Some things of note, May 2025

An interview with Helene Hanff, the thrill of uncut pages, women mountaineers, how Kazuo Ishiguro comes up with his titles, resources if Shakespeare intimidates you, and some literary inspired recipes

I amass a lot of random information, links, fun facts etc. from what I read and from the internet at large and mostly just bombard my book club’s group chat with them, but then I thought, here are devotees of the same kind of literature and perhaps they’d be interested too.

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All things 84, Charing Cross Road

In April, I reread and was charmed all over again with this collection of letters between a sparky American writer and a reserved British bookseller. It’s the shortest book I can think of to both keep you in stitches and restore your faith in humanity.

If you want a real treat, you can hear Hanff’s voice in this Desert Island Discs interview that originally aired in 1981. I get a lump in my throat when I hear her talk about how she wants to listen to Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite on her deathbed. I dearly hope you got your wish, Helene.

And for fun, here’s a playlist with her musical choices.

On a sadder note, if you make a literary pilgrimage to 84, Charing Cross Road, you will now find a McDonalds.

So we must return to the book and live like Hanff did for so many years with Marks and Co only in our imaginations. As her friend Maxine reported to her on a trip to London: “It’s the loveliest shop straight out of Dickens, you would go absolutely out of your mind over it.”

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What to cut your pages with…

This is not a problem you likely have unless you are an archivist or collector of antiquarian books, but there was once a time when your books would come with their pages uncut (or the technically accurate term: unopened), and then you had to slice them open in order to read.

The reason this came to my mind was because the topic comes up in 84, Charing Cross Road, with Hanff sharing her favorite tool for cutting book pages:

It’s a beautiful book and you can’t even call it secondhand, the pages weren’t cut. Did I tell you I finally found the perfect page-cutter? It’s a pearl-handled fruit knife. My mother left me a dozen of them, I keep one in the pencil cup on my desk. Maybe I go with the wrong kind of people but I’m just not likely to have twelve guests all sitting around simultaneously eating fruit.

Others wax poetic about the thrill and mystery of uncut pages. One Willis Cook says:

To find an uncut page is suddenly to see the book in a new light. This is a beautiful young girl who has lain under an enchantment, maybe for a century, waiting for her prince to awaken her with … [well], with his penknife, in this case.

Finally, if you are ever faced with the problem of needing to read a valuable old book with uncut pages and are not sure how to proceed, instructions can be found here.

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20th Century Women Mountaineers

I recently wrote some thoughts on the wonderful novel Chatterton Square.

Bridging the gulfs between us

However, I didn’t get much into author E.H. Young’s unconventional life which included mountaineering. Interestingly, the sport does make an appearance in Chatterton Square though it’s young men instead of women who are scaling the heights. In this recent, excellent article, Rebecca Hutcheon notes that Young herself “pioneered and led others along a route, now known as Hope, in the Carneddau mountains in Eryri (Snowdonia) in 1915.”

Ann Kennedy Smith

has also written about pioneering 20th century women mountaineers here:

Manless climbing: Dorothy Pilley (1894-1986)

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Kazuo Ishiguro: some of my book titles have come from cookery books

I could listen to Kazuo Ishiguro talk endlessly on the craft of writing, so mesmerizing do I find his fiction. Here, though, is a funny and lovely excerpt of a conversation in which he talks about how he comes up with the titles for his books.

Speaking of his process, I recently came across this line in d’Aulaire’s Greek Myths and thought that if it didn’t sound so much like Olga Tokarczuk’s award winning novel, it would make a great title:

Throw the bones of your mother over your shoulder

Hmm a title or a first line of a poem. Now there’s a creative writing prompt for you.

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Resources for Shakespeare

I know some readers of this newsletter participate in Well Read Mom. If you are one of them, you know Big Mama¹ has assigned you King Lear this month. Are you intimidated by Shakespeare? Are you worried this month’s reading is going to be a chore? I’ve got a few recommendations and tips from teaching his plays to high school students who really needed assistance.

1. Listen to a full-cast recording while reading the play. The Arkangel recordings have never failed me. There’s a BBC recording with Corin Redgrave as Lear. Naxos Audio has one with Paul Scofield as Lear and Kenneth Branagh as the Fool. And oh hello a free recording!

2. The Folger Library editions are cheap, have helpful notes, and summaries at beginning of each scene.

3. In lieu of a live teacher to guide you through the play, read or listen to a good commentary:

   1. Marjorie Garber’s introductions to Shakespeare’s plays in her book Shakespeare After All are engaging, accessible, and enlightening. Every time I teach one of his plays, I go and see what Prof. Garber has said first.

   2. If you’re looking for a commentary that will move you to tears, then you must read Harold Goddard’s essay on King Lear in his two-volume series, The Meaning of Shakespeare. I mean honestly:

      “‘What is a king?’ I once asked a little girl out of pure curiosity to see what she would say. Looking up at me with shining eyes, she replied without a moment’s hesitation: ‘A king is a beautiful man.’ She was in her fairy-tale stage. Shakespeare would have understood her–for King Lear is the story of how a king in the worldly sense became a king in the fairy-tale sense, of how a bad king became a beautiful man.”

      And:

      “King Lear is a miracle. There is nothing in the whole world that is not in this play. It says everything, and if this is the last and final judgment on this world we live in, then it is a miraculous world. This is a miracle play.”

   3. I’m not a huge podcast listener but Sr. Anna Marie McGuan’s podcast is one of my favorites, so I was extra thrilled when she did this series on Shakespeare and Christian anthropology a few years back.

      “When everything in this world is taken from Lear and Lear says, ‘But look, but look further,’ what he’s doing is engaging with the theological virtue of hope.”

   4. I have not listened to the The Play’s the Thing King Lear episodes (same people who do Close Reads), but I’m sure there’s much insight to glean there.

As for stage productions or film adaptations, I don’t know, and I would love to hear from someone who has recommendations or strong opinions on this. However, having read the play and watched one filmed stage performance (Ian McKellen as Lear), I see the sense in Charles Lamb’s belief that stage productions cannot do Lear justice:

“the greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual: the explosions of his passion are terrible as a volcano: they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare…while we read [the tragedy] we see not Lear, but we are Lear, — we are in his mind.”

-“On the Tragedies of Shakespeare” in The Complete Works and Letters of Charles Lamb

Whelp, godspeed with your reading this month. If you’ve never read it before, brace yourself. It’s the most agonizing, beautiful, life-altering work of art I’ve ever encountered. I’ll let Harold Goddard have the last word here: “King Lear takes us captive. That is what it ought to do and what we ought to let it do, for only as we give ourselves up to it will it give itself up to us.”

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Some Recipes of Note

“I like to get my recipes from good literature.” -Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs. Lippincote’s

Yorkshire Pudding from 84, Charing Cross Road

Helene my dear—

There are many ways of doing it but Mummy and I think this is the simplest for you to try. Put a cup of flour, an egg, a half cup of milk and a good shake of salt into a large bowl and beat altogether until it is the consistency of thick cream. Put in frig for several hours. (It’s best if you make it in the morning.) When you put your roast in the oven, put in an extra pan to heat. Half an hour before roast is done, pour a bit of the roast grease into the baking pan, just enough to cover the bottom will do. The pan must be very hot. Now pour the pudding in and the roast and pudding will be ready at the same time.

Or if you are the kind of person who needs more exact measurements and temperatures, see Gordon Ramsay’s recipe.

Salmon, Raspberries and Cream from Chatterton Square

Poor Agnes Spanner. She made some unnecessary and embarrassing insinuations and then attempted to soothe her conscience by preparing an over-the-top meal for the injured party.

Her own mind was in a careful state of confusion. She had collected enough conscientious motives to smother the one that was insistent and irresistible, the one which had induced her to go shopping in a recklessly placatory spirit and return with a large piece of salmon, several pounds of raspberries, and a jar of cream.

We don’t actually learn how Miss Spanner prepared the meal prompted by her guilt (though we know peas and cucumbers were involved), but if I were making a meal inspired by the scene, I’d probably go for something like this spring salmon and this raspberry and clotted cream ice cream. That seems suitably placatory.

King Lear inspired mixology

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!

Alas, there are no food references in King Lear (that I can recall), but don’t let that stop you from making a Serpent’s Tooth. There’s an idea to zing up your WRM meeting this month.

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1. My affectionate name for this organization. I have nothing but love for Well Read Mom and their mission and have been an off and on (mostly on) participant for the past nine years in two different cities.