturalist, with descriptions of night gardens crowded with Japanese wisteria and moonflower vines. 

For now, the hibernation months continue. I wonder how we’ll look back at these years, as we begin to reckon with the effects it has wrought on countries and individuals, but I may as well in the meantime take Selby’s advice, via Thomas Merton, to listen to the rain: ‘nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants this rain. As long as it talks, I am going to listen’. 

More non-fiction perfect for lockdown in the vein of Russell’s The Year of Living Danishly;

Bleaker House by Nell Stevens 

Names for the Sea by Sarah Moss

Fiction books I might read next:

A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

Childhood by Tove Ditlevsen

[nolitethoughts]

Briefly, A Delicious Life by Nell Stevens  

Nell Stevens’s paraphrases are like ripe fruits from my childhood. When I think about it, I can suddenly feel it with all my senses.

I’m going to be honest; this book so far is my favourite one of the year besides Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.

There is something in it that just worked for me and alongside me that I rarely find in books these days.

Maybe that bittersweet smell of rotting fruit that I am so familiar with since my childhood. 

As my grandfather was making his peach and plum spirits fermenting the fruits on a beautiful autumn day while the setting sun was warming my back as I watched him stir his ‘potion’.

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[daydreamdelusion]

Currently reading: The Victorian and the Romantic by Nell Stevens #currentlyreading #thevictorianandtheromantic #nellstevens https://www.instagram.com/p/BnmVhMynVMn/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=8huebmbil76i

[kattra]

(it was a crazy weekend, but here's a super late) #FridayReads: MAYBE IN ANOTHER LIFE by #TaylorJenkinsReid, BLEAKER HOUSE by #NellStevens, NOTHING CAN POSSIBLY GO WRONG by #PrudenceShen & #FaithErinHicks, BIG LITTLE LIES by #LianeMoriarty. #amreading

[teteastonellis]

From “Bleaker house” by Nell Stevens

[sankarshan]

Happy reading! @KieseLaymon on @lacymjohnson, @TisforThompson on @renee_e_simms, @rokwon on Ancco, @alicebolin on @nellstevens, @Mrao_Strib on @atrubek, @nevalalee on @parabasis/@dankois, @TereseMarieM on @JWhitehead204... https://t.co/sSAz30Crmw

— Longreads (@Longreads) January 3, 2019

[hoteltresanton]

The hotel is exclusively booked this week, but we are open for lunch each day stmaw.es/lunch #tresanton #stmawes #cornwall 🔄 @nellstevens (at Hotel Tresanton)

[class-wom]

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A post shared by Doubleday Books (@doubledaybooks)

doubledaybooks -- Is this not the most self-assured creature you've ever seen? @nellstevens snapped a picture of this proud seal as he sunned himself on the shore of Bleaker Island. // Did total isolation and 1,085 calories a day help Nell write the novel she set out to? Read more in her witty new memoir, BLEAKER HOUSE

[cocoetlavieenrose]

via Twitter https://twitter.com/CocoLaVieEnRose

[cocoetlavieenrose]

Tweeted

voguemagazine: "This was never part of the plan," says nellstevens. "I never wanted to write a memoir. It just hap… https://t.co/ohd1a9DQlv

— Coco (@CocoLaVieEnRose) March 16, 2017