A Reading Diary

"I hate reading books after you, Kate, because I can tell what you were eating when you were reading it", my brother said as he tried to avoid touching a smudge of chocolate on the side of High Fidelity.

Well, it is also true that sandwiches are an excellent accompaniment to literature.

I am spending easter weekend at my family's little old house in Suffolk and there is really no better place for reading. The low beams, the 17th century rooms, the antique furniture and not to mention the fairly frightening attic with bats living behind the bookshelves all feel very Romantic. Combine this with the wide fields, the little walled gardens and the wooded paths and I really could be writing my own novel. When I was younger, I used to pretend I was living in the house in The Secret Garden and I used to take candles and wander around the house in the dark looking for an ivory elephant.

We went for what can only be described as a brisk walk on the seafront today. I walked past P.D. James's house (in the least "I could be arrested for harrassment" way possible) and have subsequently developed a craving for a gripping crime novel. I'm reading Little Face by Sophie Hannah, because I met her a couple of weeks ago, but it's not shaping up to be as exciting as I had hoped. We had a discussion about crime novels, in which I discovered that we had very similar taste, so I thought that her book would fulfill all of my expectations, but the story line feels like a bit of a farce. On the other hand, I'm only a hundred pages in, so it may drastically improve.

Edit: It did improve! I stayed up all night reading it because I couldn't go to sleep without knowing how it ended.

I think that Harriet the Spy has had a greater influence on my life than any of my friends or family have. I used to read it every day and did so for about sixth months; as soon as I had finished, I would turn back to the beginning and start again. My copy of the book has peanut butter or chocolate on some of the pages; I always tried to eat tomato sandwiches but I just couldn't make myself like them. Nevertheless, I heartily embraced the "cake and milk" tradition.

I kept a notebook for years, spying on neighbours from my bedroom windows and writing about my friends and family. Speaking of which, my notebooks were found several times, and didn't go down too well. There are some people that I will never be able to look in the eye again. Well, they deserved it.

Even years and years later, whenever I write my name at the top of a page to write an essay, I always think about how much I like to write it, partly because Harriet the Spy does.

That is a fact. Lord Byron has been entertaining me this morning (the postcard that I have of him on my dressing table was watching me whilst I put on a necklace) and I now realise the extent to which my love of his poetry stems from how utterly and completely I am in love with him. Theoretically, of course, because he's dead. I was sitting in my kitchen eating treacle tart and reading Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and I had to stop reading every so often, firstly because I had to get some more treacle tart, but secondly to think about how exciting it would be to live with him at Newstead Abbey. We could drink out of matching skulls and shock society with our inappropriate public lovemaking.

I know that T.S. Eliot would have writing appreciated as an isolated entity, without the fascination with the author, but I'm really not sure I would have read Epistle to Augusta so many times if I wasn't looking for any signs that may point to incest. For this, however, I had to look to Fiona McCarthy's biography, Byron: Life and Legend which is definitely the next best thing.

Eliot may have been a genius, with all of his fragments, but I'm also certain that he was a bit of a snob.

I stayed with my friend Rebecca last night, who happens to be living in Notting Hill for the week. This has put me in the mood for a Romantic Comedy or two. We had a breakfast of red velvet cupcakes at the Hummingbird Bakery and, whilst trying to remember the song from Bednobs and Broomsticks about Portobello Road, sorted through mountains of old clothes and handbags for what is commonly reffered to as "a vintage find". It was sunny and it was a Sunday morning; inevitably there were couples laughing and holding hands with what appeared to be the primary aim of preventing me from walking on the pavement. I was driven into the Travel Bookshop that Hugh Grant purports to own in what happens to be the greatest film ever made, and after having a poke around there, I came home to have a root around my own bookshelf, and settled on a copy of Pride and Prejudice. Whilst Hugh Grant and Jane Austen are not entirely incompatible (in fact, it is his face that I associate with Edward Ferrars), I see him more as the foppish Mr. Bingley than the mighty Mr. Darcy.

Why is it that Mr. Darcy is just so enigmatic a character? This cannot be attributed to the infulence of film adaptations because I rather feel that Colin Firth is looking a little old these days, and I will always think of Matthew McFadyen as an MI5 Spook with a conscience rather than as a stony faced but dashing young aristocrat.

Whilst Pride and Prejudice recommends itself in a million and one ways, it's my devotion to Mr. Darcy that makes it such a page turner. Jane Austen made it perfectly clear in Northanger Abbey that she felt Gothic literature to be rather gauche, but there is something of the Romantic about Mr. Darcy. He's certainly not Byronic or rakish, but there is a mystery in his haughtiness, his silence. Then again, I have also found this in Colonel Brandon so perhaps there may be some wishful thinking on my part. For someone who can be cynical about even the most heart-breaking instances of real life anguish, I certainly enjoy a touch of mournful loneliness and regret in books, especially if combined with a little corset-ripping and a vampire or two. Though this couldn't be further from Jane Austen.

In any case, this has definitely caused an outbreak of Regency Extravaganza. I will whet my appetite with the (predictably embarrassing) ITV adaptation of Persuasion this evening. I didn't like their version of Northanger Abbey last Sunday, not least because John Thorpe's face was the most disturbing thing about it, but nothing says Regency Romance like a case of gout.