Linkety

[oursin]

Virago reissues The Group by Mary McCarthy. The original critical responses ticked an awful lot of Russ boxes in their dismissal of women's writing. I am, yay, but totally boggled by this:

It was the women's submissiveness that most enraged Norman Mailer, who claimed that McCarthy's novel was fatally diminished by the fact that none of her characters has "the power or dedication to wish to force events", while conspicuously missing the point that it was precisely this enforced passivity that McCarthy wished to highlight.

My impression of Mr Mailer is that he may have preferred feisty women but only so that he could master and humiliate them, but I really have not read much of his oeuvre, srsly.

And on another novel building up a picture out of things to an even greater extent than The Group this sounds tricksy but the reviewer thinks it works.

Nostalgia for the Hovis world that never was, by R McCrum: Most years produce an unexpected Christmas hit. Roy Mayall's rhapsody to the beleaguered postie could be the one for 2009. Up for a 4-something am start, out in all weathers, carrying a heavy sack... oh ye goode olde dayze.

McCrum is also less than golden-glowy about the good oldfashioned independent bookseller:

My memory of old-style bookselling is of dingy, cramped premises, redolent of boiled cabbage, unable to supply the book you actually wanted in less than a month. High-street book chains get a bad press, but the inconvenient truth is that they provide an excellent service for most of their customers.

but rejoices at the new foray of Slightly Foxed into secondhand bookselling.
Long article here on the demise of Borders and the prospects of bookselling but lacks the talking heads of the print edition including L Shriver claiming that she just pops onto Amazon, buys a book and is not tempted into buying another one and someone praising the 'handselling' of books by independents, which thicks my blood with cold ('No, you can not help me. I'm browsing.' Is nowhere safe from this intrusive salespersonship?).

A nice counter-nostalgic history of the development of railways worldwide.

Nice piece on friends by Kathryn Flett:

Maybe in the end the love you take really is equal to the love you make, and perhaps having such extraordinary friends isn't just some miraculous happy-lucky accident of fate. Maybe – sod it – you really do make your own luck just a little bit, in which case perhaps I actually deserve my awesome friends. In which case… how incredibly bloody lucky am I? And there's absolutely no need to answer that one, because I already know.