I can’t quite believe it but my Century of Books is done.

100 books! 100 authors! 100 posts!

I’m am so glad I’ve done it. There are times when I thought the search for books for particular years was going to drive me mad, but it hasn’t – quite – and I have made so many wonderful discoveries along the way.

You can see my complete list here.

I’m a little light-headed now, as I get used to the gap where the project used to be. It was a push to finish by the end of the year, but I have, and now I can read whatever I want!!

And now, for the sake of completeness, if there were one hundred books there should be ten 10% reports. So here is the tenth one

1913 – The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton

“Now I find myself wanting to do what Alice did at the end of ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I want to throw you in the air and say, “You’re just a fictional character!” But I can’t. Because you are so utterly real; not a heroine, not a villainess, but a vivid, three-dimensional human being, with strengths and weaknesses.”

 1932 – Conversation Piece by Molly Keane

“He is enchanted by the house, and by the cousins, and he describes them simply and beautifully. I really did feel that he was telling his story, speaking or writing, and he brought a house, a family, and a way of living to life on the page.”

 1933 – High Rising by Angela Thirkell

“It’s a simple story, but it plays out beautifully, because it is adorned with so many lovely dialogues, so many interesting incidents; and because everything works beautifully with the characters and their situations.”

 1940 – Rochester’s Wife by D E Stevenson

“There are some lovely scenes along the way. It became clear that Mardie cared for Kit as much as he cared for her. Jem – who had a wonderful talent for imitating the people around him – was always a joy. And there was a wonderful trip to Scotland. The story was readable, and was always going to keep reading to find out what happened.”

1943 – The Landslide by Stephen Gilbert

“Wolfe sets out, with his grandfather, to look at the changes that the landslide has wrought. What they find is extraordinary, not rocks and rubble, but lush new growth, trees and plants; it is as if the landslide has uncovered another world ….”

1945 – When All is Done by Alison Uttley

“Charity loves her home, she has become part of its fabric, and she finds great joy in being its custodian and the matriarch of her family for the rest of her days; and as she grows up Virginia discovers the same joy. In her home, in the world around her, in the changing seasons, in the way that lives are lived, have been lived, for generations. Life pulls Virginia away from the farm, but it always brings her back. She will, like Charity, be its custodian, and her life and the life of the house will be knotted together.”

1948 – Maidens’ Trip by Emma Smith

“It is a wonderful adventure for three young women  – Nanette, Emma and Charity – all from conventional, middle-class backgrounds, who have completed basic training and have been dropped into the very different world of the boating fraternity.”

 1965 – Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper

“It begins with their arrival in Cornwall, and it was clear from the start that Susan Cooper knew and understood Cornwall. She caught it perfectly, and that reassured me that I was in the safest of hands.”

 1973 – The Dressmaker by Beryl Bainbridge

“The story is set in Liverpool in 1944,  a time when the city was worn down by the war and all that it meant, and when the end wasn’t quite in sight. And it tells of  two middle-aged women and their seventeen year-old niece. They brought her up, because their brother couldn’t manage after his wife died.  They are ordinary, unremarkable, working class women, but, seemingly effortlessly, Beryl Bainbridge makes their story fascinating, and suggests that something is going to happen.”

 1977 – The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady by Edith Holden

“The book is utterly beautiful. Its pages are facsimiles of Edith’s original, and it holds so much and is so lovely that it would be easy to spend so many hours in its company. But I read one month every month, following Edith’s year is real time, wishing that I could have walked alongside her, or maybe that I could have been one of her students. “

There might be another century; it might be the same or it might be different; it might start now or it might start later.

I’m still mulling over ideas, and I’ll write about them – and about what I’ve learned from this century – in a day or two.

The end of my 20th Century Reading Project is definitely in sight now!

This is my eighth update, so I’ve read and written about eighty books, and I’ve read a few more that I have still to write about.

My previous reports are here and the full list is here.

I’ve reached the point when I can say I’m glad I’m doing this- I’ve discovered and rediscovered some great books and authors – but I’ll be relieved when it’s over. I’m ready for a change, and for not being tied to a project.

This ten in a bit of a mixed bunch – I particularly loved my books for 1942, 1971, 1972 and 1991,  I liked most of the others, but there were a couple of disappointments. Looking forward though, I’ve dealt with some tricky years, I’ve saved some lovely authors for the final stages, and so it’s onwards and upwards.

But, for tonight, here are those last ten books:

1907 – Through the Magic Door by Arthur Conan Doyle

“I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, nor how lowly the room which it adorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with it all the cares of the outer world, plunge back into the soothing company of the great dead, and then you are through the magic portal into that fair land whither worry and vexation can follow you no more.”

1921 – The Windy Hill by Cornelia Meigs

The children continued to visit The Beeman, to hear his wonderful tales of local history, and to ask his advice. They found out what was going on, and then they found out why, but they had no idea what they could do. But then fate gave a helping hand, and everything fell into place.

1923 – The End of the House of Alard by Sheila Kaye-Smith

Above all this is a story of characters and relationships. Each and every character is beautifully drawn, complex and fully realised; the multitude of different relationships between them are caught perfectly too. They all lived and breathed, but it was in the dialogues that they were most alive. I remember Jenny, stridently making her case for doing just what she wanted to do; Gervase and George talking about faith; Mary quietly explaining why she couldn’t bear to go on with her husband ….

1942 – Treveryan by Angela Du Maurier

An elegant manor house, set on the wild Cornish coast; a house that captures the hearts and souls of those who live their. A story of love, secrets, and their consequences, with wonderful gothic overtones. It might be Manderlay but it isn’t, this is Treveryan. The creation not of Daphne Du Maurier, but of her elder sister, Angela. Two sisters, and two very different writers; but, of course writers with the same background, and with many of the same influences.

1968 – Clutch of Constables by Ngaio Marsh

The prospect of traveling by boat through the countryside that Constable painted was irresistible. She didn’t know that her cabin had been reserved by a man who has been murdered,  believe by a master criminal the police call ‘The Jampot.’ But she found out, and that made her regard her fellow passengers with a degree of suspicion.

1971 – Penmarric by Susan Howatch

The story is told in six volumes, by five different narrators: Mark Castellack, his wife, one of his illegitimate sons, and two of his legitimate sons who would, in their turn, be master of Penmarric. Sixty years pass – from the later years of Queen Victoria’s reign to the end of World War II full of every kind of family drama you could imagine. In the wrong hands it would be a mess, but Susan Howatch made it work.

1972 – Limmerston Hall  by Hester W Chapman

Anne Milsom was leaving her home, and travelling to Pond House in Gloucester, to bring up her orphaned niece and nephew. She knew little of Neville Quarrendon, the guardian appointed by their father’s will, save that he was a distant relation, that he was a widower, and that he was an artist. Her friends were concerned that she would be living so far away, and in the household of a man they knew so little about, but nothing they could  deter Anne from going to her sister’s children.

1974 – The Face of Trespass by Ruth Rendell

The story – like many of Ruth Rendell’s stand-alone novels – focuses on the life of one lonely and isolated soul. Gray had written a highly successful first novel, but a bad case of writers block and a failed romance had brought him low. He was living alone, in a small cottage on the edge of Epping Forest, house-sitting for a friend who was away travelling. He had become a hermit, and his standards were slipping.

1980 – The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M Auel

Somewhere around thirty-five thousand years ago, Ayla, a five-year old Cro- Magnum girl, found herself completely alone when her family, and all of her people, were killed. She wandered, lost and alone, until she was discovered by a group who call themselves the Clan of the Cave Bear. They were a different race –  Neanderthals – and only one of their number, Iza, a medicine woman saw the child, who looked so very, very different from her people, as a fellow creature to be helped and nurtured.

1991 – The Unforgiving by Charlotte Cory

It begins with three little girls who have lost their mother, sitting upstairs, looking down over the bannister. Because downstairs, their father, the famous and distinguished architect Mr Edward Glass is being manoevered into matrimony by the scheming widow, Mrs. Elizabeth Cathcart. Her strategy is successful, and the arrangement was successful, though it would not prove to a conventional marriage.

I’m halfway through my 20th Century Reading Project!

First there were ten, then twenty, then thirty,  then forty, and now there are fifty books.

Which is great, but I’m behind schedule and I’ve had the mid-project blues.

I’ve been focusing on the 20th century for so long, and there was still quite away to go, so I needed a little break.  But last week a book from the 1980s caught my eye, I discovered a pile of project books I’d pushed into a corner quite some time ago, and now I’m enthused again.

And I was hit by the news that my library will be moving to new, smaller premises. Admittedly that won’t be happening for two years, but I’m thinking I need to read the books from reserve stock that I have my eye on now, in case that’s downscaled too.

Expect to see books by Winifred Holtby, Jon Godden, Evelyn Waugh and Edith Wharton in my next round-up in a few weeks time.

I won’t be reading  long or difficult books, because I still plan to finish my century by the end of the year.

Allowing just one book per author is great for the list, great for making me read widely, but there are a good few authors I’d like to get back to.

But enough rambling, this is a 10% report, so here are another ten books:

1906 – A Pixy in Petticoats by John Trevena

“Some people look at a hedgerow and see just that. A hedgerow. But others see more: a network of different plants, signs of the wildlife that live there, evidence of what the weather had been doing. John Trevena saw those things and he was able to bring that to life on the page, to pull his readers into his village and over the moors.”

1909 – The Old Man in the Corner by Baroness Orczy

“I must confess that, until quite recently, the only thing I knew about Baroness Orczy that she gave the world The Scarlet Pimpernel. But I learned that she gave the world much more than that. She gave the world The Old Man in the Corner, who might just have been the world’s first armchair detective.”

1950 – Some Tame Gazelle by Barbara Pym

“Harriet and Belinda Bede lived together in a village in the English countryside. they living quietly, serving their church, knitting industriously, reading studiously, and making sure that they got the small details of life right. Questions of how one should dress, of what should be served at dinner, of how guests should be entertained. Small things, but important things, that fill up lives.  Barbara Pym understood that and she painted the picture beautifully, taking it seriously but still able to smile at sillinesses.”

1954 – Yew Hall by Lucy M Boston

“I was held first by the wonderful evocation of the house and then, as the story shifted by a very subtle undercurrent that told me something was going to happen. Wonderful, wonderful writing, and there was a lovely touch near the end that would have told me, even had I not known, that this was a debut that would be the precursor to greater things. The characters and the relationships were simply drawn, but I could believe in them. The plot was slight, but it was enough.”

1956 – The King of a Rainy Country by Brigid Brophy

“In grey, rainy, post-war London Susan found a job with a slightly shady publisher. And she moved on with Neale, who might have been a boyfriend, or might have been a friend who was a boy. They lived in a way that some would call bohemian but I’d be more inclined to all post-student. One day at work, quite by chance, Susan saw a striking photograph of Cynthia. She and Susan had been at school together, they were classmates, and they might have been friends or they might have been rather more to one another. Susan decided that she must find Cynthia, and Neale showed an interest in finding her too. They discovered that she was in Venice, and decided that they must find a way to get there.”

1966 – This January Tale by Bryher

“History records that in 1066 William, Duke of Normandy, defeated and killed Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings to become King of England, but it has less to say about what that meant to ordinary people. ‘This January Tale’ tells their story, tells what it was like to see a foreign army invade and drive across the land, what it was like to live in fear of losing what little they had, the only way of life they knew.”

1975 – Lord of the Far Island by Victoria Holt

“Ellen Kellaway, was alone in the world when she was just five years-old. Her mother’s wealthy cousins took her in, and raised her alongside their own daughter, Esme. But they never let her forget that her every advantage was owed to the charity of others. And that while Esme was destined for a great marriage, she would have to go out into the world when she came of age, and earn her living as a governess. Ellen didn’t like that at all. She appreciated what was being done for her, but she had no intention of being a governess. She knew that the world had far more to offer.”

1978 – A Five Year Sentence by Bernice Rubens

“Miss Hawkins’ plans were thrown into disarray when she was presented with a retirement gift. A five year diary. She saw that as an instruction to live, and she decided that her diary would direct the rest of her life.  So she didn’t record what she had done, she recorded what she was going to do. And when she did it she happily ticked it off in red crayon.”

1985 – The Suspect by L R Wright

The story is propelled by Karl’s growing suspicions about George, his attempts to prove his guilt, and his digging into the past to prove that the two men had history and that the motive for murder lay there. It’s very well done, if a tiny bit predictable. But the real strength of the book comes from other things. From the perspective, completely free of any questions about who or how. From the setting, on Canada’s ‘Sunshine Coast’, an area known for its temperate climate and beautiful coastline. It felt a little like Cornwall, a little like home. And most of all from perfectly drawn characters, well handled relationships, that offered a lovely balance of intrigue, humour, and real life.

1987 – Who Saw Him Die? by Sheila Radley

“There really was no case to answer, but after the inquest the dead man’s sister called in the police. She said that the man driving the car wasn’t telling the truth. He said he was a newcomer to the town and that he hadn’t known Clanger. She said that as a child he had spent holidays with his grandparents, who kept a shop in Breckham Market. That he had played with Cuthbert, until something happened – she could not or would not say what – her father had thrashed the boys, and stopped them seeing each other. And that he had come back and murdered her brother. It seemed unlikely, it seemed impossible to prove one way or the other, but the police had to investigate, and so they set about interviewing anyone who might cast more light on events.”