First of all, thanks to everyone who stopped by during the week and left a comment about the ‘No To Age Banding’ campaign and an even bigger thanks to those who went over to the site and signed the petition against it.  I haven’t done a count of the names up there lately but it’s well into the thousands and there are indications that publishers are starting to listen.  As my Dad would have said (and it’s Father’s Day today here in the UK) ‘More power to your elbow’.

Secondly, thanks to everyone who left good wishes about my travelling adventures.  I’m in a consolidation phase at present, but the Malvern Hills are only another ten minutes down the line and at some point this summer, I’m going to climb them!

On to reading matters, then.  I was taken by a comment by Salley Vickers’ in yesterday’s Times about certain people’s reservations when it came to novels written by poets.  Vickers’ wonders why, given that [t]wo of our greatest poets, Thomas Hardy and D H Lawrence, were also fine novelists.

Well, I have to be honest and say that as far as I’m concerned Vickers couldn’t have chosen worse examples to make her point.  I do like Lawrence’s poetry, although I’m no lover of his novels, but I was once heard to remark to my Literature tutor that while Hardy might have been only a second rate novelist he was definitely a third rate poet, and I’ve never been persuaded to change my opinion on either count.

However, I do share Vickers’ wonderment at such a general condemnation.  I can think of several poets whose novels I read with a great deal of pleasure.  I’ve written here a number of times about Sophie Hannah’s excellent prose works, both in her thriller mode and as a short story writer, and she is a very fine poet.  Then there is poet Anne Michaels, whose novel Fugitive Pieces is one of the most sensitive books I’ve ever read.  I’m just about to re-read it for one of my reading groups and am looking forward to it immensely.  I just wish she would write another.  Then what about May Sarton, Maya Angelou, Ted Hughes (if you haven’t read his prose for children such as The Iron Man and How the Whale Became you have missed a real treat)?  For the most part, these are writers who really know how to weigh the importance of each word.  There is nothing superfluous in their writing.  And. most important of all for me, the music is right.  The ‘sound’ in my ear is as good as the story in my mind. 

What do other readers think about this?  Do you agree with Vickers or with her unnamed sceptic?  And do you have favourite writers who work in both modes?  I’d be interested to know.

As I indicated above I shall be reading for groups over the next couple of weeks.  As well as Fugitive Pieces I also need to read Edith Wharton’s    The Glimpses of the Moon for The Slaves of Golconda.  However, both of those will have to wait until I’ve finished the latest volume in Katherine Kerr’s ‘Dragon Mage’ cycle, The Shadow Isle.  Only one more volume to go now and then the entire fifteen book series will be complete and I shall spend a whole month reading from beginning to end.  And then, be warned, I shall be writing in the Deverry dialect for weeks, so strong is Kerr’s individual voice.  It’s already pervading my sleep and dreams just after a couple of hundred pages.  After fifteen books - well!  Interspersed between all this The Bears and I are still reading Paddington and I’m reading parts of The Canterbury Tales to go with the second and third lectures in John Sutherland’s ‘Classics of British Literature’ series, which I’m writing about here.  It should be enough to keep me out of mischief for another week.